In April and May 2023, we conducted our first compensation survey with Albany Partners to understand global tech leader reward.
We asked technology leaders to share their compensation breakdowns to provide the contextual information to advocate for market rates and to gain a better industry understanding of trends across location, seniority, and diversity.
The report outlines the top findings and offers solutions and actions to help you understand your compensation and where it fits with other tech leaders, and this article will summarise the key findings.
The compensation survey
The compensation survey focused on discovering a transparent overview of engineering leadership compensation. Our aim was to find compensation norms, trends and patterns in salaries and compensation across tech leadership.
In total, we surveyed 600 global engineering leaders.
Who responded?
Below are the key individual and company demographic highlights from the data:
Seniority:
57.5% of the survey respondents were CTO or SVPE level, with 12% at the Head of Engineering level and 9% at Director or VP of Engineering. Engineering Managers accounted for 8%, and only 3% were Engineering Leads.
Location:
61% of respondents were based in the UK. Regarding the rest of Europe, 16% were from Western Europe, 4% from Northern Europe and 3% from Eastern Europe.
For the rest of the world, 10% were from North America, 2% from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia and the Middle East and 1% from South America and Mexico.
Ethnicity:
80% of the respondents were white, 10% were Asian, and 4% were of Hispanic, Latinx or Spanish origin. In addition, 3% described their ethnicity as mixed/multiple ethnic groups, less than 1% were black, and 2% said they were other.
Gender:
Men made up the majority of the respondents, with females (7%), non-binary/other (1%) and prefer not to say (1%) making up the rest of the respondents (for reference, according to Sifted, 5% of UK startup CTOs are women compared to Germany and France, which are 3% and 2% women, respectively).
Age:
55% of respondents came under the 36-45 years age group, 23% were in the 46-55 years group, and 18% were aged 26-35. Only 3% were aged 56-65, 1% were under twenty-six, and less than 1% were over sixty-five.
Annual revenue:
70% of respondents disclosed annual recurring revenue, with 18% of these working for a company with annual revenue between £0-5 million and 12% with annual revenue over $251 million.
Backing:
Out of the 82% who disclosed backing, 39% were venture-backed, 19% were private-equity backed, 18% were private with no funding and less than 1% were angel-backed.
Key findings
- 24% of technology leaders are not sure if they are fairly compensated.
- When examining CTO/VPE salaries within businesses that have received outside investment, employers in the U.S. pay the highest cash compensation, closely followed by Germany and then the UK.
- Stock Options are the most common LTIP Structure, and a 4-year vesting period with a 1-year cliff is the most common vesting cycle.
- When examining the C-suite and VP-level data for regional differences, the U.K. exhibited slightly less preferable vesting cycles when compared to responses across other geographies.
- An analysis of the value of equity allocated across different genders reveals significant disparity.
- Across all seniority levels, technology leaders value cash in hand the most, followed by LTIPs, with bonus and benefits last.
Additional findings
Our survey research highlights some really insightful information about tech leader reward. We hope it’s helpful for leaders to understand where they sit financially compared to their peers and also where their team may be in relation to compensation norms.
In the survey, we also focus on the benefits leaders receive (or don’t receive, as just over a quarter said they have no benefits included in their compensation packages), the differences in gender base salary, bonus and cash value of equity and further detail about vesting cycles.
As a result of the high response to this survey, our intention is to make it an annual survey to highlight industry trends and allow you to benchmark careers and salaries for you and your team.
Download the compensation survey full report to learn more about leadership compensation in 2023, and view suggested solutions.
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