Even with unabated economic headwinds and a stunning number of tech layoffs — with an estimated 64,865 affected workers in 2023 so far, according to Layoffs.fyi, in addition to the over 47,000 laid off last year — workers in Silicon Valley’s flagship industry were getting paid handsomely through 2022.
The average median salary of 15 of the largest San Francisco Bay Area tech companies in 2022, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings gathered by data analytics firm MyLogIQ, is estimated at around $184,838.
Meta leads the group in median worker compensation, with workers at the middle of the pack getting paid $296,320. (That’s a few thousand dollars more than the median Meta salary in 2021.) Not far behind are Google parent company Alphabet — the highest-paying Big Tech firm in Silicon Valley in 2021 — with a median compensation of $279,802 and San Francisco data storage giant Dropbox at $274,599. Rounding out the companies with a median pay of over $200,000 are Airbnb ($236,240), Okta ($233,825), Nvidia ($228,078) and Netflix ($218,400).
A few caveats to these numbers: Worker compensation in this dataset includes other modes of compensation beyond base salary, including stock vesting, employer 401(k) matches and other perks. Salaries of chief executives are also excluded from the data so as to not artificially inflate numbers.
Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, has a median compensation that just barely missed that $200,000 goalpost, with $199,130. Other tech companies at the (relatively) lower end of the median pay scale are Adobe ($170,679) and eBay ($136,754).
Companies with a wealth of contractor, retail and factory labor — namely Intel, Apple, DoorDash and Uber — are ranked among the lowest in terms of median pay, with each coming in at under $100,000. Of the 15 companies, Uber has the lowest median total pay at $76,767. In contrast, Lyft, which also relies heavily on contracted employees, excludes contracted workers from its data. The median total compensation for Lyft’s workers is $161,348.
As Big Tech execs boast about ongoing displays of austerity, the extent to which tech worker pay will change in 2023 remains to be seen. But, at least in 2022, corporate purse strings remained wide open, especially for the top brass.
Apple — which has one of the highest-paid chief executives in Tim Cook at $99 million, per SEC filings — has the dubious honor of having the most severe CEO-to-worker compensation ratio. Cook is paid 1,177 times more than the median worker, who gets paid $84,493.
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