My post about highest paying tech companies for new grads in Canada was getting popular. So I thought, why not explore this concept in more detail?

So here it is:

Overview of New Grad Salaries in Tech, 2021

Even though the title says “new grad”, I explore candidates with 0 - 2 years of experience for general comparison

20 Top-Paying companies

What is the average salary of candidates with 0-2 Years of experience?

How does location affect salary?

Each province also has their own tax bracket. Here are the after-tax incomes for each province.

It’s interesting to note that Alberta has a higher after-tax income than Quebec, despite a lower total income.

How does prior experience affect salary?

What’s with Ontario and Quebec? Candidates with no experience are somehow getting higher offers than candidates with some experience. As for Alberta, there simply are no data points for candidates with 1 year of experience.

How have offer packages changed over the years?

Offer packages seem to be trending downwards over the years 📉 It’s a little odd. 😕 What happened to inflation? Skyrocketing stock equity?

Let’s take a look at the highest-ever offers.

Highest-ever offers are going up 📈 on the contrary. Interesting. Are the top-dogs getting richer while us normie coders are getting poorer?

A couple hypothesis:

• more low-paying jobs could have opened up in Canada over the years, which effectively brings down the national average.
  • i.e. startups
• the highest-ever offers could be coming from companies with stock equity… and as we all know, stocks have been going up, up and up 📈📈📈

So I looked into which companies were offering these highest-ever offers, and…

It turns out that every single one of these highest-ever offers are from tech companies that give stock equities…

Notes

About the data

• data is from levels.fyi
• 406 data points for 2018-2021 offers
• 181 data points for only 2021 offers
• data date spans from 2018 May - 2021 September

Tools Used

• nodejs and puppeteer used for scraping data
• python and pandas for data manipulation
• matplotlib and seaborn used for data visualizations

Author notes

• data may be skewed towards the high-end earners, as it’s more likely for high-income earners to boast and post their competitive salaries online
• money isn’t everything
• if there is anything you feel is missing in this post, let me know at dougouk@gmail.com

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Feeling a little suprised at how high the salaries are? Me too. But hey, I also have data on the lowest paying companies… So if you need to look at the dark side and feel better, let me know at dougouk@gmail.com and I’ll shoot you some charts.

Until next time!