For the second straight year, Bay Area-based tech heavyweights dominate the list of the nation’s highest-paying companies — good news for anyone who’s landed a job at one of them considering the region’s extremely high housing costs.
Sixteen of the nation’s 25 highest-paying companies in 2017 are headquartered in the Bay Area, according to annual rankings from career website Glassdoor. All but one of those companies are in the tech sector, a testament to the region’s economic bread and butter, and none of them pay less than $140,000 per year.
The results are very similar to last year’s rankings, when 17 local companies landed on the list, 16 of them in the tech sector. And while many of this year’s top-paying companies were also among the nation’s highest-paying in 2016, the 2017 list has a few new names.
Bay Area techies who want to pull in the region’s biggest bucks should apply for a job at Palo Alto-based virtualization vendor VMware, where this year’s median total annual compensation package is $167,050. That makes it the country’s third best-paying company, up from No. 6 last year.
San Francisco IT systems intelligence software maker Splunk, which didn’t even make the cut on Glassdoor’s 2016 list, debuted at No. 4 this year, with a median compensation package of $161,010. The rest of the Bay Area’s top 10 finishers are all located in Silicon Valley, and all pay in excess of $150,000: Cadence Design Systems (No. 5), Google (No. 6), Facebook (No. 7), NVIDIA (No. 8), and Amazon Lab126 (No. 10).
Foster City-based Visa was again the Bay Area’s sole nontech representive, falling 10 spots from last year’s rankings to the No. 21 position. The rest of the region’s top-paying tech companies: Juniper Networks (No. 11), LinkedIn (No. 12), Salesforce.com (No 13.), Synopsys (No. 15), Informatica (No. 16), Walmart eCommerce (No. 20), Twitter (No. 22), and Palo Alto Networks (No. 24).
Tech companies may rule Glassdoor’s rankings, but like last year, the nation’s two best-paying companies are old-school consulting firms. Founded in 1926, Chicago-based A.T. Kearney ranks No. 1, with an annual compensation of $175,000, followed by New York’s Strategy& at No. 2, where the median package comes in at $172,000.
(Photo: iStock/Jason Doiy)