15 best-paying companies for software engineers

Wonder which are the best paying companies for software engineers? Online jobs and career community Glassdoor’s recent survey claims to reveal just that. The figures collated by Business Insider ranks companies on the basis of the average base salary of their software engineers. Here are the top 15 companies from the list.

1. Juniper Networks: Juniper Networks makes networking equipment, security products and network operating system. The company offers average base salary of $128,378 to its software engineers, says the survey, the highest in the industry.
2. Google: Google is a tech titan that is known throughout the world for products like Search, Android, Gmail, Nexus smartphones and tablets, Picasa and online advertising platforms. Software engineers working at the company are paid average base salary of $124,520, according to the Glassdoor survey.
3. Twitter: Twitter is the microblogging website where users can type messages with only 140 characters; the company claims to have over 500 million registered users. Software engineers earn average base salary of $120,768 at the company, says the survey.
4. Facebook: Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and has over a billion registered users. As per the Glassdoor survey, the company pays $118,857 as average base salary to software engineers.
5. Apple: Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple is a US technology company that makes gadgets like iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac series of computers etc. Software engineers earn average base salary of $118,192 at the company, the survey shows.
6. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the most popular professional networking website in the world, with over 200 million active users across the world. As per respondents in the Glassdoor survey, average base salary of software engineers at the company is $116,375.
7. Brocade Communications: Brocade Communications is a US technology company that offers data and storage networking products, such as LAN and Wi-Fi switches, routers, network security appliances etc. The company pays average base salary of $111,858 to its software engineers, the survey reveals.
8. eBay: eBay is one of the biggest online marketplaces where retailers as well as individuals can sell their goods to consumers; it also operates an online auction platform on its website. According to the Glassdoor survey, average base salary of software engineers at eBay is $108,461.
9. Bloomberg LP: Bloomberg LP, which is well known for its media publications, takes care of data acquisition, distribution and management of enterprises. Software engineers working in the technology arm of the company earn $108,430 as average base salary.
10. Zynga: Zynga is a social game making company that is best known for hits like Farmville and CityVille that took Facebook by storm. The software engineers employed at the company take home average base salary of $107,242.
11. PayPal: A unit of online retailer eBay, PayPal is the world’s biggest online payment company. The Glassdoor survey reveals that software engineers at the company are paid average base salary of $106,920.
12. VMWare: Palo Alto, California- based VMWare makes cloud and virtualisation software and services. According to respondents in the Glassdoor survey, the company’s software engineers get average base salary of $106,568.
13. Oracle: Oracle, the third biggest software maker in the world, makes database management systems, computer hardware system as well as ERP, CRM and SCM software. The average base salary of software engineers at Oracle is $105,660, as per the survey.
14. Nvidia: Nvidia is a Santa Clara, California-based company that manufacturers system-on-chips and graphic processing units for mobile devices. The Glassdoor survey says it pays an average base salary of $104,717 to its software engineers.
15. Microsoft: Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world, best known for its Windows operating system for computers. Other Microsoft products include Surface tablets, Xbox gaming console and Windows Phone mobile operating system. The company offers its engineers average base salary of $103,563, according to the survey.

Source: GlassDoor

Mid-tier IT companies Tech Mahindra, MindTree may raise salaries by 7-12%

Mid-tier IT firms such as Tech Mahindra and MindTree may raise salaries by 7-12% this fiscal to ensure they do not lose talent to top players TCS, Infosys and Wipro, according to HR service providers.

The larger players have announced wage hikes ranging between 6% and 10% for this fiscal.

"Current environment is challenging and companies are looking at preserving their bottomline. Despite that, keeping employees' interest in mind, organizations have given hikes ranging from 8-12%, which is a good development."

"In general, we can expect 7-12% hikes for employees working with mid-tier IT companies," Randstad India president (staffing) and director (marketing) Aditya Narayan Mishra told. He added that as the demand for IT services increases in the coming quarters, one can expect above-average hikes.

Last week, Infosys said its employees in India will get on an average 8% increase, while Wipro said it has raised salaries by 6-8%. Onsite employees have seen salaries going up by 2-3%. India's largest software services exporter Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has increased wages by 8-10% in India and 2-4% for overseas workforce. HCL Technologies has started its appraisal process and is expected to make an announcement by July-end. Most Indian IT firms give increments around April or May.

