Salaries For Workers in Technology Roles, Including Software Engineers and Product Managers, Peak Around Age 45 (hired.com) 206
A report released on Thursday by the job marketplace Hired reveals that salaries for workers in technology roles, including software engineers, product managers, and data analysts, peak around age 45. After that, earnings level off or drop until retirement. According to the report, the average salary of US technology workers is about $135,000, with the highest pay in the San Francisco area.
San Francisco pay more but in other areas half the (Score:2)
San Francisco pay more but in other areas half the average salary is good in SF it's shit
Tarzan say (Score:1, Funny)
To live like here I need $400K San Fransisco money. Cheetah no like northern California. Stoners want sex with Cheetah. And Jane turn lesbian in SF. She no like Tarzan no more.
Re:San Francisco pay more but in other areas half (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great point and Ill clarify.
Tech salaries in San Francisco and Seattle are high but the cost of living is so high that even making 400K (which I do between salary+stock+wife income) that you are house poor (average house in decent school area 1.5-2M due to farcically low interest rates/money printing) or pay $5000+ in rent just to exist - thats 60K just to exist. And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K (California charges more than 9% income and sales tax). 200K - 60K means 11K / mo. Now childcare, private schools, cost of living, etc. You would be shocked how just food, fuel, child costs, etc, all rack up here. Its insanity how fast 11K/mo turns into dust and at the end of the day you either have millions of debt in mortgage or are facing crushing rents.
It would make sense to make 200K anywhere else and live like a relative king.
The biggest sadness about San Francisco / bay area is the children of tech people are lost. Latchkey, parent-less, druggies, no very smart and no hope. Cost of living is hopeless for them and competition with all the H1B etc for them will be them vs the rest of the world. So extreme cost of living and horrific competition from the entire world.
So Joe_Dragon is right. Salaries are high here. Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
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The biggest sadness about San Francisco / bay area is the children of tech people are lost.
The Bay Area is a great place for a kid to skateboard and smoke pot.
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You are terrible at budgeting. Even if your rent is $5k you have 140k clear according to your own numbers and you feel hurt? Get over yourself and learn to manage your finances.
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Wait, I thought California was the Left Wing Worker's Paradise that was going to secede from the rest of us naval gazing, redneck reprobates?
You mean with all that liberal conscientiousness they've created a hellscape that only serves the rich and their impoverished server class?
Say it aint so!! I'm shocked, shocked I say. This is the same disappointment I felt when I found out that the Fundamentalist Baptist preacher who sermon'd endlessly on sexuality was a cruising for twinks online.
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And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K
Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
How're those leftist policies workin' out for you over there in Commiefornia? Not so good?
Aw, that's a shame. Now we just need to figure out how to quarantine Commiefornia and prevent the infection from spreading. Then we can all sit back and have our kids learn the object lesson that the Commifornians are setting as an example.
It's getting so bad here that people are leaving, driving housing prices up and making traffic worse.
$135000 (Score:2)
Vancouver Canada, almost as expensive as SF.
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shut up you get free health care!
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Damn cheap, but not free. I pay $75 a month. Also Americans could have decent healthcare if they would just stop being so stupid about it.
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Ah, but if Americans stopped being stupid about it, the healthcare companies would lose their cash cow. And where do you think prices would rise to make up for this loss? Yep, you're it.
So everyone with cheap good healthcare should really hope the US never gets its act together on this.
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Cutting the military budget would be like cutting the cable bill when you can't afford the mortgage. The biggest part of the US federal budget every year is paying back social security. 40% of your annual tax payment goes towards this. The military budget is not as large as you might think, relatively.
Re:$135000 (Score:5, Informative)
"Cutting the military budget would be like cutting the cable bill when you can't afford the mortgage."
Sort of. If social security and medicare are your $2300 mortage, the military is your $600 car payment. Education is your $100 cable bill.
https://www.nationalpriorities... [nationalpriorities.org]
Take a look at the 3rd chart.
The military budget is not as large as you might think, relatively.
