That's why I quit engineering, once I hit the ceiling. |
Obviously not "everyone."
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Small ones. |
What did you pivot into? |
| 2 professors, about $550. But very uneven income - one with a very high salary, one low for the qualification (science/engineering PhD!). |
Agree. No neurosurgeon is working for $150k unless that's 1 day a week. PP probably means a neurologist and even that is on the low end |
No, it's a lot of metro operators who sound dumb. Give them speech lessons! Half the time their speech is so slurred it makes the late Mayor Marion Barr,y sound like Prof. Henry Higgins. |
I don't think so! |
It seems that even a shitty year can be lucrative.
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I work at Children's and trust me, no neurosurgeon there is making $150k full time.
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Agreed. But if this is true, there's another way to look at it. Who should be paid more? Some fourth-year big law associate who reviews documents and drafts routine motions so that corporation x can beat up on corporation y, or the guy/gal who's responsible for getting you and everyone else on your train home safely tonight? |
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^
Huh? This isn't about "should", and biglaw salary levels and talent competition is utterly irrelevant to metro salalries. Plus metro is complete garbage and worth nothing but that's neither here nor there. |
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I haven't read all these posts, but one thing to keep in mind is some people may be quoting their salaries as an independent contractor. DH recently turned down a job that paid a lot more on paper, but going from employee to independent contractor would have meant paying all the taxes on that income and losing benefits + retirement matching. He realized he is actually better off with his current lower salary.
HHI is only part of the package, so some of these contractor salaries are not as high as they actually seem. |
I realized this 5 years into my career as an engineer. I took a look at the older folks in the company and realized that they were my future and I did not like what I saw. I researched salaries for senior level engineers and it was just disappointing. Sure, a 100k+ salary is nothing to sneeze at but it became very demoralizing very quickly to realize that $150k or so was the ceiling unless I was a super star of some sort. I took a look at my dad who is a life long engineer, doing hard core stuff with encyclopedic knowledge base and the ability to quickly get to the bottom of a problem - it became very clear to me that doing engineering was not a way to become better than what my parents have achieved. I quit my job, got an MBA and have not looked back. I value my technical background, but only in so far as relying on it for an extra analytical edge and being numbers/evidence driven in my decisions and planning. |
For two salary households, where one has access to benefits, it is actually encouraged for the second one to go the independent contractor route to get a bigger check. |