<p>No offense, aehmo, but you're 22 years old. How do you think you have the experience to tell me whether or not my husband's career path is out of the ordinary, and also, don't you think we would have already weathered lay-off threats in a 20 year career? He read that hand-writing on the wall twice and looked around for other positions, and easily found better positions...twice. Also, his salary is not at all unusually high. The grapevine method of finding out what your peers are making is quite reliable, plus, when he was a manager he knew what everyone was making, and it was in that neighborhood, and sometimes higher.</p>
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Your husband is a very, very rare person to make 135k as an individual contributor...most people cap out at 105k-100k.
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<p>This is ridiculous.. who told you that?</p>
<p>"...plus, when he was a manager he knew what everyone was making, and it was in that neighborhood, and sometimes higher."</p>
<p>1down22go , didn't you say that your husband was an individual contributor earlier?? Now you're saying he used to be a manager, and later converted back to techie!!! ..... I think you proved aehmo's point without even knowing it. He's been claiming all along that people are forced into management, and here you are slipping up and basically validating half his statement!!</p>
<p>Also, I'm like aehmo about the 135k thing....you husband is over-priced and will have to take a huge pay-cut after he gets laid off. Some of the best and brightest engineers I know of don't make close to135k....sorry, I find your statements hard to believe, especially since bls.gov pegs engineers at around 90k</p>
<p>Golubb/aehmo, you can't log in as your other screenname to support your own claim and then be an arse to someone who contradicted you. In fact, golubb, by posting for the first time since mid-August, you've virtually proven that you're posting under two names.</p>
<p>Quit being an uninformed dweeb, yo. I'm really tired of all of us qualified peeps trying to override all of the doofuses whose second-cousins-twice-removed were once laid off because they weren't the sharpest engineers in the bucket.</p>
<p>PS, everyone: Golubb's post history essentially ends on 8/05/05, except for one final post on 08/16/06, and then this one today. Aehmo's posting history begins, out of the blue, on 08/13/05. If he were an engineer, he'd have figured it out that we'd have figured it out! ;)</p>
<p>I'm only posting my thoughts under 1 ID....other people can either agree with me or disagree. If they agree, it doesn't mean there is a grand conspiracy against you.</p>
<p>ZERO, I'm not inclined toward the aeronautical engineering field. =P</p>
<p>I'm actually fascinated in anything that has to do with ME. I don't know, I've been considering doing a double in Physics and maybe getting my PhD in it so that I won't have to go into management or anything...<em>sigh</em>...I want to stay as a researcher/designer/developer engineer...=/...</p>
<p>That 135k pay was awesome, thank you to that poster. That uplifted my hopes for future pay haha. And since he went back to being an individual contributor instead of staying in management, that also cheered me up. Thanks a lot! =)</p>
<p>I've been thinking of also the best possible combination of engineering studies/majors. I would think that EE and ME as a double would be pretty nice because I would be educated in both fields and may be hired to do things from both. However, I do like the aeronautical/astronautical (and with that, SPACE!!!) engineering field hehe. I dunno. </p>
<p>Just waiting for this stupid first Fall semester in college to end so that the Winter session can start up and I can take my first calculus-based physics classs. Hopefully, I'll be able to decide after experiencing a true physics class. Already like chemistry, math, drafting (for engr), and computer programming. Just need some more experience to base my decisions off..Hmmm......</p>
<p>Golubb, Read post #37. My husband was in management, didn't care for it and switched back to individual contribution. He was never "forced" into management, he chose it and then decided it wasn't for him.</p>
<p>Also, I'm here to tell you that most engineers in my husband's line of work make well over 100K per year. He is a materials scientist/engineer, which you might want to investigate, XCron, along with the EE degree, which makes for a very powerful combination for communications technology. He works for a major telecommunications company. All of his peers are making similar salaries, there are no "stars" in his group. And people who get laid-off generally just didn't see it coming soon enough to get out in time, which has never, in 20 years of work as an engineer, happened to him. Of course, it could happen to him and it has happened to some friends. I won't say it wasn't rough for those families, but all of his colleagues we know who were laid off did find other engineering jobs, some better than the jobs they were let go from. </p>
<p>In industry, the Ph.D. degree is not really much of an advantage, so unless you are planning to be an academic, I would delay that decision until you got some experience in the working community first.</p>
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In industry, the Ph.D. degree is not really much of an advantage, so unless you are planning to be an academic, I would delay that decision until you got some experience in the working community first.