I guess it depends "what you think", but no matter how you slice it it is still a massive amount of money; especially when put into perspective:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Even if we cut it in half the US still has vastly more invested than anywhere else in the world. (And if you look at that chart, of the next 14 after the US, most of them are pretty close allies too; so in terms of spending the US + allies still would drastically outclass all plausible opponents combined.)
Returning the mortgage analogy; my first home cost me $1200/mo in mortgage payments for a single bedroom+den apartment; and was probably among the least expensive places in the area; the loan payment of $600/month for a Porsche 911; on the other hand was an extravagance. Yeah the mortgage was the bigger expense, but it was still the car that was the extravagance.
If cash had been an issue at the time, I'd have traded down to a more sensible vehicle without a second thought... I'd have bought a $5000 used honda or VW, had no payment at all, and freed up 10s of thousands in cash in the process too depending exactly where along the loan it happened.
Likewise, the US military is a collection of exotic hyper-cars; it may not be the biggest piece of the total US budget but it is still a ludicrous extravagance. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that you improve the efficiency and reduce costs in social security and medicare, because you absolutely should do that. But refusing to even consider selling even one of your 918 Spyders or Rolls-Royces or Pagani's when cash is tight is a bit absurd.
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That would be oversimplifying my position considerably, but sure yes, I think a combination of spending cuts across several areas combined with tax changes would be the solution.
On the social security / medicare front in particular I think getting more value per dollar is a very acheivable goal. We don't need to cut services, we can do more than we are now AND spend less.
I'd also cut DHS funding; $40+ billion plus for mostly worthless security theatre; yeah... its smaller thing but these little things add u
Re: $135000 (Score:2)
Or we could repudiate the debt and expropriate the usurers.
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The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP [indexmundi.com]. Cutting the U.S. military budget in half would actually put us (currently 3.3%) below the world average (2.2%). And if you factor in that the U.S. is obligated
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"The U.S. isn't even in the top 20 in military spending as a percent of GDP. "
"If you want to compare expenditures properly, it has to be as a percentage of GDP. "
That's a fair comment but look at the top 20. The top bunch skews towards a bunch of lousy countries.
I'm also not sure what that chart is including; the US currently line items military spending separate from some of the various war and homeland security efforts. So depending on what you are counting its 600 billion ... or its 900 billion.
In any c
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"Evaluating a country's military spending in absolute dollars makes as little sense as..."
Let me stop you there. absolute dollars is a pretty important metric. Suppose two countries were in a cold war, and one was twice as large as the other economically and by population, etc. Suppose the smaller country is dedicating 20% of its GDP towards military supremacy. The larger by a factor of 2 country doesn't need to dedicate 20% of its GDP to maintain parity, it only needs 10% to maintain parity. (By parity, I
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Solving the Healthcare problem would do so much better than cutting defense - since Obama took office Healthcare went from $641.8 Billion (2007) to $1,130 Billion (2017). Defense however has only gone from $652.6 Billion (2007) to $832.1 Billion (2017). Yeah - ObamaCare (PPACA) did nothing but exasperate it as it had no real spending controls in it.
Or take federal government pensions - $636.1 Billion (2007) to $1006.1 Billion (2017).
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"Education is your $100 cable bill."
Out of your federal taxes it's only 2% of the budget ($46 in your example), but you're way off because the majority of educational money comes from state/local taxes, property tax in my case, which amounted to about 25% of my overall taxes.
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One thing people don't realize is that while the DoD budget is an extravagance, part of that funding does eventually end up in the private sector. GPS was DoD funded for military use before becoming widely spread. Your iphone [businessinsider.com] wouldn't be what it is today without DoD spending.
One of the tenets of the DoD Research Labs is to help small businesses get off the ground through SBIR contracts - and then make sure they can grow and sell to the public after that initial investment by the Gov. If you follow the money
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Social security is biggest, but military spending is still massive. Military spending in the US is over half of all discretionary spending. And discretionary spending are things that the president proposes for the budget and congress votes on, thus it is easier to make cuts here without changing legislation.
