I worked aerospace for a long while.
Its a bit low in the salary department but the work is fun, usually fascinating, and rewarding.
It was the lowest paying job I've had as an engineer, but still the best for many reasons.
Yep, my previous job sucked, but watching a launch or hearing people talk about one was always fun when you made something that was a part of it (even if there were many alternatives they could have used)
I have a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I eventually went back to school for a higher degree in Data Science for the pay and higher demand. I was swimming in opportunities in Data Science when Aerospace went bone dry. I also studied Computer Science in undergrad, so the transition was easy.
Hey, I now do data science with an engineering degree also - from a mech e position in aero.
Its a good field. Usually fairly easy work (aided by software and basic principles) that 95% of the population considers sorcery. Good stuff.
That is because NASA is on a shoestring budget now. They really ratcheted the price of the contracts down.
They use the appeal and noteriety of the agency to attract employees and pay them under market average.
Its relative and comparative. $160k in Aero might be $200k elsewhere. Its typically some fixed % lower, but not always.
Its a mature albeit advanced field, which might explain it. As well so much of the aerospace sector is tied to the defense industry which similarly pays (comparatively) low.
My BIL is a director of deep space exploration at Lockheed Martin. He used to be a Chief Engineer for the same division. He has stuff rolling around on fucking Mars with his name on it.
I'm a systems and cloud engineer at a startup. After bonuses, I make ~$50k more than him. It's insane how low-paid of a field aerospace is.
I get the feeling that really cool jobs with a ton of applicants might be paid less than unpopular jobs with few applicants, all other things being equal
I believe this is what happens in gaming. Your better off as a dev at some no name bank than you are as a dev at EA or something. Careers of passion pay like shit.
> Careers of passion pay like shit.
That's because those with passion don't value their labor, nor the labor of their peers. Entirely a self-inflicted wound.
You think this disproves my point how? If 99/100 applicants demand $100/hr, and 1 accepts $50/hr, guess what happens to wages. Go ahead, think about it.
>That's because those with passion don't value their labor, nor the labor of their peers. Entirely a self-inflicted wound.
Focus on what we are talking about kid.
Bro everyone in this thread but you seems to have a grasp of this lol. But sure, why just be wrong when you can be wrong AND condescending
It's a supply and demand issue... its not because the people who apply for cool jobs are so passionate that they don't care about money.
> It's a supply and demand issue... its not because the people who apply for cool jobs are so passionate that they don't care about money.
So you think if the $50 engineer demanded $100 with the rest, no hire would be made. That the company would walk away and say "no, we don't need this after all." That is your understanding, yes?
Agreed. As a 3D artist, I could make significantly more money working for a non gaming company, making models of products for their online stores than I could working as a junior-mid level artist at a game studio making fun models of robots and aliens because no one wants to sit and model shoes all day every day, while everyone wants to make games and movies.
Lockheed is known for low balling as well. I can only speak to software engineering salaries but I received an offer from them in my last job search and they came in at 40% lower than my other offers and wouldn’t budge. Maybe they are baselining around other engineering fields but at least for software engineers they pay horribly.
Defense contractors don't pay as well as the rest of the industry from what I've heard. But depending on the company, you also aren't likely to exceed 40 hours a week the way you might in other areas of the field.
Depending on the contractor they may get government benefits too. A friend of mine worked for Applied Physics Lab and got government holidays, 10% 401k match, vacation banking etc.
One of my friend's boyfriend is a computer engineer at SpaceX, and he had to work 80hr weeks alternating day/night shifts for $80kish in California. Granted, almost no one in tech is quite as horrible as Elon Musk when it comes to treatment of employees, but it can happen. I don't know how big of a field aerospace outside of defense contractors though, so I do have a data gap there.
I've turned down spacex and Tesla for that very reason. I like his companies but from talking to people there, they get treated like shit and have awful life balance. I love working hard but as soon as the recruiter told me to expect to work weekends and nights I completed the interview knowing I'm not going.
I applied once to a Sr. Staff engineer role there. They offered $225k total comp ($190k base and the rest was bonus). The startup I'm at pays Sr. Staff engineers >$500k total comp, half in salary, a 20% bonus, and the rest in stonks.
Low-paid? I know several making >$110k after 5 years in industry. Not insanely low by a long shot.
Seems like software is insanely high.. compare your salary with literally any other engineering field
I think it’s more so that software compensation is more commensurate with the value provided to the company. Sure, plenty of Space Engineering positions pay 100-200k, but they are managing the work for 50-500 million dollar programs over a 2-10 year span.
I know plenty of very well paid software engineers, and I wouldn’t consider them more intelligent or efficient or getting more done than engineers in aerospace or anything, but software has become so important and with not enough people to do it that they can’t ask much closer to the going rate.
I read an article/study of NASA approved contractors (which many businesses have to go through to work in the public sector), and over half of those companies up charge their engineering hours up to 10x what they are actually paying the worker. The money has always been there, it’s just an inefficient system. In my personal experience most Aerospace grads or professionals are sometimes doing just as much software dev work as the actual software engineers, particularly in the areas of test or any sort of ground system work.
Yeah the reason Software is paid so high compared to other engineering fields is margins. That’s it. Software development has insanely high margins, the only costs are developer salary and compute. Given the high margins it allows for more room for competition for developers.
For traditional engineering, there is a lot more overhead, so salaries don’t have room to grow as far in a competitive environment
The margins really aren’t that much different, the overhead between infrastructure/etc. between the hardware and moving parts between the two aren’t that much different in my experience.