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<p>This is very true; good advice for those PhDs aspirants. You generally wouldn't make more money by getting a PhD. PhD in engineering typically takes 4-5 years for completion, and working for the same period in industry may reward you much more than a starting salary for a PhD. Nevertheless, Masters has a better money value than Bachelor.</p>
<p>I am very interested in Materials Sci/Engr. I am considering it as a possible double major along with ME. In the end, I would like to have a job that involves either research, development, or designing. Thus, Materials Sci/Engr would probably be a very good major to pick for this purpose. I am sure that there is a lot of research going on in every engineering field and I am glad that that is probably true. </p>
<p>That's cool how an engineer can earn 100k and past that just by being an individual contributor, but maybe that's only true for the communications business. I hope to go into something that has to do with ME, so I wonder whether I will be making that much. Hmm...</p>
<p>I hope that no engineer is forced to go into management because of the whole promotion deal that an engineer can't tell his boss that he doesn't want to advance further. The whole thing with me considering a Physics degree was probably so when I am "forced" to go into management, I would be able to go back to Physics and do research when I hit that age-cap or something. Perhaps I can go into research for the Engineering field that I may get a PhD in??? That would be awesome...</p>
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I hope that no engineer is forced to go into management because of the whole promotion deal that an engineer can't tell his boss that he doesn't want to advance further. The whole thing with me considering a Physics degree was probably so when I am "forced" to go into management, I would be able to go back to Physics and do research when I hit that age-cap or something. Perhaps I can go into research for the Engineering field that I may get a PhD in??? That would be awesome...
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<p>Oh no worry, most companies would be happy to let you take senior/principal engineer position as long as you want :). However, your salary may stuck at that point and you might not be satisfied with such compensation as you watch your peers have the advancement to the position above you (you may not be concerned with it now, but the working world may change your perception later on). Nevertheless, indeed there're some people who are still not interested in management at all after working for years and yes, many of these people return to school to take their PhD with two most common goals. Becoming an academic or to qualify for joining the core design team in the company. It seems to me that you're more interested to the later option. But I think you shouldn't really worry about it now... think about it again later after you're already in the working world and money become a really important part of you/your family :p</p>
<p>Xcron I too enjoy anything mechanical engineering. its absurd that i found this post and thread because you have asked so many questions i need answered. also i think the idea </p>
<p>"In the end, I would like to have a job that involves either research, development, or designing."</p>
<p>that says it all pretty much. Engineering pretty much seems like designing and development to me and thats what I am interested in. also the fact that an engineer can earn 100k+ sounds great to me. the whole process of getting there is what confuses me.</p>
<p>how exactly do you go about becoming an engineer that makes a good salary(100k) and still strictly deals with engineering? I plan on majoring in ME. materials scientist/engineer also seems like a good idea. what path should i take as far as degrees go? bachelors, masters, phd?</p>
<p>Well, we sure need some more input on those issues, for the both of us =P. Let's just wait and see who posts.</p>
<p>It seems that one of the recent posters was at least somewhat right. They had said that rushing for a PhD is not necessarily a wise decision. This is basically what my Drafting teacher told me after the class. He went to MIT for his undergrad and Harvard for graduate school and he was a ME major. He said that he recommends, even though he has seen it done otherwise, that every engineer first get to experience industry and see what the real world of engineering is like before they make a decision for which, or if they even should, graduate degree to get. He said that he was grateful for having that experience because it showed him what he was interested in. However, he does agree with the fact that engineers are constantly forced into management positions. He explained that it is because the companies decide which task/job you will best serve. Usually after some experience is gained, the engineer is assigned to manage a group of engineers and watch over their work, etc. After that, it may get into higher management and farther from real engineering work. I think that is why I will work in the industry and go for my PhD so that I can do research and stuff, because that is what I would like to do. Research, development, and design are all part of a PhD Engineer's work and they're heck of a lot of fun when working for active organizations that have a lot of stuff going on like NASA and JPL, hehehehehe.</p>