There are people who whine about government waste pointing to programs that cost maybe a couple million but then turn around and try to give the military even more money (more than the joint chiefs ask
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Read the Constitution and pay attention to what the words mean. The US is not required to spend money on defense (although spending some is a very good idea), and General Welfare is not as limited as you conceive it. The welfare of the United States is the sum of the welfare of its citizens, and establishing universal health care would benefit both that and any individual state.
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Certainly, as long as we're not talking about bills of attainder. The Federal government does use taxes to pay down some debts. You have such a minority viewpoint that approximately nobody in the judiciary branch seems to agree with you.
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Here's a 2015 chart, showing military budget as percentage of discretionary spending: https://www.nationalpriorities... [nationalpriorities.org].
The entire total of discretionary spending was $1.11 trillion, and military spending alone (not counting VA, agriculture, etc) was over half of that.
I think you meant that the military budget PLUS all those other things will add up to over 1 T.
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Not sure where you get the $1.11 Trillion for discretionary spending...but military was only $798 Billion for 2015. Military has yet to break the $1 Trillion mark; yet Healthcare did in 2015 ($1028.4) and Pensions was just shy ($953.6 Billion); "Pensions" seem to include Social Security.
Oh - I figured out the $1.11 Trillion - a misleading chart that pulls from various budget items and compares against select items. How'd I figure that out? The
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The number quoted was the entire discretionary spending, military part was only $598 billion, from the chart I linked. People punch up the numbers differently depending upon what stories they they tell, such as including VA in military spending, but I just presented the top hit from a web search.
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Iraq had way more than we had, if you only count what we actually deployed. We sent over a small force, whereas Iraq deployed everything they had.
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Okay, when was the last time the homeland was attacked by military forces? I'm not aware of any such since WWII. Given this, it looks like the defense of the homeland is working just fine as it is.
There have been other attacks, including terrorist attacks, but the armed forces are the wrong thing to try to counter those with.
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Did you know a conservative angel gets it's wings every time someone blames Reagan for something.
Just like how a liberal one does when FDR is blamed.
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The US defense budget is 3.3% of US GDP
And 3.3% more than we can afford, given the tax cuts and infrastructure crumbling thanks to Reagan tax cuts.
Funny... https://www.usgovernmentspendi... [usgovernmentspending.com] - there's many other areas where spending can be more easily cut...from discretionary/healthcare/pensions/education, and more...
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Oh, I see, kill off citizens instead of $4,000 hammers
$19/does (Dateline and 20/20 news reports in the 1990's - 76,000% markup - $0.025 USD/dose at the *most* expensive end per Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], 2014 price) meet $4,00 hammer (445% markup, $9/hammer cheapest decent thing I could find on Amazon). Yeah - a lot easier to trim the excess from healthcare without compromising service than it is to cut from defense.
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Given the multiplier of $4000 hammers,no it is easier to end the empire and break up the army after 2 years Like Article 1 of the Constitution DEMANDS!
Not quite. You're referring to Article 1 Section 8 Paragraph 12 with respect to appropriations; however, paragraphs 9-13 stand in contrast to that - providing for the creation of navy and militia (army), training thereof, as well as buildings (forts), etc - none of which are limited to 2 years terms.
Now I would probably grant your argument over term durations...but then, budgets typically run year to year, even if a contract is over a longer period term it's still subject to budgeting every year, thereby
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I'm American, almost 40, and mine is free because I exercise my ass off and stay fit.
American culture is about as conducive to cheap healthcare as black culture is to getting a job.
Re: $135000 (Score:2)
So you're on public assistance?
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Its interesting to note that although they didn't include Vancouver, they did include Toronto, and the average in Toronto is 73K USD (92K CAD). Cost of living in Vancouver is only slightly higher than Toronto.
It's also worth noting that we shouldn't put too much faith in this this data... it seems pretty low quality.
I did some poking around and it suggests that the average salary for a network admin in Boston is 120K, in SF is 128K, and in New York City... 30K. Tell me that's anywhere close to right.
