Around 600 Microsoft employees have entered their pay into a crowdsourced spreadsheet circulating internally, and the resulting picture is of a company that now compensates two quite different populations.
Base salaries run from $111,000 at level 59 to $280,000 at level 67, with Cloud and AI roles reaching $450,000, which is the kind of information Microsoft’s own employees have been asking for since it dropped the pay question from its internal survey.
Raises across the sample ran from 0% to 3.5%, which for most people is at or below inflation, and cash bonuses spanned $2,000 to $110,000.
Stock is where the company splits in two. Annual stock awards in the sample ranged from $10,000 to $1.4mn, with the top of that range concentrated in Cloud and AI, and equity of that size changes what a job is rather than what it pays.
The pattern reported alongside the raw numbers is that engineers on generative AI work receive larger initial grants and more frequent out-of-band refreshers than colleagues at identical levels in conventional software groups. Level, in other words, no longer tells you what someone earns.
