Who would have thunk that Walmart offers better pay to software engineers than Microsoft, Expedia and Amazon.com. But that’s one of the findings in a new Glassdoor survey which looks at the top 25 highest paying companies for software engineers.
Interestingly, a networking company — Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper Networks — blows away the field with a base salary for software coders of $159,900. That’s followed by LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google.
Walmart, which has been expanding its online operations in a bid to catch up to Amazon, ranks eighth on the list with base pay of $122,110.
Three Seattle area companies also are on the list, including Amazon, Microsoft and Expedia. They rank 14th, 18th and 21st, respectively. Of course, a large percentage of their employees are located in the Seattle area where the cost of living is lower than the Valley, and presumably because of that wages are lower. (That’s perhaps one of the reasons why a number of the Silicon Valley companies on the list, including Twitter, eBay and Facebook, have set up fast-growing Seattle outposts).
Still, as the second chart below shows, Seattle ranks second to San Francisco in tech wages.
“When comparing average annual software engineer base salaries and the number of employers currently hiring for software engineers across 20 of the largest U.S. cities, the West Coast leads the way,” Glassdoor writes. “Software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area earn the highest average annual base salary ($111,885), followed by those in Seattle ($103,196) and San Diego ($93,993) to round out the top three. Interestingly, 17 of the 25 highest paying companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
Take a look at the list, and let us know which of this companies you’d most like to work for.