Meanwhi
I don't make anywhere near that in academia (Score:2)
On the other hand, my benefits are way better than most of my IT friends working in the private sector, and the "feel" is different. For me, anyway, this is the best fit.
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I'm not in academia, but similar situation. Plenty of vacation time, separate sick time that rolls over indefinitely, some pension, 401k matching, and reasonable health insurance. Salary is well below the summaries stated average, however the job isn't in silicon valley. Around here a nice home can be bought for two years salary, and three or four years salary will buy a mansion.
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If you came up back in the days when you could get a PhD without $150,000 worth of debt, academia was the way to go. The heaviest teaching load I ever had was four classes, I got great benefits, a TIAA pension, I was surrounded by bright people and a lot of my students went on to do very well for themselves.
If any of you out there are in school, and close to matriculating your masters or PhD, do NOT quit school for a job offer, no matter how lucrative. Get the PhD. People call you "doctor" and life is pr
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You sound triggerd. Are you triggered? Send me a DM and we can talk it out. You're not alone, snowflake. It gets better, and I'm here to help.
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And lucrative. Don't forget lucrative.
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The people I saw graduating with Ph.D.s in Computer Science were not generally going to particularly nice places, or places they'd expect to do much research in.
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Depends what you left in academia and went out into industry to do. If you get to work with interesting hardware /technology then that is a win. The most important thing is to work with the latest technology (parallel processing, cloud computing, machine learning, etc..)
If you are doing industrial research then you can always go back to academia later. Save up your money in case you want to go back. Robotics, computer vision and autonomous vehicles are a big thing now.
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
While it quite possible to have your salary bump 10% per year on average in your late 20's / early 30's, it's not like that could continue forever. Once you reach a Senior Architect / Manager / Director / VP role by your 40's there isn't much room to grow for most people. Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Having your salary peak at around $150k and then only keep up with inflation isn't that bad of a thing. Plenty of professions are worse off (actually nearly all professions).
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Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Also, anyone moving into executive management and/or self employment will no longer be included in this data set. The data only includes people hired thru hired.com for tech positions. That is likely the reason why they report salaries peaking at 45. How many good people over 45 are going to be looking for a job on a website, rather than using their professional network?
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Funny)
Our crystals start blinking at 45 and we proceed to Carousel...
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Yup, you get the good jobs from your network contacts. The jobs you get from websites and agencies are going be below par.
So a hint for younger workers - don't just impress your boss, also impress your coworkers, and don't burn any bridges when you leave.
For me the problem is real inflation (Score:4, Informative)
I saw a story about a woman who started at K-Mart in 1974 making $3/hour. When the store closed this year and she was laid off she made $10.50/hr. Thing is, $3 in 1974 was just shy of $16/hr today. She'd lost 1/3 of her pay in 44 years. Us tech workers don't have it as bad, but we're still feeling it. Everybody's losing ground. You just kind of hope you make it until your kid's are on their own and that you die before the layoffs in your 60s come.
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The big point about this is the availability of opportunities shrinks the higher up the food chain you go. When starting out everyone is a developer and there are plenty of options to "move to the next level".
If you don't want to go into management, you might hit architect but then you'll most likely stop going up from there. Few places have long term career paths for individual contributors.
On the management side of the house:
Once you hit manager your options are restricted as there's a smaller number of
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I'm growing slowly I think, I'm 55ish and each year my salary keeps going up. Though there's a bit of a rocky past, with leaving work and going back to grad school and leaving with nothing in the bank in my early 30s, taking a lowballed job offer for a few years since I was hungry, and then the salaries started catching up. Only single income and in Silicon Valley, so while I have a bigger salary than the Vice President, I don't actually feel rich. If I was in my home town though with this salary, I'd be do
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There just aren't enough "Senior Architect / Manager / Director / VP" roles for everyone to get one, Marie. We can't all eat cake.
My post was clear that there weren't enough high level positions for everyone, but I disagree that there aren't enough architect, manager, etc. positions to go around for everyone interested in and capable of that level of responsibility. Everyone I have worked with who is both interested in and capable enough to work at that level has reached it. That may not be true in XX years when the IT field is not growing anymore, but it is true today.
