Introduction

How does annual salary differ across different job titles at Blizzard?

This analysis uses the Blizzard Employee Voluntary Salary Info, using the variables current_title, current_salary, and salary_type.

current_title: This tells us the title of the employee’s job at Blizzard. current_salary: contains the current salary of that employee. salary_type: Indicates if the salary is by year, week, or hour.

Importing dataset

library(tidyverse)
## ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
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## ✔ lubridate 1.9.5     ✔ tidyr     1.3.2
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## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
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## ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors
blizzard <- read.csv("blizzard_salary.csv")

Data analysis

This dataset was cleaned using filter for only yearly salaries and selecting only the variables needed for the analysis. Summary statistics were calculated by comparing the salaries across job titles, and a boxplot was created as a visual representation of salary distributions. The graph will only include the 10 most common job titles to make it easy to read.

Cleaning code

salary_data <- blizzard |> filter(salary_type == "year") |> select(current_title, current_salary) |> drop_na()

Summary

summary(salary_data$current_salary)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##       1   56000   82000   88779  118500  216856

Average salaries

salary_data |> group_by(current_title) |> summarize( average_salary = mean(current_salary), highest_salary = max(current_salary))
## # A tibble: 160 × 3
##    current_title                                   average_salary highest_salary
##    <chr>                                                    <dbl>          <dbl>
##  1 3D Artist                                                79600          82000
##  2 3d Artist(character)                                     82000          82000
##  3 3d artist                                                78000          78000
##  4 Analyst                                                 112000         112000
##  5 Analyst, Threat Intelligence and Partner Servi…          66310          66310
##  6 Animator                                                 84500          87000
##  7 Artist                                                   78000          78000
##  8 Assistant Editor                                         65000          65000
##  9 Associate 3D Artist                                      62000          62000
## 10 Associate 3D Artist (Character Artist)                   65000          65000
## # ℹ 150 more rows

##Graph

top_titles <- salary_data |> count(current_title, sort = TRUE) |> slice_head(n = 10)

salary_top <- salary_data |> filter(current_title %in% top_titles$current_title)

ggplot(salary_top, aes(x = current_title, y = current_salary)) + geom_boxplot() + coord_flip() + labs(title = "Annual Salary by Most Common Jobs at Blizzard", x = "Job title", y = "Annual Salary")

Conclusion

This analysis found that there was a huge gap between job titles at Blizzard when looking at annual salary. The smallest median salaries came from Test Analysts and Game Masters, which were betweem 25,000 and 50,000. The largest medians came from those in Software Engineering roles, sitting between 100,000 and 175,000, while Artists and Designers were in the middle. These results were useful for showing how much of a variance there is in income based on a person’s job title. The highest median income came from Senior Software Engineer II, which recorded a median annual income at 175,000, while The lowest recorded income was in Game Master, which was right below 25,000. This shows a difference of 150,000 in annual income which came from two different job titles, proving a difference in annual salary at Blizzard. This research could be used in the future to study the difference in salaries across the many job occupations that are in the Gaming Industry, maybe being used by sites like Indeed or Glassdoor for annual salary averages.

References

OpenIntro.org. “Blizzard Employee Voluntary Salary Info.” https://www.openintro.org/data/