The Impact of Low Salaries At Apple

orenh writes "Recent data indicate that Apple engineers have significantly lower salaries than their Silicon Valley peers: $89,000 at Apple, versus $105,000 at Yahoo and $112,000 at Google. Paying lower salaries had a major impact on Apple's bottom line when it was struggling in the market up until 2004. But now that Apple is highly profitable, these lower salaries are no longer a factor in Apple's success. Will Apple have to raise salaries to match the market rate, or face defections?"

Comments

Uh, Google has fairly low pay, too.

[Anonymous Freak]

I have multiple friends who work for Google, that used to work for Intel.

They got paid significantly more at Intel, for what was effectively a lower-level job. (Not directly comparable in job function, but in heirarchy.) Google pays on the order of 25% less.

Comparing one single job isn't the way to go. Apple may pay less than Google or Yahoo, but, really, what job position at Apple are they referring to? TFA just say "engineers". Well, what kind? If you're comparing, say, the guy who designs the box that the iPod comes in to the guy who designs Google's customized Linux kernel, then it's not even close to comparable.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Toll_Free]

Nah, they won't.

I live in the area, and let me tell you, people would rather KNOW they are going to have a paycheck, at least in theory because of seniority if nothing else, than NOT because they jumped ship to get a 20K a year raise.

Not when you paid nearly a million dollars for your 3 bedroom house.

There ARE people within a few miles of my house paying 25 thousand dollars a month in RENT.... My neighborhood is in the 2 to 3K a month range, and if I KNEW I could pay my bills with the economy going to the toilet, there is NO good reason for me to jump ship for a raise.

Three years ago, they ALL would have jumped ship. It's a different type of world now, since foreclosures, etc. are looming everywhere. Local trash mags have foreclosure sales listed, as do newspapers.

Apple should pony up some of those profits, but a smart board and CFO would realize, they might need a bit of cheese to get them through the thin period we can all see coming.

--Toll_Free

Sample Size Matters...

[GarfBond]

I'm not going to say anything about what the data means, but I am going to call into question the data itself. The site is based on two different types of surveys, employer ratings and salary numbers, and the site has different response results on both.

So how much does a Google software engineer really make? The average, based on ten submissions, is $97,840. And the range is between $80,000 and $150,000, with annual cash bonuses coming in anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000. Adding salary and bonus together, the Google engineers that have entered information on Glassdoor average $112,573 in take-home pay. (And then there are stock options on top of that). Yahoo and Microsoft engineers get about the same salaries, but smaller bonuses, leaving their take-home pay at an average of $105,642 and $105,375, respectively. Apple software engineers make only about $89,000, on average, but they get to create some of the most loved products on Earth.

I'm pretty sure with only 10 responses, this data is completely meaningless. However, now that people know about this site, maybe we'll see some more interesting results as more people report in.

These ratings are by no means scientific. They are based on 124 responses for Microsoft, 50 for Yahoo, and 37 for Google, all collected during the companyâ(TM)s private beta. The more honest responses the site collects from any given company, the more accurate the results will be.

Re:I know you're sarcastic, but...

[oberondarksoul]

Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself.

Watch the WWDC and MacWorld keynote addresses. Jobs always makes a point of thanking the Apple engineers, asking them to stand up and be applauded, and so on.

Steve Jobs style

[sjbe]

If you ever actually watched the end of keynote you'd see that often Lord Jobs asks the engineers to stand for a round of applause. Jobs is also well known for being aggressive, demanding and egotistical. He frequently has been not-very-nice to those who work for him. He's a talented manager but has rarely been described as kind or gentle. He gets results which is why people tolerate his style. I suspect he does care about the people who work for him but he appears to be hard to work for at times.

Re:Steve Jobs style

[Dahamma]

If you want to see how much of an asshole Jobs can really be to employees, just see what he would do to his best friend.... (nicked from wikipedia):

He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them US$600 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus US$300

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[statemachine]

When the other companies in the Valley are hiring again, and Apple continues to have lower salaries, yes they will need to raise them.

