News

Survey: Google Pays Devs the Best, but Facebook Catching Up

• By David Ramel
• October 18, 2012

A recent salary report has some good news for software engineers. Their salaries are climbing much faster than most other occupations, and the national average for such devs is more than $92,000 per year, according to a new report from careers company Glassdoor, which reported that Google led the pack.

The company said Google pays its software engineers the best among 15 tech companies surveyed by tracking salary reports shared over the past year, coming in at an average of $128,336. Facebook may be catching up, though, this year coming in only about $4,700 behind Google at an average of $123,626, while last year the gap was more than $6,800. Rounding out the top 10 for 2012 are: Apple ($114,413); eBay ($108,809); Zynga ($105,568); Microsoft ($104,362); Intuit ($103,284); Amazon ($103,070); Oracle ($102,204); and Cisco ($101,909).

Overall, the national average for software engineer base salaries in 2012 was $92,648, according to more than 5,000 salary reports. Of the 15 tech companies surveyed, only IBM and Intel had average base dev salaries less than that national average.

Glassdoor quoted Bureau of Labor Statistics data that indicates a projected 30 percent growth in jobs for software developers from 2010 to 2012.

"However, a talented software engineer can be tough to find and many companies are investing big bucks for the best talent," Glassdoor said. That trend is reflected in a 2.5 percent growth in average base salary for software engineers in 2012 over the year before.

In terms of geographic location, the San Francisco Bay area paid the best, at an average of $105,120. Google is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., while Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., both in the Bay area, along with several other of the featured companies.

Glassdoor's report included average salaries based on 50 or more salary reports in metro U.S. areas from Oct. 8, 2011, to Oct. 7, 2012.