$850K Per Year? This Big Tech Company Pays Software Engineers the Most

01.09.2023 - 10:15 / pcmag.com

It's no secret that a career in software engineering is a one-way ticket to wealth, and a new study from Blind shows just how much Big Tech employees are raking in.

Blind is a popular app for techies, who can share details anonymously about interviews and compensation. The company used "hundreds of thousands of data points" to create estimated pay bands (ie salary ranges) at Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

Using its trove of user submissions, Blind sought to answer the following questions:

What are the pay bands for software engineers at Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft?

How does the total compensation at Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft differ for software engineers at similar job levels?

How many years of experience is typically needed to reach a certain job level at Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft?

Their findings show some shocking salaries hitting these engineers' bank accounts and stock portfolios, combined to represent total compensation. (Go to Blind's website for more details.)

Amazon and Meta pay their top engineers the most: an average of $691,000 and $655,000, respectively, to as high as $950,000. Google ranks third, and Microsoft and Apple pay their engineers the "lowest."

Even the lower-salaried engineers at all companies are averaging around $150,000 per year and and higher. At Google and Meta, entry-level employees with none to one year of experience are making $184,000 and $179,000, respectively.

Regarding promotions, Blind uncovered some surprising differences between companies. Meta engineers seem to level up the fastest and have some of the highest pay, whereas Amazon's promotions seem to take the longest to go through. Amazon also has a wide pay band for engineers, leading to a lot of variance in total compensation.

In contrast, though Apple's total compensation may be the least competitive, its pay bands across job levels are the most consistent and fair. Google also has fairly balanced and consistent pay bands, Blind found. "This means it's rare for someone at a lower job level to get paid more than someone at a higher level," it says.

Microsoft, which also pays on the lower end compared with its competitors, has many job levels for software engineers. This "might give the company more flexibility to hand out more promotions," Blind says.

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