Data Engineering Jobs

Research and analysis of existing positions regarding Data Engineering

Our group, with all members being Data Science students, were curious about what could our salary expectations be once we finished our educational path. After some research we encountered a collection of data regarding exactly the salary estimation of several job positions at different companies in the United States. Thanks to some data processing and elaboration, we were able to answer to the question we were asking ourselves: what can we expect once we go out in the wild, looking for a job?

Salary by state

The dataset contains a total of 2528 employees reviewing both the company and their position in it. This data has been collected from a total of 9 different states in the USA, and we decided to analyse which of these states have a higher average of the salary estimate. The data regarding the salary is given as an estimate within a range, like “85’000$ – 120’000$”. Having all the data as ranges, we decided to perform the mean of every range, in order to have a unique value for every job position. After having done just that, we analysed the average estimate for every state, and the results are as follows:

State	Average salary estimate ($)	Amount of data
California (CA)	127'000	530
Illinois (IL)	101'800	182
Delaware (DE)	101'000	12
New York (NY)	100'000	160
Arizona (AZ)	99'000	163
Pennsylvania (PA)	97'400	158
New Jersey (NJ)	97'000	23
Texas (TX)	90'000	901
Florida (FL)	62'000	118

Salary by sector

Other than the salary for every state, we also wanted to find out which were the most paid sectors amongst the collected ones. Selecting from the following menu, you can visualize a map with the average salary by state in that specific sector

Sectors distribution

Since IT is a field that has to do with everything, it stays in concat with many sectors. Below you can see how the sectors are distributed, meaning which sectors are more or less present in the analysed data.

Conclusions

Salary by state

The highest paying state out of this list is California, which is also the second one in terms of estimations collected, so we can confirm the reliability of such salary. It was a result that we could’ve expected, having of course the famous Silicon Valley in that state. At the bottom of the list we can find the state of Florida, with a massive gap in salary with respect to the second to last, being Texas. One could also say “well maybe in Florida there are very few data collected that may have been skewed by very low salaries”, but it is not true since a total of 118 employees out of Florida have participated in the survey. Except for these two outliers, the other states have an average variation of salary between each other, where 6 of the states (from Illinois to New Jersey) vary in a range of roughly 5’000, and Texas is a bit further from this range, placed at the 8th place with a 90k expected salary.

Salary by sector

There is a total of 24 sectors analyzed, and the top 3 in terms of yearly salary are:

Biotech & Pharmaceuticals , with an average yearly income of $ 112'700
Media , with an average yearly income of $ 110'000
Accounting & Legal , with an average yearly income of $ 107'800

Others than these three, there are other 7 sectors over the 100'000 threshold, another 7 with an average salary between 90'000 and 100'000 dollars, 6 are positioned between the 80'000 and 90'000, and the very last one being Agriculture & Forestry, being the less profitable sector with an average yearly income of "just" 66'000 dollars, nearly as half as the sector N°1. The results are not so surprising since the top sectors are also the ones known for having a general income bigger than others, so we are assuming that this could be a possible reason for having such a high salary there. For the same reason, even though we're talking about Data Engineering, a position in the field of Agriculture has its salary reflected with respect to the kind of expected salary in that field generally speaking (in agriculture there's way less money going around rather than Medicine or Law)

Sectors distribution

As can be seen from the pie chart, there is an evident dominance of the Information & Technology field with more than a half out of the ~2500 Data Engineering positions analysed. Seems pretty fair, being this a kind of job that many people take in a dedicated IT company, instead of maybe taking a less profitable job position in another kind of company, such as a Business or a Finance company (even though these two are pretty popular, in fact being placed in the top 3 of the sectors analysed).
You also can notice that there is an "Others" slice in the chart, being all the sectors that contribute less than to 1.6% of the total amount of positions analysed. This means that a total of 16 sectors make up to 11.5%, 1/5 of how much the Information & Technology is popular.