Facebook confronts a new crisis seemingly every other month. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the pushback over its attempt to launch a new global currency, these calamities haven’t dampened the company’s profits—but they have lessened some tech professionals’ desire to work there.
In May, Former recruiters from Facebook told CNBC that the company “experienced a significant decrease in job offer acceptance rates” in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica incident. Specifically, they said that the rate had fallen from 85 percent for the 2017-2018 school year to “between 35 percent and 55 percent as of December [2018],” including students from top universities such as Carnegie Mellon.
Facebook pushed back against those numbers, but it’s clear from other surveys that many tech professionals have an issue with the company. A recent Dice survey had a full 86 percent of technology professionals reporting that they did not trust Facebook at all. And the company tumbled on Glassdoor’s most recent list of the best places to work, from the top spot in 2017 to seventh by the end of last year.
Nonetheless, there are still tech professionals willing to work for Facebook—and freshly minted graduates can expect to earn a pretty reasonable salary from the firm. We took a sampling from this magnificent Reddit thread in which new hires posted their offer data for various tech firms, and supplemented it with data from Glassdoor and Indeed.
One thing is immediately clear from these results: Facebook’s base salary for starting tech professionals is very much in-line with what other tech giants such as Google and Amazon offer. The company is especially generous about stock options, often paying out the equivalent of $150,000 or more in stock over a four-year vesting schedule. Nor does location seem to have much of an effect: salaries are as generous at Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters as at outposts in Seattle and New York City. Take a look at the overall averages:
For comparison’s sake, new tech recruits at Amazon pull down an average of $108,000, with bonuses of $51,000 and stock options (on a four-year vesting schedule) of $70,000. At Google, base salaries for newbies hit $115,000, with average signing bonuses of $44,000 and stock options (again, on a four-year schedule) of $139,000.
(According to Levels.fyi, Facebook employees at an E3 ranking earn an average salary of $111,246, with stock options worth roughly $39,649 per year, and a bonus of $18,175. That’s pretty good, and roughly aligns with the data we’re seeing from other sources. By the time they climb to the E7 level, their base salary might total $233,000 per year, with stock options worth roughly $370,000 per year, and a bonus of $58,167.)
According to Glassdoor, Facebook pays its software engineers an average of $147,798 per year (as a base salary), which means there’s definitely room for new developers and engineers to climb in terms of money. Meanwhile, Indeed pins the average software engineer salary at virtually the same number: $151,655 per year.
In other words, Facebook can prove a lucrative spot right out of college or graduate school. The bigger question is whether a candidate is comfortable with some of the issues confronting the company at the moment.
