
Paychecks Exposed: Google, Apple, Facebook and More - lunatech
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40129303?__source=yahoo%7Cheadline%7Cquote%7Ctext%7C&par=yahoo
======
credo
Facebook seems to offer the most salary/compensation.

More interestingly, Facebook is one of only two companies (among 10) where the
company rating is higher than the compensation rating.

Google gets 3.9 for company rating and also 3.9 for compensation rating (both
are good). Facebook gets 4.3 for compensation rating. It gets an even higher
score 4.6 for company rating (and that makes it the only company where
Glassdoor describes the employees as "very satisfied")

It will be interesting to find out what Facebook is doing right and why other
companies aren't able to match it.

~~~
alokm
May be it has to do with the fact that number of employees in google are many
times more than that of Facebook, bringing down the compensation avg as well
as the avg job satisfaction.

~~~
mkramlich
They're also a younger company, and pre-IPO, and probably have cultural
differences too.

~~~
enjo
The pre-IPO part is key. They still have a ton of employees motivated by the
"I'm about to be rich" carrot. Facebook is young and growing, it's easy to
have satisfied employees at this point.

It's keeping them that way over the long haul that's the trick (particularly
after the 'sexiness' has worn off).

------
rwmj
First time I've come across glassdoor.com -- clear your cookies else your
"free trial" runs out.

At one small start-up company I worked at us developers/hackers eventually
found an "encrypted" XLS document which contained all the salaries (this was
when Excel "encryption" wasn't up to much). So we read everyone's salaries,
from the management down. The interesting part was that certain people in
management were taking home huge salaries, for not doing very much visible
work. The company ripped off a lot of investors and was eventually sold for a
tiny fraction (~1%) of the money which was put in. Which surprised no one on
the inside.

~~~
nopal
Do you think it's acceptable for you to have read the document, no matter how
simple the encryption?

~~~
rwmj
Sure, why not? I don't get this whole secrecy around salaries. If it was up to
me everyone in the company would know what everyone else was earning.

~~~
nopal
Well, I don't think it's a question of whether salaries should be kept secret
or not, I think it's a question of whether one should access data he's not
supposed to just because he can.

~~~
nopal
I find it interesting that this is getting down-modded.

I think the ethics of IT is an interesting and important subject, and I was
surprised to see someone unabashedly admitting to using his position to read
confidential material.

I don't think our industry has a good enough set of accepted ethical
guidelines, and I'd like to see that change.

------
chime
Is Facebook rated higher because it is the new cool kid in the neighborhood or
because it is doing something different? After all, Google was considered the
best place to work less than 5 years ago.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
Google went crazy with hiring in 2006 and relaxed its standards, letting in a
bunch of duds. There's a higher chance at Google that your manager is going to
be a creep and your coworkers are going to be mouth breathers. Facebook is
younger and smaller so does not face these issues (yet). If you do encounter a
poser at Facebook, at least they are a cool, young , good looking poser, not a
yucky beardo comp sci Phd poser...

Also, every bullshit funded startup in NYC pays what Facebook is paying, or
better. (just a pro tip in case anyone else here is too old for facebook but
needs to make some dough after spending too much time in the 80-90k zone, like
I did)

~~~
tectonic
Why the level of negativity about Google? Do you have prior experience there?

~~~
catch23
Let's just say I know enough Googlers who are currently fed up with the influx
of subpar nooglers. It's not just one data point -- at least 4 of my googler
friends complained about the new employees. They mention that Google stopped
hiring around the economic crisis, and when the economy picked up again, they
had to hire twice as fast to make up for the lost time and in doing so, they
let in people who should have been rejected. I also recall that Eric Schmidt
says his biggest mistake was to halt the hiring during the recent economic
downturn.

~~~
haberman
I'm a Googler with the opposite complaint: in my neck of the woods we seem to
be so picky that you start to wonder how any of us ever got hired. A person
can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed
good) get an offer.

Google's a big company, so I'm sure that some pockets err on one side, some on
the other.

~~~
vic_nyc
I agree with you. And the effectiveness of the criteria Google uses to screen
& interview candidates is highly debatable, at best.

One of their recruiters once contacted me (because I went to a 'top
university') but decided it would be a 'waste of time' because I hadn't done
any Java or C++ recently. It used to be that Google was interviewing for
knowledge of the fundamentals unlike most other 'business-oriented' companies
that want specific recent skills.

Nowadays it seems that they've got the 'worst' of both worlds - I heard they
interview for very hard-core graph programming algorithms, and at the same
time they want recent experience with Java or C++. So basically if you've
recently only done Lisp/Smalltalk/etc or even Python, you don't qualify. Where
is the logic in that?

On top of that, my impression was that the salary levels of their employees
were fairly astronomical, on par with the ones paid by banks/hedge funds, but
that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.