This notion that average, normal, decent people are worthless pieces of shit that should just go fuck-off and die at the age of 40 is going to bit you all in the ass, soon. Madame Defarge is knitting away.
What part of having your salary capped at closer to $120k (in the
Sorting? (Score:2)
These studies always make me wonder whether they are taking into account that techies graduate into management and other higher paying jobs. It may be that the higher earners are getting sorted out of the studies by that age.
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Isn't that true with most jobs, though? If we study what salary burger flippers stabilize at, I'm sure part of it is because they eventually become shift managers or graduate and get on to a high paying job.
It is true of most jobs, but we are talking about careers here. Your analogy is more like looking at when software developer intern salaries peak.
But if you truly want to see where technology workers cap in salary, you need to look at the entire career progression. This includes Director of IT, CTO, entrepreneur, etc. The only thing this study shows is that you should have a career plan past senior developer / architect or your pay will stagnate in your 40's and beyond. Either that or be happy with $150k pe
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Of the students that graduated in my year, about a third moved into the financial industry (architects, consultants). Some moved abroad to places like Singapore or Europe. A few work on embedded software, and a the rest left the industry altogether to run their own businesses (retail, gardening).
With the Agile/Scrum process, some people are expected to become scrum-masters, architects, team leaders and project managers. Some well-qualified entry-level software engineers can earn as much as a project manager
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Some of us are very insistent on not going into management. My manager makes more than I do, and I have no problem with that, because I really don't want his job.
So (Score:1)
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It means your best years are behind you.
Left out... many IT workers "retire" at about 50. (Score:5, Interesting)
Rising health care costs and a desire on corporations to avoid training workers (it costs money and corporations fear they'll leave) drive many IT workers from the field at about age 50.
It spiked up after the supreme court gutted age discrimination protection in 2009.
Likewise, younger workers have open said on slashdot that older workers "don't fit their culture".
Which would be amazingly blunt if they said, "black workers don't fit our culture" or "female workers don't fit our culture".
Google actually approached the same 41 year old female engineer 4 times because their automated software was selecting her was a highly qualified candidate and younger human managers repeatedly rejected her. I'm not sure how her lawsuit turned out. So 41 is too old for some managers at Google.
Thing is .. everyone gets older every day. And I've known 64 year old java programmers who programmed the pants off younger workers with a few years experience.
The best thing you can do is to save hard and take any training opportunities you can get. Then also self train in what little spare time you have after the historically longer than average IT work weeks. Eventually, unless you are lucky, all the training in the world won't help because some young managers won't care about your skill set and simply say you are "too old". That's when you retire early on your savings.
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And I've known 64 year old java programmers who programmed the pants off younger workers with a few years experience.
Is that how you get their pants off? Well, I never learned Java, so who knew?
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Likewise, younger workers have open said on slashdot that older workers "don't fit their culture".
The response to which is of course that if this is the case, your culture is effed, and you should probably work on that. Hiring an older worker or two would be a good start.
FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem, and then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more. The problem is
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FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem
Two rounds of face to face interviews? If you had that, then the first round of interviewers must not have been able to make a definitive hire/no-hire decision.
then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more
A call from HR seems extremely unlikely. I suspect you were actually called by a recruiter, perhaps because the second round of interviews was also inconclusive and they were trying to decide whether it was worth trying a third time. If so, you might have been better off if you'd said you don't program any more, since it would indicate that there's a
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Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
http://www.evetahmincioglu.com... [evetahmincioglu.com]
If you work at Google and one of the founding employees of the mega search engine company starts calling you âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter,â your days may be numbered.
Thatâ(TM)s what Brian Reid, Googleâ(TM)s vice-president of eng
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Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
"Evidence" is a strong word to use to describe the unsubstantiated claims of one former employee. I'm not saying it's not true -- I have no idea -- but I don't think it rises to the level of "evidence".
