Twitter pays its engineer $10.3m
The senior vice president of engineering raked in $10.3m (€7.6m) last year, just behind the social media giant’s CEO Dick Costolo’s $11.5m, according to witter’s IPO documents.
That is more than the paychecks of executives such as chief technology officer Adam Messinger, chief financial officer Mike Gupta and chief operating officer Ali Rowghani.
Welcome to Silicon Valley, where a shortage of top engineering talent amid an explosion of venture capital-backed start-ups is inflating paychecks.
“The number of A-players in Silicon Valley hasn’t grown,” said Iain Grant, a recruiter at Riviera Partners, which specialises in placing engineers at venture-capital backed start-ups. “But the demand for them has gone through the roof.”
Stories abound about the lengths to which employers will go to attract engineering talent — in addition to the free cafeterias, laundry services and shuttle buses that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are already famous for.
In Fry’s case, his compensation came mostly in the form of stock awards, valued last year at $10.1m, according to Twitter’s IPO documents. He drew a salary of $145,513 and a bonus of $100,000.
Some might call that underpaid. Facebook vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, took in $24.4m in stock awards the year before the social network’s 2012 IPO. He also drew a salary of $270,833 and a bonus of $140,344. But Facebook that year posted revenue of $3.71bn, 10 times more than Twitter’s $317m.
Grant said over three- quarters of candidates who took VP of engineering roles at his client firms over the last two years drew total cash compensation in excess of $250,000. Many also received equity grants totalling 1%-2% of the company.
