Google vs Facebook: Who Earns More – Engineers or Product Managers?

Note: The article was originally written in November 2014; data has changed, but the author shares it now.

Facebook and Google are the two most competitive Silicon Valley companies for talent, prompting the question of which pays higher salaries to software engineers (SEs) and product managers (PMs). The author obtained a valuable dataset from publicly disclosed H‑1B visa applications, which include position titles, employer, and salary.

The H‑1B data, released by the U.S. government, is considered more reliable than self‑reported salaries on sites like Glassdoor. The author acknowledges potential issues and lists them at the end.

Data Collection and Processing

The steps were:

Scrape yearly H‑1B application charts from http://visadoor.com/ for 2012‑2014 for each company (e.g., http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-by-companies-2014-google-inc).

Combine three years of data into a single dataset.

Keep only “certified” applications.

Consider only base salary.

Retain records with job titles “Software Engineer” or “Product Manager”.

Aggregated Results

A summary table with five key metrics (25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, etc.) is presented, followed by box‑plot visualizations.

Combined distributions for the two companies and the two roles are shown:

Observations

Overall, product managers earn slightly more than software engineers; the median gap is about $15,000 per company.

The highest salaries belong to top engineers, not PMs, suggesting elite engineers stay on the technical track.

Google SE salaries show two distinct peaks at $105k and $127k.

Facebook SE salaries also show a bimodal pattern, with peaks near $110k and $140k, though the second peak is less pronounced.

While Google’s average SE salary is higher, removing extreme outliers (above $180k) reveals Facebook’s median and mean are higher.

Facebook PM salaries have two peaks around $105k and $145k; Google PMs show a single peak near $140k, possibly due to differing job‑title conventions.

The SE‑to‑PM ratio is similar: roughly 1 PM per 35‑40 engineers at both firms.

Limitations and Potential Biases

Sample size for PMs is much smaller than for SEs (e.g., 24 Facebook PMs vs 3,354 Google engineers).

Job titles may not be consistent across companies or over time, affecting comparability.

Only base salary is captured; bonuses, equity, and benefits are excluded.

The data reflects foreign workers on H‑1B visas, who may be paid differently from domestic employees.

Many H‑1B applicants are early‑career workers; senior, high‑earning staff may have already obtained green cards and are absent from the dataset.

H‑1B sponsorship imposes a minimum wage requirement, which can skew the lower end of the distribution.

Conclusion

Salary ranges for the same role are surprisingly close between Google and Facebook, but the analysis is limited by data gaps and sampling biases. Readers are reminded that job satisfaction and personal fulfillment matter beyond compensation.