"IT sector has been fairly conservative in terms of pay hike. We recently did a survey, where we asked some of our customers on increments this year and almost 46-47% of the respondents said they are looking at wage hikes between 6-15%," HeadHonchos.com CEO Uday Sodhi said.

IT firms are also looking at the global economic scenario, which still has not been very promising and it plays an important role in determining the hike percentage, he added.
Source: TimesofIndia

What is keeping India's engineers unemployed

Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India's engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.

According to multiple estimates, India trains around 1.5 million engineers, which is more than the US and China combined. However, two key industries hiring these engineers -- information technology and manufacturing -- are actually hiring fewer people than before.

For example, India's IT industry, a sponge for 50-75% of these engineers will hire 50,000 fewer people this year, according to Nasscom. Manufacturing, too, is facing a similar stasis, say HR consultants and skills evaluation firms.

According to data from AICTE, the regulator for technical education in India, there were 1,511 engineering colleges across India, graduating over 550,000 students back in 2006-07. Fuelled by fast growth, especially in the $110 billion outsourcing market, a raft of new colleges sprung up -- since then, the number of colleges and graduates have doubled.

Read More @ TimesOfIndia

TCS non-Indian employee number crosses 21,000

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT services company has more that doubled the number of its non-Indian employees during the last three years.

According to the company, as on 31 March 2013, it had 21,282 non-Indians on its rolls belonging to 118 nationalities. This is an increase of about 20% over the previous years. In 2009-10, the company employed 9,536 foreign nationals.

The company said the highest number of its non-Indian employees are Britishers with a share of close to 19% followed by Americans at 15.4%. About 10% of its non-Indian employees are from China where TCS has a strong presence, the Mumbai-based company said in its annual report for 2012-13.

TCS also said that the company has improved the ratio of women in its total workforce to 32.40% at the end of FY13 as compared to 31.60% as on March 31, 2012. "Our progressive policies and customised programmes such as executive education programme for women in mid-management, interactive forums and women discussion circles address the aspirations and needs of our women employees," it added in the report.
Source: Business-Standard

Big data to create 4.4 mn jobs by 2015

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to surpass $3.7 trillion in 2013, a 3.8 per cent increase from 2012 projected spending of $3.6 trillion, but it is the outlook for big data that is creating much excitement, according to Gartner.

"By 2015, 4.4 million IT jobs globally will be created to support big data, generating 1.9 million IT jobs in the United States," said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president, Gartner and global head of Research. "In addition, every big data-related role in the US will create employment for three people outside of IT, so over the next four years a total of 6 million jobs in the US will be generated by the information economy."

"But there is a challenge. There is not enough talent in the industry. Our public and private education systems are failing us. Therefore, only one-third of the IT jobs will be filled. Data experts will be a scarce, valuable commodity," Sondergaard said. "IT leaders will need immediate focus on how their organization develops and attracts the skills required. These jobs will be needed to grow your business. These jobs are the future of the new information economy."
Source: CIOL

27 percent Indian staff set to switch jobs

Globally, the number of workers taking flight is expected to reach 161.7 million in 2014 - a 12.9 per cent increase in people leaving compared to 2012, says a Hay Group study.

Over the next five years, 49 million more employees as compared to 2012 are going to leave their current employers and switch jobs, global management consultancy, Hay Group's new research, in association with the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), has revealed.
As far as India is concerned, it finds itself in the eye of the storm, with a predicted employee turnover of 26.9 per cent (in the organized sector) in 2013 - the highest attrition rate globally.

The study, Preparing for Take-Off, covers 700 million employees in 19 countries worldwide and is based on a unique Hay Group macroeconomic model that analyzes the main factors affecting employee turnover across the globe, stated a release.

A million engineers in India struggling to get placed

A million engineers in India struggling to get placed in an extremely challenging market. Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India's engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.

According to multiple estimates, India trains around 1.5 million engineers, which is more than the US and China combined. However, two key industries hiring these engineers -- information technology and manufacturing -- are actually hiring fewer people than before.

