Data salaries at FAANG companies in 2022 - Mikinote - Tech & finance information

Salary is a sensitive topic. Should it be? There are numerous justifications for salary transparency. Candidates benefit from not wasting time on jobs that offer less money than they desire. It makes clear the disparities in wages between women and other categories. Employees might use it to determine whether they are being underpaid in their existing positions. The topic of salary transparency is current. The UK government believes that we should talk about pay more and this week started a trial to address this.

"Participating employers will run pilots aimed at closing salary gaps by publishing salaries on all job adverts" —UK Equal Pay Pilot

However, this doesn't always require the involvement of the state. There have been a number of efforts that allow employees to evaluate salaries within their organizations. Employees at HelloFresh recently participated in the Open Pay Initiative 2022, which allows you to enter your salary and then see how it stacks up against your coworkers. This is a fantastic "give some, get some" incentive that permits anonymity for the workers.

My desire to try and shed some light on data compensation utilizing data was sparked by all of this. I've previously worked at Google and am well-connected with several FAANG company employees (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). In order to start working with some numbers, I looked at more than 4,000 data points from websites like levels.fyi and otta.com. Let's get going.

The median total compensation in 2022 in the US was $187,000. This varies a lot across companies and seniority. For example, the median data compensation at Netflix is $450,000.

Source: Image by the author. Data from levels.fyi

Move to the US, work for Netflix, get rich.

US-based data jobs are paid well. Particularly if you’re among the lucky 440 working in a data role at Netflix. If you’ve read Reid Hastings' book No Rules, Rule, you’ll know this is not by chance. Netflix has a policy where they encourage their employees to interview at different places and bring back the offers they get. If Netflix sees that they’re being outbid, they’ll increase your salary and do the same for everyone across the company in similar roles.

"It costs a lot more to lose people and to recruit replacements than to overpay a little in the first place." — Reid Hastings, No Rules Rule

The other top tech companies also have many people in data roles earning more than $450,000 total compensation per year, but not as consistently as Netflix.

Data salaries in the US, Europe, and elsewhere

It’s no surprise that US tech and data salaries are high. But how do they compare to Europe and to the rest of the world?

The median US data salary for companies I looked at is $187,000, compared to $108,000 in Europe and $87,000 in the rest of the world. No small gap.

an image by the author from levels.fyi, otta.com, and a few other sources.

While I wasn’t able to collect as many salary data points outside the US, the pattern is still clear; you get paid much more in the US. That being said, a quick glance at data jobs on otta.com shows that there are plenty of jobs in the UK that pay more than the median.

Data salaries by seniority

If money is cold, it’s cold at the top. The largest tech companies have different variations of a level (L) system that indicates seniority. Most employees fall in the range of L2–3 (junior or mid) to L6 (expert or manager). At Google, the level goes all the way up to L10, but the lucky few here are unlikely to share their salaries (a quick look at levels. FYI shows that the reported few salaries at L8 are more than $1,000,000, so I dare you to dream of where it ends at L10).

Source: Image by the author. Data from levels.fyi. Data is directional only, and levels are not perfectly comparable across companies.

If you go from L3 to L6, you will more than double your salary. Some lucky top paid data people earn upwards of $700,000 (and some, possibly much more).

Now you're thinking to yourself, "Wow, $400,000+ sounds quite good." What steps should you take next? You may work on experimentation tooling at Netflix as a Senior Data Engineer. You would need proficiency in working in cross-functional teams as well as some knowledge of statistical methods and experimentation methodologies. Alternately, you may apply sophisticated analytical techniques to challenging analysis problems while working with enormous datasets at Google as a Data Scientist Technical Lead. Or, if you only have a few years of experience, you might apply to be a Business Data Scientist in Ads & Marketing at Google and work your way up (from my experience at Google, you can expect a promotion every two years at lower levels, but this gets harder the higher you go).

Conclusion

There are numerous justifications for salary transparency. For example, the median total compensation in 2022 in the US was $187,000. Netflix has a policy where they encourage their employees to interview at different places and bring back the offers they get. Netflix has more data workers earning more than $450,000 total compensation per year than any other company. The median US data salary for companies I looked at is $187,000, compared to $108,000 in Europe and $87,000 elsewhere. If you want to be a Data Scientist at one of the world's top data companies, start at level L3 and work your way up. Some lucky top paid data people earn upwards of $700,000 (and some, possibly much more) from L3-L10.