Tesla, Cruise, General Motors: Which Pays Software Engineers the Most?

If you listen to automakers, the future is autonomous driving. However, that technology still has a long way to go before humans can fully trust their vehicles to seamlessly drive them from Point A to B. In the meantime, the car companies need software engineers for a variety of vital roles, from building dashboard-screen software to making sure that drivetrain sensors effectively communicate. Last year, we used crowdsourced compensation data from levels.fyi to compare what Tesla and General Motors paid their respective software engineers. At the time, it looked like Tesla and GM were on something of a collision course, strategy-wise; Tesla CEO Elon Musk was claiming that full self-driving was an imminent feature in his company’s vehicles, while GM made it clear that it would pour tons of resources into its autonomous-vehicle efforts. The future, it seemed, hinged completely on whether the companies’ software engineers could effectively utilize their skills in computer vision, machine learning, and other disciplines to create cars that could truly deal with all kinds of unexpected scenarios on the road.