In a bid to compete against Tesla and other high-tech companies, General Motors plans on hiring 8,000 highly skilled workers this year, including software developers and computer scientists.

“Our commitment to hiring 8,000 tech employees in 2022 is an exciting sign of G.M.’s momentum, our quest to innovate technology with impact and our focus on helping people find their purpose in the workplace,” Jessika Lora, G.M.’s director of global innovation, wrote in a statement to The New York Times.

According to the Times, roughly a third of General Motors’s 10,000 hires in 2021 were involved in software development. How much can a software engineer expect to earn at the automaking giant? For an answer, we can turn to levels.fyi, which crowdsources compensation data (as we’ve said before, crowdsourcing might not be the most scientific way of determining company compensation, but we tend to trust levels.fyi’s ranges because they align with data from other sources). Here’s a compensation breakdown of some (but not all) of GM’s software engineer levels:

As we’ve pointed out before, General Motors pays software developers less than Tesla (not to mention massive tech companies reportedly interested in the auto industry, such as Apple). That could make it difficult for the company to find and hire highly specialized technologists, such as those who’ve mastered machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.). If General Motors isn’t able to compete on salary, it will need to hope that its benefits and perks will prove enticing. 

Over the next several years, automakers and tech companies will continue to pour billions of dollars into next-stage car technologies such as autonomous driving. Success will hinge not only on money, but also having the best possible technologists working on the underlying problems. General Motors needs to hope it can hire a significant portion of those technologists.