For example, India's IT industry, a sponge for 50-75% of these engineers will hire 50,000 fewer people this year, according to Nasscom. Manufacturing, too, is facing a similar stasis, say HR consultants and skills evaluation firms. Source:Economic Times

Salaries for fresh engineers in IT companies may fall in coming years

For years, fresh engineering graduates have had it good because demand from the IT industry was robust. That's changing. Salaries for fresh IT engineers will be under major pressure in the coming years.

"Fresher salaries of Rs 2.75 lakh to Rs 3.25 lakh will remain unchanged or be lowered over the next few years," wrote Kawaljeet Saluja and Rohit Chordia of brokerage firm Kotak Institutional Securities in a recent report.

The trend is changing because the number of students graduating in engineering has shot up in the past few years, and the demand has slowed. Estimates by IT industry body Nasscom show the number of engineers graduating each year has more than doubled to 8.13 lakh from 2007-08 to 2011-12. Read More

Does Cloud Really Matter for Your IT Job?

The job market is already warmed by the news about emerging job openings with cloud computing. Recently published Microsoft Corp. commissioned research from IDC analyst firm points out that cloud computing is to create over 14 million new jobs globally. New findings report that business that shifts to cloud can invest more time and money in innovation and job creation. While half of all new cloud-related jobs are centered in China and India, IT job hunters are seen relaxed despite of the Tech job cuts are happening in another side.

Though employment bright lining in cloud computing, a study by CSC, the IT Service Provider, indicates that 14 percent of companies reduced their IT staff after setting up cloud strategy. By embracing cloud computing, enterprises may need different types of IT professionals who are asked to manage vendor relationships, to work across departments and to help clients and workers integrate into the cloud.

The survey also found 20 percent of surveyed companies have actually increased their IT staff. It shows instead of a wholesale cut off or hiring, it depends how the enterprise works with cloud computing while cloud is meant only for a shift of responsibilities.

India job market prospects to improve in next quarter: Survey

The job market outlook in the second quarter of 2012 has improved in most countries, with prospects being the best in India, according to a survey by staffing services firm ManpowerGroup. A survey of 4,992 Indian employers showed that most plan to increase headcount in the April-June quarter this year.

India's seasonally adjusted net employment outlook for the second quarter stood at 44%, one percentage up from the previous quarter. Net employment outlook is the difference in percentage of employers who anticipate increase in employment at their location in the next quarter and those who expect a decrease.

It was 46% for the same quarter last year. The two sectors in India that may offer new opportunities are services (59%) and finance insurance and real estate (51%). While outlook in the services sector has improved by 9 points over the previous quarter, and 10 points over the year-ago period that of the finance insurance and real estate sector has improved by 6 points over the previous quarter.

Cognizant rewards employees with 200% variable payout

CHENNAI: After growing faster than Indian information technology (IT) industry, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp has now rewarded its employees by giving out as much as 200% of the variable components of their 2011 salaries.

Typically, anywhere from 20 to 30% of an employee salary is labeled as variable pay, linked to a combination of overall company performance and individual performance.

"The company has done the repeat of 2010 in rewarding its top performers. The top performers got around 200% of their target bonus while the average bonus given was 150%. The bonuses were on expected lines as the company has been scoring good quarter on quarter," said a Cognizant employee in Chennai on condition of anonymity.

"Yes, Cognizant has announced performance-linked bonus payout for all its associates, globally," said Shankar Srinivasan, Chief People Officer, Cognizant. "Our industry leading revenue growth in calendar 2011 has enabled us to pay performance bonuses well above target."

Cognizant's bonus comes at a time when industry lobby Nasscom has projected tepid revenue growth for software exporters. Last month, Nasscom forecasted 11-14% growth for India IT-BPO Industry during fiscal 2013, lesser than the 16.7% growth that the sector saw this in the just concluding fiscal.

Click here to read more.

U.S. job losses worst since 1974 as downturn deepens

U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs from payrolls in November, the most in 34 years, as the year-old recession hammered the economy and hardened calls for dramatic government action to restore growth.

Job cuts in Constellation, Credit Suisse, United Airlines

Constellation NEW YORK - Constellation Energy Group Inc. says it will cut some 800 jobs from its global work force. About half of those will be in the Baltimore area.

Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse said Thursday that it will cut roughly 5,300, or 11%, of its jobs after posting a loss of around 3 billion Swiss francs ($2.5 billion) for the first two months of the fourth quarter. Most of the job cuts will come in the group's investment-banking arm, where it is also sharply cutting its risk exposure and reducing or eliminating trading activities in certain sectors.

United Airlines
United will furlough more than 1,000 workers from positions across the country The Associated Press reports, citing "layoff notices and the unions that represent the workers." The Chicago Tribune says "the latest furloughs are among the 7,000 jobs that the Chicago-based carrier had said it would eliminate as it reduces its workforce to match its shrinking airline operations amid the tough economy. United is in the process of grounding 100 airplanes, about 20% of its fleet."

IT staff desperate to keep their jobs

A survey of over 600 IT staff in New York, London and Amsterdam has shown that over half are concerned about losing their jobs, and over a third would work longer hours with a 25 per cent pay cut to stay in employment. Click here for complete story.

Bank layoffs: J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered and more

Source: The Deal.com
With the recession official, banks are trimming back. Tuesday many banks announced more layoffs. See the latest announcements after the jump.

Many U.S. banks are trimming back before the end of the fourth quarter.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. will lay off 9,200 or 21% of Washington Mutual Inc.'s employees by the end of 2009. Around half of the layoffs will be before the end of January.

• Bank of America Corp. is expected to cut about 10,000 investment banking jobs at in its combination with Merrill Lynch & Co., according to CNBC.
• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has cut its Dubai-based work force, a bank official told the Gulf Times.

International banks are also announcing layoffs.
-German-based bank, Bayerische Landesbank, plans to slash 5,600 jobs.
-Credit Suisse Group said it was cutting 650 jobs.
-HSBC Holdings plc said it was cutting 500 jobs at its British banking business and will cut 200 jobs in Hong Kong, according to the International Herald Tribune.
-Standard Chartered plc is trimming 572 jobs at its main office in South Korea and 200 in Hong Kong.
-Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc and Macquarie Group Ltd. are eliminating a combined 260 jobs in Hong Kong, according to the China Morning Post. Royal Bank of Scotland is eliminating 3,000 jobs in its investment banking division. Rumor is that 250 cuts will be in the bank's division in India.

Hit by downturn, Wipro keeps 9,800 freshers waiting...

BANGALORE: Reeling under the impact of global meltdown, Wipro Technologies Ltd has kept about 9,800 graduate engineers, hired from campuses last year, waiting to join the IT bellwether, a company official said here on Tuesday.

"Of the total 13,500 campus offerings made across the country last year, we have taken 3,700 of them so far, while the remaining (9,800) have been told to wait for their turn to join," Wipro vice-president for talent acquisition Pradeep Bahirwani told reporters here at a hurriedly called press conference.
Due to slowdown in the IT industry and tough business environment, Bahirwani said, the company had discontinued campus offerings this fiscal for the time being.
"We have made 8,000 campus offers across the country in about 200 engineering colleges, including IITs and NITs (National Institutes of Technologies) this year as against 13,500 last year," Bahirwani said.

To make better use of the engineering freshers hired but not absorbed, the company has began to offer them the option of joining its BPO (business processes outsourcing) division at its software development centres in Kolkata, Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad for the same compensation fixed for IT services.

"To meet our BPO division's requirements in technical support, we have offered them the choice of coming onboard or wait as long for the joining date at the salary stack made in the offer letter. We hope to see a turn-around in business after 12-18 months to move them to IT services," Bahirwani said.

The company's novel initiative to ask freshers hired for IT services to join BPO division by paying upfront Rs.75,000 for bond backfired in Kolkata, with the hired engineers protesting against such the move and taking up the matter with West Bengal IT Minister Debash Das Monday.

"The option has been given in commensurate with our current requirements, which are more in BPO than in IT services, as technical support role requires engineering grads and not those from science or general stream. There is no compulsion or change in compensation," Bahirwani clarified.

