There’s been a lot of turmoil within the world’s largest social media companies. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, finds itself under fire from federal and state governments; Twitter is in chaos after Elon Musk’s controversial $44 billion acquisition; and Meta/Facebook and Snap have laid off thousands of employees over the past year.

Despite those issues, however, these companies continue to pay out enormous compensation to software engineers, even those at the lowest ranks. Check out this crowdsourced data from levels.fyi, which tracks various types of compensation at some of the world’s largest tech companies:

While crowdsourcing isn’t always the most scientific way of determining compensation information, the numbers presented by levels.fyi tend to align with those presented by other salary-tracking websites and reports, so we’re inclined to trust their ranges. And what can we conclude from the above numbers? First, ByteDance is a competitive threat to Meta and the other, older social media companies when it comes to offering attractive compensation to engineers; it has a notable edge when it comes to salary and bonuses, at least.

Second, despite their troubles, social media companies continue to pay sizable salaries. In a certain way, they have no choice: if they don’t pay enough to retain top talent, another company will happily do so. Also keep in mind that, despite their very public travails, the social media companies continue to earn billions of dollars in revenue every quarter—they can afford to pay their tech pros above-average salaries, especially if those employees have hard-to-obtain skills in cutting-edge areas such as artificial intelligence (A.I.), machine learning, and virtual reality.

If you’re interested in working within social media, it seems that virtual reality (a.k.a. “the metaverse”) and artificial intelligence are the two main arenas of competition at the moment. Meta continues to invest billions in VR hardware and apps, with ByteDance nipping at its heels. Twitter, Meta, and other companies are all building out their respective A.I. architectures, as well. Developing expertise in building VR apps and machine-learning models could earn you a job interview—and perhaps a full-time position.