Silicon Valley Tech Salaries Will Make You Want To Quit Your Job And Learn To Code

It should come as no surprise that tech employees in Silicon Valley make boatloads.

We learned just how many boatloads they make in a recent post by SFGate.

The average tech worker in San Francisco made $156,518 in 2013, a gain of roughly 19% from 2012.

If you head south on the Peninsula, salaries are even higher.

The mean salary in San Mateo County is $291,497. That's up 8% year-over-year.

It's important to remember these are averages, not median salaries. That means they can be distorted by outliers, like one person making a ton.

As SFGate notes, that outlier may be Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

Zuckerberg cashed in a whopping $3.3 billion in stock options last year. In 2012, Zuckerberg made $2.3 billion, again from stock options.

That would factor into the numbers SFGate used because their source wasn't able to differentiate between salaries and total compensation, which includes other compensation like stock.

SFGate found that when you remove Zuckerberg's stock option money, the mean wage in San Mateo County slides down to around $210,000.

That's still more than the nearly $196,000 your average employee made working in 2013 in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.