<p>I just met a professor yesterday at Berkeley who gets $800/hour talking to oil companies. Now who says engineers cant get rich.</p>
<p>that's awesome. but no one really says that engineers cant get rich, cuz everyone knows that engineers make good money. but i didnt know one could make THAT much.</p>
<p>That's just sick.</p>
<p>He probably spends 1-3 hrs per week of actual talking and actually getting paid. You don't think he talks 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week?</p>
<p>...of course, he still makes good $.</p>
<p>'talking' to oil companies? What does that mean?</p>
<p>The sarcastic demon on my shoulder says, "It means 'selling your soul'. Satan pays out the wazoo!"</p>
<p>$800 per hour does not surprise me, though it is a lot. I agree with scorp that the hours are likely quite limited. </p>
<p>The power of free market economics is that where goods/services are in demand, the price is determined by what the market is willing to pay.</p>
<p>He used to be the chief engineer at Shell oil, and is now a prof at berkeley. He just gets asked sometimes for consulting. I think he specializes in oil platforms and stuff, and also engineering failures like Katrina, the space shuttle, etc</p>
<p>uh...the oil companies probably make triple that for the information given</p>
<p>There's a lot of money to be made in consulting. The trouble is, you first have to acquire expertise that's worth paying money for. A top engineer or executive at an engineering firm who had moved up through the ranks would probably be sought-after, but such a situation is the exception, not the rule for engineers.</p>
<p>In my (worthless) opinion, the only way to really make a KILLING with an engineering degree is to start your own business.</p>
<p>That prof also did that and sold it to Bechtel. Basically he's done everything an engineer could do to make big bucks.</p>
<p>Large companies frequently contract to people with no more than a B.S. and some little expertise like welding or something and are charged anywhere from 50-200 dollar per hour for the work. This is the cost of contracting in our society, people with little skill can be paid what seems like absurd rates.</p>
<p>I.... <em>really</em> don't think we're talking about someone with no skill, here...</p>
<p>Keep overhead in mind, too. Someone at my firm who makes about 30 bucks an hour will typically bill a client for 125 bucks an hour, and that's fairly normal. High contracting/consulting rates are a fact of business. Even as a tutor in college, I'd bill 40 dollars an hour and only see 18.</p>
<p>airbarr that is the point i was trying to make. this kind of stuff is extremely expensive to a company. its half the reason internship programs exist according to my boss, interns are like slave labor for a company. give a college kid 20 an hour and they are in heaven and the company gets dirt cheap labor, whereas a contractor with "experience" charges anywhere from 50-200, and these contractors dont have PhDs, they are your run of the mill engineers. </p>
<p>The point is, this stuff is extremely expensive, 800 dollars an hour doesn't seem that crazy to me for an expert with a PhD when companies hire contractors who aren't much smarter than monkeys for 200 an hour.</p>
<p>Oh, okay. I see what you're saying.</p>
<p>By the way: A-I-B-A-R-R. Two r's, not 3. =)</p>
<p>
[quote]
and also engineering failures like Katrina, the space shuttle, etc
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Does he specialize in failures, or just on fixing them?</p>
<p>:p</p>
<p>He studies what when wrong from each phase: design, construction, operation, and maintance.</p>
<p>Erm... I think that was a joke.</p>
<p>And the typical approach to failure analysis is to first examine the wreckage and work backwards, so... you really don't study what went wrong with each phase. You study the current situation (buncha rubble), then find anomalies, then trace those anomalies back to their origins. Observe everything, write down all the observations you have, and then more or less do a differential diagnosis with respect to what sorts of things might have caused those things which you've observed.</p>