$89K/year won't get you a house even with today's market. Maybe an OK condo, assuming a bank will give you a loan. But if you don't mind driving 100+ miles each way, then you could get a decent structure, though the neighborhood might be in the middle of nowhere. Rents are going back up, but if you don't mind living in small apartments to be able to have some play money, then sure, $89K is enough.

For those who just see the numbers and have no idea about cost of living, $700 for an apartment is awesome in the midwest, but $1400-1600 in the Valley will at least keep you out of the bad neighborhoods. After gas, food, and utilities, you'd be lucky to have anything left over to go out and socialize. In the midwest, you'd live like royalty.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

($removable_SIM && $can_use_on_any_GSM_network) == (true && false) == false

HTH HAND.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[cayenne8]

"$89K/year won't get you a house even with today's market. Maybe an OK condo, assuming a bank will give you a loan. But if you don't mind driving 100+ miles each way, then you could get a decent structure, though the neighborhood might be in the middle of nowhere. Rents are going back up, but if you don't mind living in small apartments to be able to have some play money, then sure, $89K is enough.

Wow....I mean, I figure if you've got a few years experience under your belt...$89K/yr is really NOT that great?!?! And I mean not great in areas that aren't nearly as expensive as out there in Silicon Valley.

As the parent said...people paid over a million dollars a pop for homes out there that aren't that palatial. How they hell does anyone make a house payment like that on $89K/yr? Hell...how do you pay for what a condo or apt must cost out there on that salary? I'm not even talking having wife and kids to support....

$89K is not a high salary in this day in age...it is middle class...medium-low end of it really.

This is what bothers me in the presidential rederick that is going on wanting to raise taxes on the rich. Use to..the rich was $250K and up....today...well, apparently it is $75K and up from what I've seen. Notice where the tax rebates started declining in full value recently? Yep....$75K and you start getting rich and don't deserve a full rebate.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[cbrocious]

I wish that was true of anywhere (anywhere worth living, that is) in CA, really. When I lived in San Diego I was paying $1200/mo for a pretty terrible 1br apartment. Now in PA, I'm paying $500/mo for a nice 2br house.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Peaquod]

presidential rederick can't resist the urge... it's rhetoric

You, sir, do not know what you are talking about

[tlambert]

You, sir, do not know what you are talking about.

Mac OS X is the *first* UNIX(tm) *not* derived from AT&T sources.

I was one of the people who made Mac OS X into UNIX(tm), and we started from not even being able to compile the test suite.

My first one line header file change to xnu to test the water (not defining size_t in ) broke 156 projects, including Open Source that was written by people who assumed promiscuous #include files, in violation of the standard.

A relatively small team of us fixed well over 40,000 total test case failures in a period of about 2.5 years, many of those in command line tools, most of that code being pushed back out to the various Open Source projects. Like, oh, "gcc", "bash", "vim", "tar", "bc", "pax", and hundreds of others, which are now UNIX conformant because of us.

In the middle of things we were working 80 hour weeks, sometimes more.

At the end... *almost no one noticed the changes*, because we worked our *asses* off to make sure there was so close to zero *both binary and source* compatibility issues that it would *not* be noticed. One member of the team put it this way: "It's like raising everyone 12 feet into the air, and replacing the Earth underneath them, then lowering them back down to the ground".

All told, we changed more lines of code in the kernel, libraries, compiler, and UNIX(tm) standardized utilities, than all of the non-conformance related changes in Tiger and Leopard combined. I counted.

And then we published the sources for everything needed to build your own Darwin system that could pass the UNIX(tm) conformance test, including our kernel.

So let me repeat: you, sir, do not know what you are talking about.

-- Terry

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[DrakeMcSmooth]

This posting is a joke. The "average Google salary" is based on 10 self-submissions. Aren't /.ers supposed to have a better grasp of statistics than this? kdawson has accounted for more wasted productivity this week than that Tiger Woods character.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Lars T.]

$89K is not a high salary in this day in age...it is middle class...medium-low end of it really. The median household income for the U.S. as of 2006 was $48000. The median individual income was $26000. But the median income is pretty much the definition of the lower bound for the American middle class income. Middle class is not the middle third of the population, but the upper half minus the 1% rich.