"I’ve billed them $500 an hour for in the past" !!!...
$500/hr is usually reserved for work done for lawyers ;)
Yeah to be fair I have a lot of specialized knowledge and experience around the high paying work. But under the hood the approach, methods, tools, and way of thinking are fundamentally identical. I get hired for the high paying stuff in part due to the domain expertise, but really I command that price because I’m $450 an hour better at the $50 an hour work than most other people with the domain expertise. Or maybe I just want to believe that.
Remember, if you pay median, 1/2 the engineers are making more at other companies.
This is a great point so many companies don't seem to get. The company I worked for previously thought their pay was "competitive" because they kept people at median of market. Company before that, same deal, I was paid a "fair" median salary. Turnover at both companies was very high as you'd expect.
I don’t think they recall that a 50% is a failing grade in every class and on every test they ever took.
$45/hr is about what I was paid as a grad-student intern at Apple ... 15 years ago.
I have an MSEE working as an engineer on a cutting edge physics project making the salaried equivalent of... $31/hr. HN is great, but it really is not an accurate sample of real world wages.
I’m not an EE and I think that’s an underrepresented group on HN, but... you are surely underpaid
I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.
$45/hr is about what I was paid as a grad-student intern at Apple ... 15 years ago.
Tell me if I'm calculating this incorrectly.
$45 * 8 (hours a day) * 22 (days a month) * 12 (months) = $95k
You were getting paid the equivalent of $95k/year as an intern??
I disagree - non-software companies feel entitled to price employees based in relation to their peers rather than in relation to the value they add to the business (and possibly misuse their tech labour because they never hired an architect that could actually steer it to be as valuable as it could be) but Jack the EE might be a perfectly servicable developer. There's a lot of theory we learn in school that Jack woul…
They value people based on 'visibility' at my place. Unfortunately, some people who get that visibility are just putting out their own fires. I had a tech lead that was not very good in my opinion, but the business and management loved him. Sometimes I think about becoming a mechanic. They make good money.
Having worked at a car dealership- don't work at one of those, at the very least. Like many established industries, being a car mechanic doesn't have too many ways up from there- you can get all the certs you want, but you'll never be management- and compensation increases are based more on tenure than anything else. If you can teach yourself and then get into a performance garage or something like that, go for it! You'll likely wind up better off buying a project car to learn on or going to a technical school in off time than going full-tilt into mechanicary- and you'll have a chance to see if it's right for you before you switch. Also, if you like that stuff, and want to create things, consider mechanical engineering of some flavor.
Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.
:) Why is it that MBA types always end up on top ? My pet theory is that they just have more time to spent scheming, and influencing others. While engineers are busy trying to get shit done.
As someone who has worked with an MBA who was good at "scheming and influencing others", they can be an absolute godsend in clearing away the corporate detritus so you can actually get your job done.
That may be median for your area and you may be happy with it. In west coast tech hubs, that's about half of median salary alone. If you factor in bonus, stock options, etc. That's about 1/3 or 1/4 of total comp. https://www.levels.fyi/
I hate my job for reasons other than the pay. I just have to except that I'm worthless.
Noooooooo! You may be undervalued, or in the wrong field. Einstein was not an accomplished baker- you might just not have found something you feel you fit into. It might also be impostor syndrome- please don't devalue yourself because you don't like your job or what you do there. Your job doesn't define you.
This is an encouraging move. My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company. I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more…
I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank. At Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. And given my level (two levels above Senior Developer) I estimate I was paid better than at least 90% engineers. Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigio…
I was at Intel. Everyone I know who was good was systematically Assassinated or otherwise undermined by the career mediocre. The spectacularly good moved on to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc.
At this point, suspect it’s nothing but dregs. Would not hire any of the people I left behind who are still there. Period.
I worked at a startup that was acquired by an unsexy behemoth. It was not covered in TechCrunch. We had a sales guy who easily cleared over $1MM in salary and bonuses, several times the CEO and founders, because he went above and beyond, closing $15MM of new business a year. When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally manage…
"I have a master's degree and I went to , therefore no one's supposed to make more money than me!" We need to get people out of this kind of thinking, and the sooner the better.