In addition, there's little reason to expect that what happened in 2003, when Google was a much different company, is indicative of the situation today. It's worth pointing out, for example, that the executive named in the suit was 38 in 2003 which means he's now 53.
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Guess you've been lucky.
Maybe. But you're assuming that the allegations are valid and also that they're systemic. I see no justification for either of those assumptions.
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The most likely case is you will be involuntary let go from your current job and then suddeny find none of your experience matters and you can't even get an interview.
Vanishingly unlikely in my case. My expertise (cryptographic security) is in very high demand across the industry. Moreover, my specific experience in Google over the last several has put me in close contact with lots of major industry players, and built up a lot of expertise and knowledge they'd love to have (nothing secret; it's all open source). I could have a dozen job offers next week, either contract or full-time, my choice.
I'm not claiming my position is typical. It's not. My career is hitting kind
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Two rounds of face to face interviews?
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those. IMHO, I knocked the first one out of the park. The second one was a bit tougher, but I think I came up with something useful. As near as I could tell really the main thing they were querying me for was knowledge of things like design
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Two rounds of face to face interviews?
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those.
You got two phone screens? That's unusual. The normal process is one phone screen to decide whether or not you are brought in for on-site interviews. The on-site interviews are the actual interviews. If you got a second phone screen, that's because the engineer who did the first one couldn't decide whether you should be brought on-site.
So, I think what happened was the first phone screen was so-so, and the interviewer couldn't make the call. Or maybe it was bad, but your resume was good enough that they t
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I have been approached many times (maybe 7?) by Google. I am now over 50! I'm not interested. I had to nominally get G's legal dept involved to stop the unwanted contacts... Got SPAMmed one more time by accident along with (apprently) ~1000 others recently by fumble-fingered recruiter... %-P
And aren't most people in white-collar jobs at peak earning potential in their 40s? I always assumed so. I have only worked a few weeks for anyone else in the last 30 years, but I always assumed something similar
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There are so many different programming languages ( Java, C#, Python, Scala, C++, Javascript, Fortran), API's and frameworks that are changng every six months, that it is more important to have someone with experience in the latest technology in the last few years that it is to have experience over 10 years.
you have to move around to get that kind of money (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you were lucky and smart enough to end up at Google, FB, Amazon, etc right out of high school, you definitely need to leave at least every 3 years in order to achieve maximum income by the time you are 45. I only have two years left, so I should really hurry up :)
Aww sheesh! (Score:2)
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Mine peaked at age 42, when I retired.
It is 10 yrs later and I've seen the world, hiked on 6 continents, and my list-o-things-to-do is 50x longer than it was when I was working.
People get stuck working far too long.
The 5 yrs that my stock investments earned more than my salary made it clear that I was wasting too much time working.
I'm not a billionaire. In fact, I'm in the low millions, but my lifestyle has contracted on spending to match.
Oh - and I'm 20x healthier than I was the last 10 yrs working. Drop
SV/Seattle, plus there's a natural cap (Score:2)
I think there's a bunch of factors at work.
- People working in Seattle, and SF/SV make tons of money because of that region's out-of-control housing market and other cost of living factors.
- If this is recent data, don't forget that this is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Large Seattle/SF/SV employers heavily favor younger workers and hip startup types. So, on average the age of people reporting high salaries will be lower, while their salaries will be comparatively higher. Microsoft and Amazon are throwing money
Be careful interpreting this! (Score:2)
You cannot conclude by looking at current salaries vs. age that the average person younger than the peak will peak at that point! The comparison across age is an apples and oranges one. The salary environment at the time you entered engineering has a long-term effect on your salary progress.
With that in mind, it is possible that the peak indicates older engineers took a bigger hit in 2009 and that starting salaries and early career raises have been growing faster than the salaries of experienced engineers i
After 50 or so you quit working so many hours (Score:2)
Or....you retire at 50-60, come back as a contractor, and pocket the whole rate (less income & self-employment taxes of course) because you've got benefits through your retirement or your spouse.
At least that's what controls engineers seem to do.
