Founded in 1982, Adobe is ancient by tech-world standards, and yet its products continue to dominate the developer and designer worlds. It survived a bruising battle with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs over Flash (although Flash ended up a casualty) as well as the transition to the cloud and subscription services (irritating any number of customers in the process), and Photoshop remains a staple of web developers everywhere. 

Working for Adobe’s unique platform requires a specialized set of skills. Depending on the role, skills required might include everything from MySQL and PHP experience (for backend work) to working for cloud architecture and C/C++ (in the case of Photoshop developer work). As a result, a software engineer salary for Adobe is generally pretty good (and aligns with industry standards); in order to uncover compensation ranges, we turned to levels.fyi, which anonymously crowdsources that data from people who claim to work as engineers at various tech firms:

(While it’s true that anonymous crowdsourcing isn’t the most scientific way of surfacing salary data, levels.fyi’s numbers generally align with those presented by Glassdoor, which also crowdsources salary data.)

Adobe’s entry-level software engineering salaries match up well with those at the biggest tech companies, according to levels.fyi’s data:

According to Dice’s 2020 edition of the Salary Report, the average pay in the technology industry hit $94,000 in 2019—just a 1.3 percent increase from 2018. But that’s not the whole story: Salaries increased in specific cities (including some up-and-coming tech hubs such as Denver) as well as for particular skills:

Skills that experienced huge salary gains between 2018 and last year included Swift, HANA, MapReduce, and Apache Kafka. In other words, a mix of front-end and back-end skills, with a heavy focus on data wrangling. No matter where you work, having the right mix of skills and experience can translate into a significant compensation bump.