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Data & Methodology

What Matters Most

By the Numbers: Comparing Tech Employee Salary, Age, Stress and More

Methodology
 
Overview

Using PayScale.com's compensation database, PayScale examined the characteristics of the following large/well-known tech companies: Adobe Systems Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Apple Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook, Inc., Google, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines (IBM) Corp., Intel Corp., LinkedIn Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Salesforce.com, Inc., Samsung Group, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Corp., and Tesla Motors, Inc. Data was obtained from 33,500 workers in the tech industry (non-retail or sales) who took the PayScale Salary Survey in the last two years. These characteristics include:

1. Job Details: typical pay, typical tenure at the company and typical years of experience within a career/field.
2. Demographics: typical age and gender breakdown.
3. Job Soft Features: shares of employees reporting high job satisfaction, high job meaning and high job stress.
4. In examining the characteristics of these companies, we eliminated retail and sales workers from the sample. Some of the large tech companies examined have a large retail presence (e.g., Apple, Microsoft, etc.). For this reason, we eliminated retail workers and retail and sales managers from our sample to keep the data focused on the corporate employees.
5. Notes:
1. We did not further limit the sample to just IT workers, and included all workers from software developers to financial analysts to marketing assistants, as it takes more than IT to make a business run.
2. Data for Hewlett-Packard employees was obtained prior to Hewlett-Packard's split into two separate companies.

Definitions

Total Cash Compensation (TCC): TCC combines base annual salary or hourly wage, bonuses, profit sharing, tips, commissions, and other forms of cash earnings, as applicable. It does not include equity (stock) compensation, cash value of retirement benefits, or value of other non-cash benefits (e.g., healthcare).

Early Career Median Pay: This is the median pay for workers with 0 to 5 years of experience.

Mid-Career Median Pay: This is the median pay for workers with 10 or more years of experience.

Years of Experience: These are the number of years the respondent has spent in their field/career. The years of experience will incorporate all applicable jobs in the field, not just the current job. The average years of experience across all full-time (non-retail) jobs at all employers referenced in this report is 6 years.

Years with Company: These are the number of years the respondent has worked for their current employer. The average number of years with a company across all full-time (non-retail) jobs at all employers referenced in this report is 4 years.

Median Age: This is the median age of full-time, non-retail workers who work at the given company. The national median age for all full-time (non-retail) workers is 37.

Percentage of Male/Female Workers: This is the percentage of workers within a company that report their gender to be male or female. When available, we used data self-reported by each company. If that data was not publicly available, we used data based on the sample used to calculate other figures in this report from employees who have taken the PayScale survey. The average percentage of female workers across all full-time (non-retail) jobs and all employers (not limited to tech) is 51 percent.
Notes:

1. IBM: Did not report
2. Tesla: Did not report
3. SpaceX: Did not report
4. Amazon: Amazon's publicly reported diversity statistics (39% female; 61% male) include a significantly larger percentage of labor employees (such as warehouse workers) than is included in our data pool. It should be noted that their statistics about the gender diversity of managers was much closer to the numbers in our sample (24 percent of Amazon managers are female, and 26 percent of PayScale's sample of non-retail workers is female). For this reason, we reported gender statistics based on the compensation profiles we used to calculate other data points.

% High Job Satisfaction: This is the percentage of respondents who answered "Extremely satisfied" or "Fairly satisfied" to the question, "How satisfied are you in your job?"

% High Job Stress: This is the percentage of respondents who answered "Fairly stressful" or "Extremely stressful" when asked "How stressful is your job/work environment?"

% High Job Meaning: This is the percentage of respondents who answered "Very much so" or "Yes" to the question, "Does your work make the world a better place?"