They work hard and make good money — which got even better in 2012.

Source: Riviera Partners

Average salary by programming language

The average salary of a Silicon Valley developer jumped about $4,300 in 2012 to reach $118,900, a new study by Riviera Partners, a technical recruiting firm in the Bay Area says.

Database specialists brought home the most bacon, at $130,500, while lowly front-end developers wrangling CSS, Javascript, and some small remnants of HTML pulled in a relatively lowly $109,200.

Interestingly, when you break down the numbers by coding specialty, relatively out-of-favor Java developers make the most money, at $122,400. Developers in the popular but perhaps more accessible PHP programming language make $106,700, while devotees of relatively new languages Python and Ruby bring home $117,900 and $121,400, respectively.

So what else is new?

Not gender equality. Silicon Valley engineers are still overwhelming male, with 86 percent of developers prominently featuring a Y chromosome.

More details in the infographic below:

photo credit: Carsten Schertzer via photopin cc

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Apple chief executive Tim Cook received an increase in his salary this year, according to a regulatory filing. The CEO took home $1.4 million in comparison to 2011′s $900,000 salary, though he did not earn any new stock given the huge package awarded to him last year.

In August 2011, Cook was awarded his base salary, but he also received one million restricted stock units — then worth a whopping $378 million. The shares, however, aren’t yet Cook’s to own. Half of them will fully vest in August 2016, five years after their award date, and the rest will vest on Aug. 24, 2021.

“In light of the RSU award granted to Mr. Cook in connection with his promotion to CEO, the compensation committee did not grant Mr. Cook an RSU award in 2012,” the filing said.

Cook will take home $4.17 million in 2012 as made up of a base salary payout of $1.6 million plus cash from the employee incentive plan of $2.8 million. Apple says Cook was not present for discussions about his salary, though it did take into consideration his request to not earn dividends on restricted stock units he had not vested for. The total of those dividends would have been $75 million.

Cook otherwise proposed a new rule for Apple “nonemployee” directors and the chief executive that was reviewed and approved. It states that the chief executive must hold onto Apple common stock that is equal to ten times the salary of that CEO. All other directors must hold onto stock that equals five times the amount of their salaries.

hat tip Bloomberg; Tim Cook photo via Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

It’s official: social media is here to stay, and companies late to jump on the social train are scrambling to snatch up the social butterflies of the online world to humanize their brands.

With the ad-skipping mentality and technologies available to customers today, soft-sell social marketing seems to be the saving grace of the advertising world. Customers now opt to do their own research instead of being bombarded with annoying, impersonal ads – so someone had better be at the helm when customers come calling. Employees are jumping at the chance to be that social helmsman, too. With perks like working from home or a coffee shop and bragging to their friends how they are professional Facebookers, social media jobs equate to a win-win situation and business is a boomin’.

The infographic embedded below, created by OnwardSearch, exemplifies the demand for talented online socialites by displaying the social media job listing densities across the nation, percentages of available jobs in the social field, and the salary for those positions.

How do you feel about companies having a presence on social media? Think you have what it takes to represent someone other than yourself across an increasingly dynamic myriad of social networks? How does social media work for you?

Brian Wallace is the President of NowSourcing, a premier social media firm specializing in infographic design, development and content marketing promotion. The company is based in Louisville, Ky. and works with companies that range from small business to Fortune 500.

Infographic via OnwardSearch (Click image to enlarge)

Apple CEO Tim Cook took home an astonishing $378 million in 2011, according to Apple’s just-released 2012 proxy statement to shareholders.

Cook took over as CEO for Steve Jobs in August of last year. Jobs passed away about a month later, truly leaving the company to its own devices. Jobs famously only took $1 a year for his salary (a common practice amount CEOs for tax reasons, not humility), but outside of that, Cook has followed the path Jobs set out well. Cook led Apple’s October event introducing the iPhone 4S, which has become a monster hit.

The salaries, first spotted by Business Insider, aren’t terribly shocking in light of the ginormous amount Apple makes in revenues each year. As you might expect, other Apple executives are also compensated quite well.

The base salaries for Scott Forstall, Peter Oppenheimer, Eduardo Cue and Ron Johnson are all set at $700,000 and when other options are awarded, that number shoots up. Cue, for example, took home a total of $53 million in compensation in 2011.

A full compensation chart can be viewed below: