China tech crackdown: Beijing no longer among top 10 world cities with best-paid programmers

Beijing, which attracts some of China’s most talented tech workers, fell out of the top 10 best-paid global cities for programmers this year after ranking 10th in 2020 with a median annual pay of US$100,000, according to US crowdsourced data firm Levels.fyi.

As in 2020, this year’s global rankings were led by Zurich, where programmers earned a median income of US$200,000, followed by Tel Aviv at US$190,000. Other top-paying cities included Sydney, London, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Tokyo, Munich, Dublin, and Toronto.

A separate ranking for US cities was topped by the San Francisco Bay Area – home to many Silicon Valley workers – followed by Seattle and New York, where programmers were paid a median salary of US$240,000, US$215,000, and US$190,000, respectively.

As for companies, Beijing-based TikTok owner ByteDance – which employs workers in the US – offered the most generous median salaries among Chinese firms. It paid senior engineers, who typically have more than five years of programming experience, US$430,000 a year – landing the unicorn in fifth place after US peers Netflix, fintech start-up Stripe, Pinterest, and online brokerage Robinhood.

In 2020, ByteDance came in seventh with a median income of US$400,000 for senior engineers.

Wages earned by China’s best and brightest programmers stand in contrast to those made by other tech workers. Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2020, the average annual salary for “technicians in the information transmission, software, and information technology service industries” was 199,000 yuan (US$31,258).