Silicon Valley Business Journal/Marlize van Romburgh: Facebook’s median pay tops $240,000 — here's how that compares to 30 other big Bay Area employers

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Facebook’s median pay tops $240,000 — here's how that compares to 30 other big Bay Area employers

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An entrance to Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, Calif., Feb. 4, 2016. A drive down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Santa Clara offers plenty of diversions for the Super Bowl-bound.
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An entrance to Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, Calif., Feb. 4, 2016. A drive down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Santa Clara offers plenty of diversions for the Super Bowl-bound.

Jason Henry/The New York Times
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    Career & Workplace Industry
    Cisco Systems Company
    Compensation Topic
    Facebook Company
    Google Company
    Intel Corp. Company
    Matthew Niksa Person
    Salesforce.com Company
    Technology Industry

By Marlize van Romburgh  – Managing Editor, Silicon Valley Business Journal
Aug 16, 2018, 5:05am PDT Updated Aug 17, 2018, 5:41pm

Many of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies pay a typical worker well into the six figures — or in the case of Facebook, a whopping $240,430. That's $43,000 more than what Google parent Alphabet Inc. pays a typical worker, according to the latest Silicon Valley Business Journal analysis of public company filings.

We've been keeping tabs on how much the region's biggest publicly traded employers pay their median worker. The figures on worker pay and how that compares with CEO compensation are from company filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
How much more do 30 of the biggest Bay Area employers pay a typical worker

As more public companies are required to disclose median worker pay, we look at which big Bay Area tech employers pay their employees the most — and least. Here's the ranking, from lowest to highest.
As more public companies are required to disclose median worker pay, we look at which big Bay Area employers pay their employees the most — and least. Here's the ranking, from lowest to highest.
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32 photos

You can see how many of region's biggest tech employers — including Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, Intel Corp., Salesforce.com, Tesla, eBay, GoPro, PayPal Holdings, Electronic Arts, Zynga, ServiceNow, Autodesk, Intuitive Surgical, Netgear, Arista Networks, Square and Yelp — compare in the gallery above.

Among our other findings:

• Software companies dominate the highest slots on the list. Along with Facebook and Google, Netflix, Twitter and cloud storage business Box are all near the top.

• Silicon may be what gave the Valley its name, but semiconductor companies tend to fall lower on the median compensation scale. That's because for some, like Intel Corp., a large part of the workforce is in chip manufacturing, not the research, design and engineering jobs that tend to be concentrated in Silicon Valley. That also helps to explain why the median worker at Intel worker makes $45,540 less per year than his or her peer at smaller rival Nvidia Corp.: While Nvidia is a fabless chipmaker, Intel's global manufacturing workforce — which is largely concentrated at its plant outside Portland, Oregon — is factored into its median employee pay figure.

• Two of the Bay Area's other chipmakers — Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices — also pay their median worker less than $100,000. San Jose-based Cypress notes that of its approximately 6,000 global employees, more than half are in manufacturing and fewer than 2,000 work in the U.S. The rest are in Thailand, the Philippines, India and Japan.

• Two of the U.S.' biggest household names — Wells Fargo & Co. and Chevron Corp. — are headquartered in the Bay Area but also employ the vast majority of their workers elsewhere, in lower-cost markets, no doubt pulling down their median pay figures as well.

Here’s how much money average Americans make from CNBC.

Notes on methodology:

• Median pay means half of the company’s employees, not including the CEO, make less, and half make more.

• This data is due to new financial reporting rules that require many U.S. public companies to calculate and disclose median worker pay, and how that compares to the CEO's compensation, in their filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• In calculating that figure, the companies notably don’t account for the lavish workplace perks that many Bay Area tech employers are known for, including free daily catered meals, unlimited snacks and on-campus gyms and laundry facilities.

• At some companies, like Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, median pay includes the value of restricted stock units and other employee benefits.

• Many of the region’s biggest tech employers — including Apple, Inc., Cisco Systems, Oracle Corp. and Adobe Systems — have not yet disclosed their median pay figures. We'll report again as they disclose those numbers.

— Reporting intern Matthew Niksa contributed research.
The List
Largest Employers Silicon Valley
Ranked by Local employee headcount
Rank     Business name     Local employee headcount
1     Apple Inc.     25,000
2     Alphabet Inc.     20,000
3     County of Santa Clara     18,244
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