Even 200k is a tremendous amount of cash...haven't seen any engineers making anywhere close to that.
Don't know how I missed this thread, but that above made me laugh.
I counted eight engineers I know personally outside of PoA who make that number and aren't software engineers.
Four have college degrees. Only one would be considered "pedigreed", he's an RPI grad. Two their degree isn't in anything technical at all. The other four have high school diplomas only. All have been forced at one time or another to wear a manager title but only one pursued management roles. She's a girl who knew she likes to be the boss. Ha.
The thing they all have in common is they build things and fix things worth billions. And high risk projects are their staple diet, and six of them at one time or another traveled extensively to learn and hone their craft.
One pre-negotiated a severance package worth $1M and it paid out, when one of the prototypes he designed and built of a massive system the government was thinking about bidding on, died politically. Then he traveled to China and built them something similar but not quite the same from similar tech making more than double your $200,000 number. He "slowed down" by buying a large multi-state business so he didn't have to travel any more than a few hundred miles away on a regular basis. Ha.
My career is similar but I specialized in fixing and troubleshooting. I was the guy we jokingly called the "appeasement engineer". I showed up in less than 24 hours domestically to fix your telecom stuff worth millions (instead of billions) and later did similar in the data center world. I make a bit less than the above folks do and find that to be just fine. I would go when nobody else could or would. Like, get your bags and see if there's a flight out tonight kind of go.
And I backed off and stopped traveling years ago and chose to focus on smaller businesses who needed a jack-of-all-trades type of engineer to fix a lot of varied infrastructure stuff. Heck I even reprogrammed the lights in the office to come on and go off at appropriate times last year when nobody else would go get the manual and figure it out. Heh.
On paper, I have a high school diploma too. I fall into that "some college" category on surveys because I was traveling too much to finish.
High paid engineering is way more about initiative and building/fixing than sitting in an office 8-5. You gotta GO build or fix.
One of those guys above has no formal education in electronics. You should see the stuff he builds for his house, just screwing around. Fingerprint readers, integrated security system, all integrated with all the TVs and phones, he's a nut. He posts photos of "this week's" project on FB.
That's a common thread also. Such an interest in building stuff that they build regularly just for fun.
I like integrating stuff already built into strange and new things. It's subtly different than what they do. I know how to lay out a board and develop a circuit and make stuff, but it doesn't hold my interest as much as say, taking a pre-built widget and making it do something it wasn't intended to do. Different mindset. Different salary too, but not a bad one at all.
Plus for whatever reason my company kept me around when I said I wanted to take a leave of absence or resign to go play airplanes for the summer. Awfully nice of them. I still don't know why, but it feels like a pretty big pat on the back for the work done over the last couple of years. They could still decide to let me go at any time, but I'm grateful they didn't. Ironically for almost two decades getting time off was the hardest thing in my life. All of a sudden I say I'm cool with quitting and I now nearly come and go as I please. It's very weird to me.
(Obviously I went from salaried to hourly during this summer of aviation fun, so my income won't be what it was, but I'm just floored that they let me do it. I'm still technically "on-call" for anything major that breaks, but a lot of the upgrades and fixes we did over the last two years made stuff a whole lot more redundant and resilient and most of it "just runs" even when hardware breaks. Not all. Yet. But most of the really important stuff for business continuity.)
