From Netflix managers earning over $500,000 a year to a photographer at Airbnb making $22 an hour, a new database highlights who earns what in the tech industry.
Flickr / Integra Global Solutions / Via Flickr: integra-global-solutions
Visa Explorer, a database of tech worker pay unveiled last week, reveals the highs and lows of the American technology industry: a gilded class of managers and programmers earning salaries placing them comfortably among the country's top 5%, alongside a vast pool of middle-class coders at giant consultancies and outsourcing firms.
The pay transparency site, utilizing data from millions of corporate requests to sponsor foreign worker visas, gives a detailed look at high-end salaries in Silicon Valley's best-known companies. The requests, known as Labor Condition Applications (LCAs), must be filed to the U.S. Department of Labor before a foreign worker applies for their visa.
Unsurprisingly, some of the highest salaries were posted by some of the world's largest and most profitable companies. A position for vice president in engineering at Apple is listed at $406,000; its vice president of core operating systems is listed as making $390,000. In 2012, a senior vice president for retail was listed as making $800,000. Apple declined to comment on employee compensation.
At Microsoft, meanwhile, executive salaries (titles like senior manager of data and analytics, director of public relations, principal software engineer, and senior principal engagement manager) are listed at around $200,000, with the Latin America lead for enterprise and partner groups making $235,000. Microsoft declined to comment.
But Netflix, which made a $267 million profit on $5.5 billion in revenue for 2014, appears to pay its people as well — if not better — than many much more profitable companies. Its director of advertising for Europe is listed as earning a base salary of $560,000, its senior counsel for original film is listed as making $465,000, and its Latin America director for digital marketing is listed at $425,000 a year.
In fact, the median pay for the 88 foreign workers Netflix has applied to hire in 2015 is $260,000, more than double the $112,000 median pay Apple has listed on its 681 visa filings so far this year.
A representative for Netflix wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News that top salaries are part of the company's "high-performance culture."
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Pay was also generous at the companies best known for their creative use of on-demand contractors instead of employees. At Uber, the head of global talent acquisition was set to earn $250,000, and in 2012, a chief operating officer was listed with a salary of $350,000. Airbnb planned a salary of $185,000 for its global head of advertising, while Homejoy — which rumors suggest could soon be purchased by rival on-demand cleaning service company Handy — wanted to pay both its vice president of operations and its chief growth officer $200,000 in 2015. Uber and Homejoy declined to comment; Airbnb did not respond to request for comment.
It's not all milk and honey in the so-called sharing economy, though: Airbnb, according to an LCA filing, sought to sponsor a foreign photographer to work at $22 per hour. That would work out to just over $42,000 a year, based on 40-hour work weeks.
But while all these high-paying companies represent the public face of the technology industry, plenty of behind-the-scenes work is done at much more earthly pay rates.
Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, two Indian outsourcing firms, topped the list of companies applying to sponsor employees to work in the U.S. via H-1B visas, and seem to be hiring heavily in the United States to satisfy their customers. The Visa Explorer database lists Infosys as filing 95,947 LCAs since 2001, and Tata 48,753, with the jobs being primarily technical in nature.
But the two companies appear to be paying well below their Silicon Valley counterparts. Among the 9,300 jobs Tata has filed LCAs for in 2015, the median salary is just over $66,000, while at Infosys, the median is $76,000. Microsoft, which sponsors more H-1B visas than any other U.S. tech company, listed a median salary of $102,000 on the 1,100 LCAs filed so far this year.
An Infosys spokesperson said the company complies with all U.S. laws and regulations when sponsoring foreign workers, including "paying the higher of the prevailing or actual wages for the occupations and locations involved, while offering health insurance, bonuses and other fringe benefits based on an employee's position within the company."
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