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.
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.
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).
It's also becoming ever clearer that Google isn't actually very good at doing things other than their core services: web search, e-mail, and the associated advertising platforms. Even those are slipping.
Now, that is very telling. Google should be awesome at building new products with the developer talent and general resources they have to throw at any idea with potential. And yet, they have basically released (and subsequently canned) one failure after another for a long time.
Even the advertising systems and related tools (Google Analytics and the like) are pretty poor in terms of usability/APIs; people use these tools because of Google's place in the market and because they give a lot of goodies away for free, not because the tools themselves are particularly good.
And even web search, the heart of Google's operation, isn't what it used to be: they seem to have become victims of their own success, with so many people out to game the system that a lot of their results pages aren't worth the time to type in a search term any more.
It's not clear how much of this is down to culture or management factors, and how much is just the unavoidable consequence of being the biggest kid on the playground. But either way, a lot of people at Google must have worked on projects like, say, Wave, and it's tough as a developer to put your heart into a job only to see it canned because it wasn't promoted effectively or the timing just wasn't right for the market.
Meanwhile, for all the extra features and so on, Facebook basically only has one product, and it's one of the most successful on the planet.
Other things being equal, which culture is going to be more fun to work in? It's not a tough decision, is it?
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.
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.
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.
I did at one point (metaphorically) sign the bank transfers. At that point the company only had 3 people in it and we all knew everything so I don't think that counts.
Anyway, how does it matter whether or not I'm in charge? The question is, I think it's a good idea, why don't you?
I've been taught to "Never look into another man's wallet, it will either make you prideful or insecure" and have found it to be true.
I think everyone needs to work out their own deal with their own boss; sharing your pay is your choice; looking at others without their permission is taking that choice away from them.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> A person can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed good) get an offer.
That's actually fairly common in the Silicon Valley. It's 10 to 20 people on the market, not 10 to 20 programmers selected at random: some are specialists in fields other than the ones you're looking for (or their resume is misread by the recruiter e.g., someone who has experience with enterprise search but is being interviewed for a web search position), others lack certain specific knowledge you do want, yet others are looking for a place where they can be "promoted to their level of incompetence".
A rate of 1/10 or 1/20 (5-10%) is actually very good and indicates an ability to recruit and screen well.
If 10 or 20 people are getting to the technical interview stage and failing to qualify, that points to a problem. That adds up to a lot of non-productive time for the interviewers.
If you reject those 10-20 people at the phone screen stage, you end up with another problem that Google has been accused of: you overlook many qualified candidates who just had a bad day on their phone screen or drew a bad interviewer or got quizzed on questions that aren't their specialty.
It's a balancing act. Reject too many in phone screens, and you miss out on talent. Reject them at the interview stage, and you waste interviewer time. Accept them and put them on teams, and you drag down the level of the team and cause morale problems. Google's been accused of all of them, but in my experience, hiring sucks wherever you are, and they do the best they can given the data available.
I was asking to get an objective definition of a "subpar" noogler.
I'm about to be a recent college grad and I want to know what subpar is so I can spend my time now making sure that I am not that.
It's really frustrating to me when people say things like "Let's just say I know enough Googlers who are currently fed up with the influx of subpar nooglers." And I have no idea what they mean.
1) High impact. Most team sizes are 5 people or less. Those 5 people are handling big systems like photos or memcache. You know you're doing important things.
2) Move fast. Example: Facebook Groups went from concept to release in 3 months. In other companies, it would take 3 months just to get through release engineering.
3) Hackathon! People here love to code, and the environment encourages you. A lot of managers have switched back to SWEs, reinforcing that it's not demeaning to stay technical.
4) Still growing. It's true, new hotness normally trumps old & established. However, where Google started doubling every 6-9 months; Facebook tries to maintain top quality at the occasional expense of slower growth. This is helping the company retain most of its original culture.
Here's another data point: Googlers hate doing partner stuff. Google has lots of APIs they have to maintain -- everything from Android to GData and that puts a burden on SWEs who spend half the time writing new code, and the other half supporting partner companies who rely on google engineers to help fix their shitty code.
Yeah. I can imagine how nice it is when you are free to release code and docs with the quality of Facebook API offerings and nobody would tell you any bad word about that.
Why would being "the new cool kid" affect job satisfaction ratings by employees? Unless you're suggesting they are more satisfied due to the coolness of the idea of working there.
There're a whole bunch of benefits that you get from working at the "cool new kid":
1.) Everything you do automatically has an audience. People care about the software you write and use it in their daily lives.
2.) You get social cachet from working there. Say "I work for Google", and a bunch of people will say, "Oh, that must be nice. I wish I was smart enough to get in there." Outside of a few nerds who are too cool for FaceBook, saying "I work for FaceBook" gets the same reaction.
3.) Being in a younger, game-changing company gives you the chance to work on cooler, game-changing technologies. Many tech workers are attracted by hard problems; young, fast-growing companies tend to have lots of hard problems.
4.) When companies are younger, they've accumulated less legacy code and fewer bureaucratic procedures. If you ask a bunch of Googlers what they hate most about working for Google, I bet a large portion will say "legacy code". This is a maintenance tax that isn't fun at all, yet has to be dealt with whenever you build something on top of it. Being younger and smaller, FaceBook has less of this.
#2 is a fair point, but I think you have it reversed on #1 and #3. You are a cool company _because_ you're young, game changing and have an audience, not the other way around.
#4 is a property of most young companies regardless of their popularity.
Don't forget about the 'halo effect'. If a company is performing well, it tends to lead to better results in employee surveys, for no other reason than that.
I know this doesn't exactly explain why facebook does better in the surveys than google, but I think part of the reason facebookers feel more satisfied, is because they know they get paid more than googlers.
Maybe the difference of age as well ? If I had to do some basic data analysis, age + family would be the first two explanatory variables I would look at. But without data, that's as clueless as anyone's else guess of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The numbers from Glassdoor mentioned in the article are simply the mean salaries self-reported. Of course, if you actually look at Glassdoor there is quite a range to what is reported, depending on experience - so don't just compare your own salary to the mean without considering things like years of experience and location.
For example, the range of reported salaries for "Software Engineer" at Google is 70k to 133k. Titles like "Senior Software Engineer" and other variants are reported in different groups.
I work in Austin, where the cost of living is much lower than on the west coast, and I'd say that the base salaries look good but not great. But those bonuses are really something.
I also don't have a sense for the range of experience levels represented by these figures. That's not insignificant.
For me, 100K has always had the feeling of "big money". On the other hand, from a cost of living point of view, I'm guessing I have more disposable income in Toronto (and better quality of life for my tastes (except winter)), while making say 20% less.
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.
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.
I suspect CNBC being partnered indirectly with MSFT had something to do with the MS omission. No sense is looking bad in your own media outlet. The CEO approval rating for MSFT was a dismal 50%.
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.
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.
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.
The decreased risk of a regular salary mitigates it - consultants don't really have job security, and it's hard to be fully employed all the time as a consultant.
Also, there are a large number of paper millionaire FB employees, from the stock options. It's a hell of a bonus that I'm pretty sure isn't included in these numbers.
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.