Engineering talent in high demand
COMPETITION for engineering talent remains fierce in Silicon Valley. The mega players offer recruits lavish offices and gourmet cafeterias along with all the usual corporate perks, such as gym memberships and expense accounts. But there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned money to entice top talent.
Internship salaries in engineering and product management can exceed $6 000 (R82 700) a month, but fulltime salaries are even more impressive. According to data collected by Jesse Collins, a Valley intern-turned-employee, the average annual salary for a first-year Silicon Valley worker is more than $105 000, plus a nearly $13 000 stock bonus and almost $26 000 cash bonus. The national wage index is $48 098.63, according to data last compiled by the Social Security Administration in 2015, or about a third of what an entry-level engineer might earn at Facebook or Amazon.com.
A 26-year-old computer science student at Purdue University, Collins set out to put together dataof what his fellow engineers are being offered by their first employers. (His friend, Rodney Folz, put together a similar set of Valley internship salary data earlier this year.) Collins collected 290 purported offers from bigname companies.
The data were submitted by a mix of self-identified graduate and undergraduate students, as well as two overachieving high school students. The form was shared in a prominent young engineers group on Facebook, on college web forums, and on Reddit.
Replies were submitted anonymously, and while the vast majority of respondents were offered software engineering jobs, a handful identified themselves as analysts and managers. Most respondents identified as male undergraduate students.
As with any online survey – particularly a self-reported, anonymous one – there’s room for bad data. For example, Collins said a single respondent claimed to get five job offers from big-name companies. While not impossible, it’s rare at best and false at worst.
In an effort to corroborate this self-reported data, Bloomberg compared Collins’s data set with average salaries recorded by salary tracker Glassdoor.
The site listed Facebook’s typical base salary as $120 345, slightly higher than Collins’s figure, but the stock and cash bonuses were considerably lower on Glassdoor, at $21 450 and $14 333, respectively.
A source with knowledge of the matter said Facebook’s salary figures were closer to Glassdoor’s than the data set. (A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment, citing a company policy not to discuss employee compensation.)
Glassdoor’s number for Snap’s salary was similar to Collins’s number, as was the salary for Twitter and Uber, though the bonus amounts differed. (Twitter declined to comment and Snap did not return requests for comment. Uber declined to comment, however, a source with knowledge of the matter indicated the numbers in Collins’s data set are accurate.)
“I can obviously understand that in this political climate, it’s probably a little bit intense seeing those sort of numbers,” Collins, who is originally from Australia and started at Purdue’s undergraduate programme at 22, said of the salaries and bonuses.