If you want the smartest software engineers you have to pay top dollar both to attract them and to hang on to them. Here's the low-down on the top salaries in the industry.

We recently reported on Glassdoor's Employees' Choice Awards, see Facebook Is The Best Place To Work.

Meanwhile Business Insider asked Glassdoor to investigate average base salaries in order to reveal the Top 25 Best Paying Companies for Software Engineers.

This chart summarizes the findings. Nineteen companies remunerate their software engineers with six figure salaries.

(click in chart to enlarge)

When you think about how valuable software engineers are to the companies they work for it is hardly surprising that in this fiercely competitive industry that we find really familiar names - Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google near the top of the the league. But right at the top comes Juniper Networks - a company for which security and innovation are both paramount. So not only does it need to attract highly talented developers, it also wants to keep them. 

What do you think?

Is paying more a good way to keep talent or are there better ways?

Is what matters the quality of the task, the quality of the working environment, the time to do your own thing or the possibility of making bigger bucks with a stock option?