TechCompanyPay shedding light on cash. Image: Screegrab.

An ex-Google engineer has built a website where you can peruse the average salary for each position at the world’s top 100 tech companies. Or thereabouts.

Gareth Jones, the 25-year-old creator of TechCompanyPay.com, calls it a “vague guide” to salaries in the high-tech world.

Recently, Jones was trying to decide whether he should pursue a business degree or Ph.D. in computer science, and he began sifting through gobs of unorganized data in an effort to determine which career track would lead to the highest salary. He’s still undecided on his future, but this salary hunt soon gave rise to TechCompanyPay.com. The man who was apparently nicknamed “The Wizard” while at Google built a crawling tool and started averaging the numbers.

Though he won’t cite specific data sources, Jones told Wired that the salary data backing the site is all open and free to the public, ranging from immigration and census data to published market reports. The site sorts salaries according to business group and titles, but you can also query by company.

According to the site, Twitter is the highest-paying tech company with $120,111.11 as the average salary. Apple ($113,319.21), LinkedIn ($111,720.00), Facebook ($105,167.62) and Google ($104,594.27) round out the top five.

Jones also notes that salary data varies according to the size of each company. Unlike large outfits, small startups generally depend on the lure of equity packages, and the values of these packages are rarely published before a company goes public.

After building the site and posting it to his Facebook wall last week, Jones was floored by the response. He received a call from his hosting company at 4 a.m. a couple nights ago, telling him that his traffic had spiked to abnormal levels.

“I have no idea how everyone found it,” he said, noting the little site has had over 200,000 impressions in the last three days. “I haven’t slept in three days and have used three credit cards buying servers.”