Dive Brief:

• Despite sometimes earning a signing bonus of $10,000, 61% of current tech workers say they are underpaid, according to a survey of about 6,000 tech workers in July 2018 by Blind. A little over one-third of respondents said they were paid fairly and 5% said they were overpaid for their position.

• Among the 20 tech companies with the most survey responses, 80% of Cisco employees reported feeling underpaid followed by 79% of respondents from Intel. Sixty-seven percent of Microsoft employees felt underpaid, compared to Amazon's 53% and Google's 50%. 

• The report blames the cost of living and a lack of pay transparencies for employees feeling underpaid. When engineers working outside of Silicon Valley or at small startups see how much other employees make, they lose confidence in their own salaries. 

Dive Insight:

Finding talent is one thing, but retaining talent is another. Professionals in the tech space are constantly faced with the dilemma of pursuing a higher salary while paying for a higher cost of living or the other way around.

The high costs of living in primary tech cities are deterring potential hires or increasing the chances of relocating because about 41% of tech employees already feel they are paid unfairly when their cost of living is accounted for.

Though Silicon Valley and California account for nearly one-fourth of the national tech sector payroll, when adjusted for the cost of living in the Bay Area, Austin, Texas leads the national average for tech salaries at $202,000 followed by Seattle at $182,000.

Companies, no matter their location, are in need of the best and brightest. It is no surprise then that the top three cities for the tech talent market are San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, according to a recent CBRE report.

However, the supply and demand of tech job creation is dependent on where there is a "brain gain" or "brain drain," according to CBRE. For example, Washington has a higher number of tech talent than its demand of jobs, creating a brain drain. Whereas other locations, like Toronto, San Francisco and Charlotte, North Carolina, all have a brain gain because they have more jobs ready with fewer tech graduates. A brain drain, on the other hand, is the result of more tech talent supply than a demand in jobs. 

Top tech talent still works hard to earn positions at notable companies like Microsoft and Cisco. For example, about half of employees at Google and Apple faced the most "difficult" or "very difficult" interviews during hiring processes.