By:  Benyamin Davidsons

Step aside Wall Street, tech workers are raking in the big bucks.

As reported by Crain’s NY, there’s a shadow looming over Wall Street employees– and its tech workers who are earning substantially more.  A recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission has revealed that the median pay at some of New York City’s top tech companies is greatly beating salaries at New York’s traditional bread-winning financial industry.  Two of the city’s biggest publicly traded technology firms doled out raises to employees in 2022, as revealed in required disclosures recently filed.  Etsy, a Dumbo-based online goods marketplace, reported paying its employees a median wage of nearly $250,000 in 2022, up some 7% over 2021, and up over 30% compared to 2020 pays.  Datadog, a Midtown software company, paid $203,500, up from about $190,000 in 2021.  Also, database giant MongoDB had paid a median salary of $249,910 in 2021, and has yet to file info regarding its 2022 pay.

In contrast, filings from several New York-based non-tech firms showed that wage growth had ceased, and even begun to drop.  As per Crain’s, economic uncertainty, business slowdowns and falling stock prices have led big companies to offer more moderate compensations in many cases.  At big NY-based banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, median pay declined in 2022 compared to 2021. Goldman’s median salary is now at $149,707, making median pay roughly $100,000 less than at Etsy’s or MongoDB. JP Morgan’s pay for 2022 was $88,730, which is a drop from the median pay $92,000 in 2021, but higher than 2020’s $80,102.  At pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, median pay fell for two years straight, falling from the pandemic high of $108,828 in 2020 to $75,536 in 2022.

At Silicon Valley, and other non-NYC-based tech giants, wages in some cases continued to grow in 2022.  This includes companies Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, all whom reported wage growth from 2020 to 2022.  Google’s parent company, Alphabet, however, disclosed that wages fell in 2022 to $279,802, compared to $295,884 in 2021, but still higher than 2020’s $273,493.  At Uber, wages fell steadily and significantly for two years in a row dropping to $76,767 in 2022, from $81,825 in 2021, and $99,382 in 2020.

Public companies with revenue of over $1 billion are required to file an annual disclosure of their median pay, so that shareholders can see the difference in salary between typical employees versus the company’s CEO.

On the whole, salaries for all private industry workers are still moving upward. In the New York metropolitan area, labor costs were raised 4.6 percent for the year ending in March, as per data released last week from the regional Bureau of Labor Statistics. Per Crain’s, there was also a 4% wage growth, in the previous year, which ended in March 2022.