Biggest Names Not the Highest-Paying Companies for Engineers

Oct. 18, 2013 — -- intro:While the media took note of the news that pre-IPO Twitter paid engineer Christopher Fry more than $10 million in compensation last year, the uber-competitive talent hunt comes as no surprise in the tech world.

There, innovation and top-notch leadership are the typically the basis for a firm's future value, which is why both small and large firms can pay handsomely for software engineers.

However, the highest-paying company for software engineers isn't a sexy newly public company or a hot pre-IPO firm, according to jobs site Glassdoor.com. It's networking equipment maker Juniper Networks, founded in 1996 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., south of San Francisco. The average base for the company's software engineers: $159,990.

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Social media site Facebook is No. 9 with $121,507. Meanwhile, the highest-paid engineering executive disclosed in proxy filings as a named executive officer was Michael Schroepfer, CTO and VP of engineering of Facebook, who had total pay of $20.7 million last year, according to executive compensation firm Equilar.

Twitter comes in at No. 5 in Glassdoor's list of highest-paying engineering firms, offering an average base of $124,863.

While Fry earned $10.3 million last year, his salary was only $145,513. He earned more than $10 million in stock awards and $100,000 as a bonus. While he is one of Twitter's highest-paid employees as senior vice president of engineering, he is relatively new to the company. He joined in April 2012 and was a vice president of engineering. Previously, he worked his way up at Salesforce.com, eventually becoming senior vice president of development.

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Glassdoor, based in Sausalito, Calif., compiled its data from employee-reported salary information among companies with at least 50 software engineer salary reports over the past 12 months.

Here are the top five high-paying companies for software engineers and their average base salaries, according to Glassdoor.com.

quicklist:category:title: Juniper Networkstext: $159,990

quicklist:category:title: LinkedIntext: $136,427

quicklist:category:title: Yahootext: $130,312

quicklist:category:title: Googletext: $127,143

quicklist:category:title: Twittertext: $124,863