<p>so to be or not to be an engineer?</p>
<p>All the objections of Aehmo/golubb_u boil down to the same things that we had discussed in another thread. I'm not saying that getting an engineering bachelor's degree is the greatest thing. But the question is, what other bachelor's degree out there is better? Is Art History better? Is Film Studies better?</p>
<p>I've said it before, I'll say it again. If all you care about is money, don't be an engineer, and don't be a doctor. Go to Wall Street and become an investment banker. The top bankers can make more money in one year than even the best doctors can make in their whole lifetimes.</p>
<p>It's also a bit risky doing business majors even at top schools like Wharton or Princeton because you have to maintain a very high GPA in order get recruited by the best i-banks. What's the point of graduating from Wharton or Princeton in econ. with a 3.2 when you can major in engineering and graduate from either Princeton or Penn SEAS with a 3.2? You're guaranteed a 55K job coming out with the engineering major.</p>
<p>It's also a bit risky doing business majors even at top schools like Wharton or Princeton because you have to maintain a very high GPA in order get recruited by the best i-banks. What's the point of graduating from Wharton or Princeton in econ. with a 3.2 when you can major in engineering and graduate from either Princeton or Penn SEAS with a 3.2? You're guaranteed a 55K job coming out with the engineering major but if you want to work for i-banks, it's very dependent on GPA.</p>
<p>Just to be on the safe side, why not choose engineering?</p>
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I've said it before, I'll say it again. If all you care about is money, don't be an engineer, and don't be a doctor. Go to Wall Street and become an investment banker. The top bankers can make more money in one year than even the best doctors can make in their whole lifetimes.
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<p>Well, taking the extreme examples will not take us anywhere. Top entrepreneurs can make money in one year than even the best top bankers can make in their whole lifetimes. In fact the average bankers in Wall Street are not that well off after all. I think the illusion has become too far-fetched. Just pick an average ibanker from Citygroup and Goldman Sach and ask them their starting salary.</p>
<p>Einstein was brilliant, and he was a patent clerk that dropped out of graduate school. So if I want to be just like Einstein, I should quit grad school now and become a patent clerk!</p>
<p>I unfortunately can't be like Bill Gates because I have a college degree, but IT ISN'T TOO LATE FOR MANY OF YOU!! Get out while you still can!!!</p>
<p><em>sigh</em></p>
<p>Why are we doing this whole massive generalization thing? If you're super-good at engineering, you can make super-good money. If you super-suck at investment banking, you can live in a refrigerator box behind the bus depot. If we're trying to find some sort of hard-and-fast rule, or even some sweeping generalization that high school students can take and apply to their lives, then we're not going to find it, and we're going to, at worst, lead people away from where they may be happiest and might find their fortunes.</p>
<p>Stop the goofiness already. Life isn't scientifically methodical. There are no equations on how to do it "right". There are no guarantees in life, and some of us are skirting the edges of claiming that we know what's what, and that our magic formulae can be applied to everybody... Be careful, and be clear.</p>
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Just pick an average ibanker from Citygroup and Goldman Sach and ask them their starting salary.
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yes but the salaries grow exponentially afterwards, especially if you pursue an MBA</p>
<p>Anyways, there is a question that I'd like to ask you guys: What's the average pay for a manager in an engineering firm? After you "capped-out" at 30 or so? Is it better than an engineer's?</p>
<p>1down22go, do you mind if I ask you waht your husband made when he was in management?</p>
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yes but the salaries grow exponentially afterwards, especially if you pursue an MBA
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<p>There would be a jump, yes, but it is far from exponential growth.</p>
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Anyways, there is a question that I'd like to ask you guys: What's the average pay for a manager in an engineering firm? After you "capped-out" at 30 or so? Is it better than an engineer's?
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<p>It depends on the engineering firm you're talking about. In some companies becoming a manager is much more difficult than in others. The pay hence varies. Nevertheless, it's better to become a manager in general since you will manage those engineers under you (yes, you're still an engineer, but perhaps on the higher layer).</p>