Makes sense to me (Score:1)
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I'd put my peak somewhat later, but I'm definitely going downhill. My manager still considers me middle of the pack, and it's a darn good pack, so I'm happy with that. I'm in my mid-60s and intend to retire next year.
Peak isn't static :) (Score:3)
A tale of three friends (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to the difference between the trades and college paths I am reminded of the story of three friends, of which I am one. We met in a community college trade program. All three of us were recently out of the military and drew together.
We had a similar starting point; but ended in different places. One of us went directly into a trade, repairing office equipment. Another bounced around a bit between various county and state technical jobs until he started his own HVAC business.
The friend who started his business was able to do it because his mother poured, quite literally, everything she had into his business to get him started. I remember delivering some of her personal jewelry to be sold in order to raise money for his business. He is now doing ok. We are all now in our 50s and he is pretty much completely broken down from the physical demand of his job. However, financially he is now stable (and has a lot of great guns, I love going out to his place just to see what he has added to his collection).
The other friend tried to stay in Office equipment too long. As he got older his numbers declined and he was let go right about 50. For reasons not understood by me, he decided to take that “opportunity” to get his college degree in a field that doesn’t hire people over 35 unless they are entering with a tremendous amount of experience. He is now delivering pizzas and struggling to hold onto his house.
Me, I saw the writing on the wall. Right around the time the company I was working for canceled the defined benefits pension program I looked around and realized that I saw no old guys. I went back to college and got my BA and eventually my MBA. I am not tall or good looking, I lack family connections and there was no way I could afford an expensive internship. I came from one of Americas poverty areas and, without question, it is part of who I am.
I was able to get a job teaching and took the accreditation over a period of a couple of years of evening courses. I now work as a teacher in rural district that, due to the number of immigrants, has many very urban problems.
What does this short biography have to do with the trades? Of the three of us one made it in the trades, mostly because his family had the resources to prop him up as long as it took to become stable. One just plain left, bounced around and left the trades. The other tried to stay until he was pushed out.
Those promoting trades, look around. Do you see many old guys in that trade? How many 60 year olds? How many 70 year olds? As we push up the national retirement age who is going to hire that 70 year old?
I do not think trades are wrong, what I think is wrong is how our society treats tradesmen. As long as people are nothing but disposable cogs to be discarded once they are worn I am concerned about the pure trades’ path. It can, and I think should, be part of a person’s life
Re:A tale of three friends (Score:4, Interesting)
In my area, most of the trades guys are in their 50's. Home Depot is now teaching classes for the millenials on how to use a measuring tape and hammer because they've never been exposed to them before.
The problem in the trades is that cheap labor gets the job every time. That means all those meth heads and ex-cons who can't find work elsewhere get picked up to swing a hammer for minimum wage. The quality of the work suffers but since everyone is hiring from the same bottom of the barrel that's what you get. The demand is high but they fill it with illegals rather than kids fresh out of school who 50 years ago would have been all over those jobs.
Your story though can be said of any profession. Every person our age older not in a management role is in danger. People think "wow they are middle age, why aren't they managers, what's wrong with them?" I was a manager, a good one. But I hated it. I'll never do it again unless I start my own business and set my own terms.
Article could be improved (Score:2)
I'm not sure what to make of some of the numbers from the article.
Salaries peak around age 45 and then level off or drop. Looking at the last chart, I see that salaries start leveling off at around age 35. The averages don't come with any confidence intervals so I'm not sure if any real conclusions about the trends can be made. There are also distributions in the survey responses, so maybe the median might be a more representative statistic.
The global average salary is hard to believe. All listed US cit
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I suspect that 45 is probably around the age at which most people stop improving. Young people are often motivated but ignorant. Older people are more experienced, but past a certain point (particularly in a tech field) experience doesn't add much because things have changed. Most of the things that you learn in 10 years of experience will be beneficial. In 20 years, a load of the stuff you learned early on will be either irrelevant or actively harmful. In 30 years, a lot of the stuff that you learned
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At the age of 54, I got a great job, although I was a bit under average salary for a while. I think it's a matter of luck and hair dye.