Defending the offer to join the BPO division, the HR official said the decision was taken to give an opportunity to engineering graduates to get on work without further delay. Wipro's global IT services business had 97,552 employees, including 16,500 in the BPO division till the second quarter (July-September) of this fiscal.

Wipro seeing a few cancellations, more delays

Indian IT outsourcing company Wipro is seeing a few customers cancel contracts and more delaying or downsizing deals as a result of deteriorating global economic conditions, its joint chief executive said.

Girish Paranjpe added that Wipro, India's third-biggest software services exporter, was feeling minimal impact from last week's attacks that killed almost 200 people in Mumbai, and reiterated that the company expects business to improve next year.
Referring to the Mumbai attacks, he told Reuters in an interview on Monday, "I don't see any operational impact of that ..." When asked about cancellations by Wipro's customers -- who include Cicso, Credit Suisse and Nortel -- he said: "Some few, but much more delay, postponement, resizing -- a few cancellations."

Paranjpe said he remained hopeful that business would pick up in the company's first quarter beginning in April next year after a slowing that began about a quarter ago. Customers cannot sustain constrained spending indefinitely, he said.

"About six months you can manage with compression, three to six months you can manage with compression. Beyond that, you have to start thinking longer-term," he said. "I'm still kind of optimistic that we would have gone past the bottom some time in the first fiscal quarter" next year, he added.

Sector leader Tata Consultancy Services and fellow large Indian outsourcer Infosys have recently expressed cautious optimism about the market, but like most peers they face at least short-term uncertainty.

Will Technology Job Losses Be Worse than 2001?

Source: eWeek
It will not because there has not been a large quantities of technology hiring as there were during the Internet bubble buildup in the late 1990s, according to what Tom Silver, the CMO of the technology jobs' website Dice told CIO.com.

Given that U.S. government data came out today that now shows the recession began a year ago in December of 2007, it seems a little premature to be calling the game when we have not finished 2008 (as much as we'd all love it to be over). Evidently, there are some key indicators that you cannot see when a recession is going on, one of which is that "gross domestic product remained positive until the third quarter this year," according to a Reuters article from today.
Silver told CIO.com that job postings for technology jobs are down across the board about 20 percent, but are particularly bad in regions you'd expect like Silicon Valley. Here are some of the specifics from the CIO.com article including Dice's numbers about technology-heavy regions of the U.S.:
[Silver] says that the number of IT jobs advertised on his site had been holding steady at between 85,000 and 90,000 jobs until the September-October time frame, when the number of ads for IT jobs dipped significantly. "We've seen a drop of roughly 20 percent versus where we were last year," he says. "We're now around 70,000 jobs on the site." The big markets for tech jobs--NYC, Silicon Valley, Chicago and Dallas--are experiencing the most significant declines in IT job opportunities, says Silver. Job opportunities are down 30 percent in Silicon Valley year over year, 25 percent in New York, 24 percent in Dallas and 21 percent in Chicago, according to Dice.com's data.

Given the information I've seen over the last few weeks with IDC cutting its forecasts for nearly everything technology related (in tech services and tech infrastructure), to research Ed Cone of CIO Insight pointed out recently showing corporate IT spending to be a "historic collapse," the economic data on the technology sector is not good, but as Dice's Silver pointed out (with little consolation to those affected), it's better than other industries.

Researcher Paul Carton of ChangeWave sums it up like this in his post on the spending collapse (make sure to look at his charts for the wider historic view):
U.S. corporate IT spending is in the midst of a huge nose-dive, the likes of which hasn't been seen before in a ChangeWave survey dating back to 2001. In short, the current ChangeWave survey findings virtually guarantee that we'll be seeing the technology sector get hammered with pre-announcements before the January earnings season gets underway. I want to believe that 2009 will not be the bubble-bursting of 2001, but I have a feeling, much like Eric Lundquist of CIO Insight, that a big portion of work in technology over the near future will be for systems integrators, contract project management and other programming and business analyst skills that can be outsourced (and not necessarily offshored) using existing or low-cost infrastructure. As Lundquist points out, the CTOs and CIOS of companies he is talking to are dealing with internal customer and financial data issues. These guys need as close to real time numbers for budgets that they can get, and are looking for easier ways to make data consistent, and they need it--like now.
Don't we all.