Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday, May 10, 2023. Firm employees are among the best-paid in any industry.
The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Thousands of Google salaries have leaked, and they make it clear why the Bay Area has some of the nation’s highest costs of living.
Workers at the Mountain View-based tech giant compiled a spreadsheet with 12,000 entries, Insider reported Wednesday, containing self-volunteered pay details from full-time software engineers, salespeople, designers, product managers and other workers based in the United States. Eye-popping numbers abound; Google employees’ salaries are regularly five times larger than the national average.
The company has interests across the technology industry, with YouTube, Google Cloud and Workspace, Android, Waymo, DeepMind, and, of course, its money-printing search engine and ad network. As of the end of March, parent firm Alphabet had just over 190,000 employees — even after a 12,000-worker layoff round. Last year’s median pay for Alphabet employees was $279,802, according to a notice to company shareholders filed this April.
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But some workers, according to Insider’s reporting on the internal spreadsheet, make far, far more, usually through a combination of base salary, company equity and bonuses. The reported pay details are all from 2022 and don’t include Waymo, Nest or any “other bets” subsidiaries; the company declined SFGATE’s request for comment.
Software engineers topped out each pay category, with three shockingly high amounts: One reportedly pulled in a base salary of $718,000. Someone says they got stock worth $1.5 million, and another claimed a $605,000 bonus.
Google has been trying to grow its cloud business — competing with the massive Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — and the employees responsible for selling the products to other companies are making a pretty penny. Insider reported maximum base salaries of over $300,000 for cloud sales, sales strategy and enterprise direct sales employees, plus over $200,000 for account managers and product specialists.
Several base salaries for user experience employees reportedly cleared $200,000, with the highest-earning designer pulling in $315,000 before bonuses or stock options.
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Insider also released some salary ranges from the spreadsheet with less mighty (but still huge) totals. Global communications workers reported base pay