- A spreadsheet showing what thousands of Google employees make has come to light for all to see.
- The best paid are software engineers, who could potentially make over $1 million a year in total compensation.
- Yet many Google employees think they're underpaid.
We all know Google pays well, which may be why it has a reputation for being so hard to get a job there.
Now, thanks to a spreadsheet obtained by Insider's Rosalie Chan, Madison Hoff, and Hugh Langley, we know exactly how much its employees are taking home.
The TL;DR is that Googlers can expect to be paid pretty well.
Yet the company's annual "Googlegeist" survey for 2022 indicated that just 60% of workers surveyed felt their pay was "fair and equitable," down from 66% in 2021.
For some of these salaries, that might feel understandable.
Someone working in cloud sales for example could have a base salary of $50,000, although that ranges up to $302,000. A job in technical operations starts at $47,000, while the minimum base salary for an admin assistant is $67,509.
Per some very back-of-the-envelope math, these kinds of lower-tier salaries hover around US national median earnings. A like-for-like comparison is difficult, given Google's total compensation figures can include bonus and equity, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the median US wage is $1,100 a week, equating roughly to $57,200 a year. In 2021, real median household income was $70,784, per census data.
But many Googlers earn far above this. The median total compensation for a Google employee in 2022 was $279,802, according to the leaked data. The highest-paid software engineers can make up to $718,000 a year in base salary. They can also receive bonuses of up to $605,000. This would put them in the top 1% of earners in the country.
It's unclear whether the same workers received the maximum salary and the maximum bonus, but if they did they'd be taking home a staggering $1.3 million dollars a year. That doesn't factor in equity either, which can range up to an additional $1.5 million.
Continuing our rudimentary math, which doesn't account for taxes, someone earning the median average US salary would have to work for several decades before saving what a top Googler could theoretically earn in a year.
One has to wonder what Googlers, if surveyed again, really think "fair and equitable" pay is.