~~~
robrenaud
I've done more than 100 interviews at Google.

The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the
interview.

I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was
obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.

Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I
certainly don't count it against them.

I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you
are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years,
that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but
you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but
it will be harder.

------
d2viant
Does this make anyone else feel extremely underpaid? I'm a software engineer
at Fortune 200 company in a major metropolitan city, making about 30K less
than these guys. It's not a technology company, so that must be the
difference.

~~~
steverb
Honestly, I was looking at these thinking how under-paid they are. I contract
for a company in a much lower cost of living area and I'm making more than the
average Googler.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for
peanuts.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Dude, let's get real here. 100k + is not peanuts.

It's higher than the median household income.

There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.

~~~
mmt
Median of which households?

Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently
exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to
put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.

[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection
bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its
employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.

~~~
JabavuAdams
All of those are substantive arguments. I was objecting to the use of the term
"peanuts", which is derisive and dismissive -- as though this salary is not
even worthy of consideration.

Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income>

It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of
touch with reality.

~~~
mmt
That didn't even occur to me, that you'd find the _term_ problematic. I just
interpreted as colorful language.

I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I
said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for
someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.

Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low
hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this
may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low
enough to resemble a legume.

[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed
contractors?

------
leelin
Be careful of these numbers being biased lower than the real medians and
averages.

Glassdoor's gimmick is "tell us your salary and we'll tell you what everyone
told us." They'll keep bugging you as you use the site until you finally
relent (or play cookie / session reset games).

I'm guessing that means most people who sign up are somewhat insecure about
their salary level and want more information. The truly satisfied or highly
paid folks either don't use the site much or only need to look at one page and
leave satisfied that they are doing just fine.

~~~
mynameishere
I would guess the opposite. People who are comfortable in making more than
average would be more willing to divulge, even anonymously.

------
Locke1689
This is just blogspam. The site is glassdoor.com.

------
hess
What a weak article. 98,000 vs. 99,000, off an unreliable sample size.
Expected from CNBC

------
ryanwanger
How could Facebook be so much higher in terms of satisfaction? Maybe it's too
casual?!?

~~~
ericd
Is it too casual if they're wildly successful?

------
devinfoley
In this study, is "average base pay" basically equivalent to "midlevel
salary"?

~~~
brown9-2
No. It's not a study, it's the average of salaries self-reported by employees
on the website glassdoor.com. There is nothing to say that these self-reports
are a fair sampling other than relying on there being a good number of them -
I see 775 reported salaries on glassdoor for software engineers at Google.

------
ronnier
Missing from the list are Microsoft and Amazon. I wonder how they compare?

~~~
WalterGR
The data is from glassdoor.com. Here are the salary pages for Amazon and
Microsoft:

[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-
Salaries-E6036.ht...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-
Salaries-E6036.htm)

<http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm>

------
rorrr
Is it just me or these numbers are not that impressive?

Many of my friends make $100+/hr, it's not out of the ordinary.

I'm sure there are really highly paid developers there as well, but it just
feels good to know that you don't need to work for one of the huge companies
to make good money.

~~~
ryanfitz
I agree, in my experience most funded startups (in nyc) are willing to pay at
least 120K a year and you can make much more consulting. I would have thought
these two companies, which are seen as the top of technology, would be paying
much more.

~~~
JabavuAdams
The reverse is true. The cooler a place is perceived to be, the less they can
afford to pay developers, up to some threshold where they can't hire any good
ones.

There's a huge variance to what salary good developers are happy with. For
every one who says "I wouldn't work for less than X", there are some who
would, and moreover would not be unhappy at that salary level.

------
arghnoname
Anyone else find it interesting what companies _aren't_ on the list? I guess
MSFT didn't seem relevant.

~~~
kenjackson
MSFT isn't really considered a Silicon Valley company, given their
headquarters is in Redmond.

~~~
arghnoname
Ah that makes sense. I missed the Silicon Valley reference. Thank you for the
correction.

