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It’s the time of year when Microsoft employees start finding out about pay raises and promotions, and hundreds of them are sharing information about their compensation in a spreadsheet viewed by Business Insider.
The document has more than 850 self-submitted entries and counting, and includes how much these Microsoft employees report making in salary, bonus, and stock awards.
The competitiveness of Microsoft’s pay is particularly important now as it tries to lure top AI engineers and researchers to keep up the momentum that’s fueling its record earnings.
Microsoft is going after Meta’s AI talent with multimillion-dollar offers and released new pay guidelines this year with a carve-out to make its offers more competitive, as Business Insider recently reported based on internal documents.
The company has cut thousands of employees this year while insisting its headcount will remain flat, suggesting hiring plans continue.
Business Insider analyzed nearly 300 submissions in the spreadsheet from people who identified themselves as software engineers in the US to determine pay ranges and averages by level and organization. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment.
Microsoft employees typically share this information voluntarily and anonymously to promote pay transparency, but that means the data isn’t official or comprehensive. The company had 228,000 employees on June 30, so a spreadsheet with roughly 850 submissions provides a tiny snapshot.
Employees with higher pay or seniority may contribute less to such spreadsheets, so the pay ranges may skew lower than might be representative of the total workforce.
Business Insider’s analysis excluded levels and teams with fewer than three entries, along with submissions with unusually large entries that may be typos as the data is self-reported and may contain errors.
Much of tech industry compensation is stock-based, but base pay can be a useful way to compare different teams across the company. Here’s the average base pay in various Microsoft groups, per the numbers shared by employees in this spreadsheet:
- Cloud + AI: $204,135
- Commerce + Ecosystems: $191,597
- Security: $189,285
- Azure: $176,035
- Experiences and Devices: $175,123
- Microsoft AI: $170,456
- Xbox: $168,831
- CoreAI: $167,759
Business Insider recently reported Microsoft’s internal pay guidelines, revealing how much the company generally offers new hires in engineering and research roles in the US.
The self-reported ranges for base pay, bonus, and stock awards by existing employees in this spreadsheet generally skewed lower than the ranges listed in the official Microsoft guidelines for new hire offers.
Again, this could be because employees with higher compensation and seniority often contribute less to spreadsheets like this.
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