Here is an interesting WSJ article that compares median incomes across various industries:
The data reveal the types of firms where lucrative jobs are the norm rather than the exception. Some of the highest reported median wages were paid by pharmaceutical companies. Four firms in the S&P 500 paid workers in the middle of their payrolls more than $200,000. Facebook Inc. was one of them; the other three are developing drugs to fight everything from cancer to psoriasis. At Incyte Corp. , Celgene Corp. and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the middle earners last year made $253,000, $213,000 and $211,500, respectively.One financial firm ranked in the top 25 for highest median earnings: At boutique asset manager Affiliated Managers Group Inc. last year, the typical pay package was $157,384. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. came in 46th, with $135,165, the midpoint among roughly 34,000 employees at the bank.
According to this article, it looks like pharmaceuticals, tech, and energy beat finance in terms of median salary at top employers.
Are these statistics surprising?
Is this accurate?
What are your thoughts?
These statistics are misleading because the ratio of back office/support to FO/revenue generating employees is different at all these firms.
Of those 34,000 employees at GS, maybe like ~5,000 are bankers/traders? They have a ton of support personnel which are lower pay positions and not really true high finance positions.
Would guess a much larger percentage of Pharma/tech companies are R&D/product management/software engineers (the 'FO' equivalent positions) and hence they have a higher median overall.
FaceBook has just shy of 28,000 employees, and I'm sure they also have support staff.
LOL whatever you need to tell yourself so you feel better about not making it like the rest of us
These statistics are misleading because median employee pay is generally calculated the same way executive pay is calculated for that company in their proxy NEO summary compensation table.
For many older companies they have legacy pension liabilities, and their median employee may have pension benefits that are included in the total comp calculation. This includes pension accounting adjustments.
Imagine the following oversimplified example:
Oil company median employee:
Salary: 100k
Bonus : $20k
Other benefits: $10k
Change in pension benefits: $40k
Total comp; $170k
The total comp number is the one you see on the table. Hard to tell unless the company breaks it out what a comparable number is to a company like Facebook who never had pension benefits to begin with.
old saying that figures lie and liars figure
Do people even still think that banking is the highest paying industry?
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