<p>..because they dont get paid a lot. This sounds a bit too general to me, but does it hold some truth to it?</p>
<p>You probably won’t get rich doing it, unless you get lucky or are such an unbelievable genius that you’d get rich doing anything.</p>
<p>If you want to get rich, you’d be better off playing professional sports, getting into finance, etc. There are definitely better ways of making money than engineering…</p>
<p>well, if you can break into wall street front office… or can get into medical school or top 14 law school.</p>
<p>otherwise, we earn more than rest of the population</p>
<p>I actually dont mind an “average” pay-rate. What type of engineer are you, x_ray?</p>
<p>DITIt3K, rule for life, don’t do something because you want to get paid, do it because either you love it or are good at it or want to make a difference in the world in that field.</p>
<p>That might be your rule of life; and mine isnt far from it. I dedicate myself fully to anything i do, and THAT is what i love. I dont care if im doing something like…scooping poop. If im bound to being a pooper-scooper, than i will make the best of it and become the best pooper-scooper i can be.</p>
<p>With that being said, i would much rather go into something i can dedicate myself to and get a decent amount of money for.</p>
<p>Whether engineering pays well depends on what you define as “decent money”. It certainly pays well enough to allow a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and to raise a family. You won’t be buying mansions and yachting and traveling the world’s 6-start hotels though.</p>
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<p>It’s amazing sometimes. An engineer that is just an engineer - no management, no non-traditional work, just engineering - usually breaks the $100,000 / yr mark around 6 or 7 years out of college (before age 30 for most people). And that 6-figure salary doesn’t require a $200,000 MIT degree - a number of good (and cheap) state schools can get you there. Engineers work steady hours, tend to have stable positions, are in decent demand, and get excellent benefits (including tuition reimbursement for graduate degrees). And yet people on here treat engineering like it’s a dead-end job making just above the minimum wage. </p>
<p>Compare engineering to business sometime. Sure there are people with business degrees making $500,000+ per year, but that’s a very small fraction of business majors. The vast majority of business degree holders make <$60,000, even those from good schools. </p>
<p>How about comparing engineering to law? Sure there are some lawyers making tons of money, but there are also those starting at $40,000/yr. The average lawyer in the US makes $110,000/yr. That’s about what the average engineer makes, and the engineer didn’t have to pay for (or lose salary while in) law school.</p>
<p>Look up how much the Scientists and Engineers who work for hedge funds and investment banks get paid. Don’t be surprised when you find that most of them are working on real engineering/scientific problems.</p>
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<p>That’s in a non-engineering role, though - either as a business analyst or in quantitative finance. </p>
<p>I don’t mean to imply that non-engineering positions are inferior - it’s actually often the opposite. But those positions tend to be the exception to the rule. Very few engineers go to work for a hedge fund and no school that I know of has a hedge fund class in their undergraduate program. However, a good number of engineers go to work in manufacturing plants, design, or construction (traditional engineering positions).</p>
<p>It’s implicit that there are fewer jobs that make you rich than those that don’t, but I don’t see how that invalidates the point. There are a lot of ways to become obscenely wealthy and engineering isn’t what I would consider to be the easiest way.</p>
<p>Of course, you can always study engineering and do other kinds of work… that’s not a bad idea at all. Neither is studying whatever you like most. Most jobs that make you rich don’t require a specific degree anyway.</p>
<p>isn’t engineering a very good undergraduate degree for those who want to track themselves into better paying jobs? Like going to b-school or getting an MBA. And what about consulting?</p>
<p>I feel that engineers have a variety of options to go into other fields because of their analytical and quantitative skills, not just strictly engineering, this is true right?</p>
<p>Although you have your Wall Street jobs, Law and a few other business jobs that pay more, engineering pays pretty good considering you don’t have high-pressure “competition” like those higher-paying jobs. One of the things I like about my job (Database Architecture/Development) is that there is always a demand. Add on a government security clearance and you pretty much don’t have to worry about having an income. As long as the USA has foreign policy issues and enemies, folks working in INTEL will have jobs.</p>
<p>I am happy with my selection. No worrying about “Is my 3.88 GPA enough?..do I have the right extra-curricular activities?..Is my school a “target school”?..did I network enough?” and yadda yadda. Just e-mail your resume and interview in a Polo shirt and Khakis over lunch and your offer is sent out.</p>
<p>…at least for me :-)</p>
<p>GP Burdell,</p>
<p>You say that engineers with 6 to 7 years of experience can make $100,000/year. What kind of engineering work will pay that kind of money? I work in power plants and there are engineers with 30 years of experience who only make $85,000/year. None of the engineering pay grades ever reach $100,000.</p>
<p>Aerospace, High Tech, Petroleum.</p>
<p>Software Engineering</p>
<p>@G.P.Burdell, I don’t think Software/Network engineers are hired at hedge funds such as Renaissance Technologies as business analysts. You can be an engineer or computer scientist and work for Goldman Sachs writing algorithmic trading software and similarly come out of “math, physics, engineering, and computer science” with no extra training and be hired as a “quantitative developer” at D.E.Shaw. They wouldn’t hire MBA’s to do that sort of work.</p>
<p>It does hold truth…Obviously there’s those rich corporate execs but I dunno how people get those jobs…</p>
<p>In any case, I looked into different professions that would enrich my life, ones that would provide a sense of contribution, and engineering was the highest paid profession of them. So if money isn’t the only thing that matters to you, you might still view engineering as a lucrative profession.</p>
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<p>I don’t thinks so. I think that it’s a global phenomenon among a certain typology of engineers to over-value themselves (ideologically) and complain sorely about their present incomes. </p>
<p>I don’t think that it should be taken seriously. There’s no real reason to believe it. But I do think it’s good to be realistic and to have as modest expectations as possible.</p>
<p>If you go into engineering for money, work very hard because you don’t think it’s fun or your passion, then I guess you’re likely to wind up in the typology of engineers who spreads the propaganda you’re bringing up.</p>
<p>Some engineers hit the lottery on stock options too. But timing is everything. Having the right timing at Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, Intel, Cisco, VMWare has resulted in a lot of millionaires, otherwise known as software engineers.</p>