Highest Paying Data Jobs and Companies in America using Tableau
Introduction
Out of curiosity, I've always wondered what the highest paying data jobs and companies in America are. Since I'm local to Silicon Valley, I've automatically assumed that here is the place to work if I want to earn the most. However, that is not necessarily the case. Salary data from glassdoor, linkedin, and indeed are inconsistent with each other. Also, cost of living should be factored in to salary data. So how do we present a logical story on the highest paying tech jobs in America? I'm going to use Tableau to make dashboards in order to visualize a story in a clean, compelling format.
Salary Data
Out of habit from my specialty as a researcher, I tend to only obtain and use data from sources attached to .gov and .edu websites. Luckily, there is a website where we can access public salary and employer data that the government provides us. Check the United States Department of Labor website for the dataset. This dataset exists for the public since it collects and stores information for companies wanting to higher foreign workers to work alongside our citizens. (Commonly known as visa workers) It compares which companies in which state is willing to pay a foreign applicant compared to the prevailing wage of what applicants with similar education and skillset that a U.S. applicant would have. This protects foreign applicants from being taken advantage of and also prevents adverse effects to applicants in the states as well. Thus, we can use this to compare salary and company data to make assumptions for a job hunt.
Median Paid Wage Per Year for Job Title Subgroups
After aggregating the data available from 2011-2015, I've been able to get 8 subgroups. However, since I'm only interested in data jobs and companies, I'm going to filter out the 4 irrelevant job titles soon. Here is the first chart so far.
Parity Data
A way of accounting for cost-of-living is with parity data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Using the values obtained from this website, I'm going to blend it with the salary data reported from the U.S. Department of Labor to make an adjusted salary data according to cost of living. Here I will report the top 5 adjusted paid wage according to work state for the data jobs I am interested in.
Top Companies with Highest Adjusted Salaries within Job Subcategories
After filtering out the highest paying states, we can filter out the top companies within each subcategory. Since we've filtered data for so many iterations, it is important to keep track of how many data points is in each assumption. Be sure to hover over and click the table to see the tooltips. More data points could lead to a more accurate representation of what is expected.
Conclusion
The aim of this visualization was to take information from public data available from government websites to analyze in Tableau. We were able to get some meaningful results in which states paid the most after adjustments for cost of living. However, after several filters, we were left with just a few data points when reporting which companies paid the most. In this case, we can still refer back to glassdoor, linkedin, and indeed if we want to be certain by cross-checking our results. Even after published results it's important to note how some salary websites get their data. The government gets their data from government forms. Since each website has their own algorithm in getting estimated salary, I can't really comment on that. However, my prediction is that they use employer reported salary when they post ads and also employee reported information. The practicality of this project could help workers make an ultimate decision if they are considering to move states and companies. This gives insight on what companies and states lead for highest adjusted pay based on cost of living provided by government data.
