This week I took a look at the Top City Earners dataset and found out a lot of interesting facts. In this specific dataset, the viewer is presented with a bar chart that shows the max earning potential of city/government jobs. It has updated salaries for the year 2014 on the city’s top earning jobs, and to my surprise L.A. Port Pilots claim the top spot. The bar graph is color coded as to denote all types of pay these city jobs receive. Here you can see how the bars are colored:
Blue refers to base pay, orange is permanent bonus pay, green is longevity bonus pay, teal is temporary bonus pay, red is overtime, dark blue is lump sum pay, and yellow is other pay and adjustments. Essentially it was the L.A. Controller’s Office that has compiled this data overtime and through the years they have been constantly updating it to keep it relevant. It contains the payroll information for all Los Angeles City Departments, from January 1st, 2011 through March 31, 2014.
Anyone interested in working in the public sector of Los Angeles would most likely find this data fascinating as it could help them find what kind of job they want if money is their top concern. If they wanted to be a L.A. Port Pilot, they might want to consider another job because breaking into that industry is very difficult without any connections and entering the Longshoreman’s union is almost impossible. What this dataset tells me is that the city of Los Angeles spent about 4.5 billion dollars on public jobs last year which is a substantial amount of money. I’m not sure what this project is missing. It accomplishes its goal of listing the various L.A. City Department jobs and their respective average salaries. I don’t know what else could be added to make this project more comprehensive. I like it just the way it is.
Anyone can find the project here with this link: https://controllerdata.lacity.org/Payroll/Top-City-Earners/78mt-gezm