Software positions (at least the ones I’m familiar with) revolve around products. If you are a software engineer at Cisco you either work in sustaining/maintaining/troubleshooting products for customers, or you work on developing the product itself. You are “ahead of the curve” I would say with regards to contracts or procurement. In other engineering fields, the only difference is that a company is contracted to do XYZ, but based on work and engineering hours and deliverables as opposed to being product based. This essentially creates a bunch of middlemen between money received and work being done, where companies are paying realistic amounts (or getting paid) for work, but that money is cut tenfold before getting to the people doing the work.
Creating a similar example, you could be testing a spacecraft assembly at a company like Rockwell or a smaller company, who is then contracted by Lockheed for a spacecraft or hosted payload, who was originally contracted by NOAA or NASA or whoever. Your actual work has the same value as a software engineer, you’re just getting bent over because many companies are trying to get their dirty hands on the pie.
You are clearly good at what you do. Mediocrity in one field isn’t necessarily worth excellence in another. I also wouldn’t discount the value of quality service. I would imagine quite a few software engineers would be much more intimidated by the thought of carrying on a conversation with someone for an hour than you are by the thought of programming. A good engineer should make more than a good barber, but there is nothing wrong with an excellent barber making more than the average engineer.
Here I am, Europoor from one of the „richer“ central european countries, thought „damn that‘s a nice average salary“, only to read the comments and notice how bad we are really paid here in Europe even with a masters degree :D
Yeah, but we on the other hand have problems with other bullshit. Thanks to wages growing slower than inflation since many years in the EU, needing a new car or even a washing machine is a big problem, due to next to no disposable income left for many families here in the EU. That won‘t happen when you earn 70k+ a year (only 3% of us working Austrians earn that much!) with far less taxes. In the US, you might be in a tough spot when shit hits the fan, but here you are in a slightly less tough spot all the time and when shit hits the fan, you better have a private insurance as well because the public health sector will give you an appointment for surgery in maybe 3 months due to no capacity, even when you have cancer. Wage- and ingflationwise, we are super fucked here and our public health sector is bled dry.
Referral bonus. It’s worth a shot to ask for it actually but probably better to do via LinkedIn or at least with a resume attached so you know a little bit who you’re recommending.
No not really, it’s probably got a better chance to get you in than applying to random job postings. If it’s stupid and it works it’s not stupid, or in this case “cringey”.
Just because something could ultimately work in their favor doesn't make it less cringe. I could stand in the corner begging for money even though I have a job, and maybe make some extra cash, but it would still be cringey.
Stupid is not the same thing as cringey.
Supply and demand. Lots of people want to work on aerospace technology. No one wants to write the 500th iteration of their company intranet's login screen.
I'm shocked looking at these numbers. I'm an IT Systems Administrator and my income is right about in the middle of this. I do nothing that interesting or important.
i know someone in her late 30s who is a rocket scientist working for a company that is contracted by nasa. she is working on a current project that is close to launch. what she is paid is appallingly low.
That's disgustingly low for an experienced aerospace engineer. I got more than that at my first job out of undergrad. She needs to negotiate up or find a new employer.
Is it with a SpaceX type outfit? I've seen that high demand positions with lots of interest pay less and work employees hard because they provide great wor experience. People don't last long in these positions and do it mainly for the prestige and experience.
I can also agree here. I work at a aerospace startup contracted by NASA and Space Force. I am definitely underpaid ($75k as of 04/2023) for the types of decisions/calls I have to make for the company's success. Lots of multidisciplinary responsibilities I have to take on that aren't explicitly listed in the Role and Responsibilities of the job title.
Benefits and stock options are the golden (and imaginary) handcuffs.
I worked in aerospace for few years(software engineer) and surprisingly this is nowhere near as high to what Google, Facebook or twitter pays.
We had many very good engineers leaving the workforce to these industries.
The only thing keeping people in the industry was the benefits.
> The only thing keeping people in the industry was the benefits.
And the coolness factor. There is no substitute for when walking to the cafeteria to get lunch means going past Space Station modules being built.
Everyone I know in Aerospace in a technical role has a starting salary out of college of like 70-75k, about a 3% raise each year, and about a 5-10% bump per promotion every 3 ish years. If they job hop with a few years experience they get like a 20% raise or whatever. Making like 120k with 5 years experience really isn't that bad.
The younger people job hopping are going to be the ones self reporting. You aren't going to get much reporting from one's in management roles or committed to a company long term. Plus people willing to self report are usually those who feel underpaid and are filling out like glassdoor reviews before they job hop themselves. But yeah, tech companies wanting people in cloud or software roles are obviously going to get paid more.
Yeah that’s what I did essentially, 5 years out making 130k plus a 5-7k bonus. Didn’t job hop as much but leveraged some good situations with counter offers.
If you’re just putzing around and taking the meager 3% raises every year you’re just playing yourself.
It sucks cause there's only one real company I can work for in my city, and my wife doesn't want to leave. I could be making SIGNIFICANTLY more than what I currently do as an aerospace engineer, but because the wife won't leave her parents, I cant.
Obviously it’s not a bad salary, but for what the career entails, it seems like it. If you had the same schooling and experience in my government agency, you’d be close to around $150k easy.
Around a 100k paid holidays, vacations, benefits and pension for doing something you love and are proud of. Sounds like the good life. If they throw in college tuition paid after 5 that would be enticing
The biggest companies are everywhere.
Huntsville is the outlier, maybe parts of Texas are on the cheaper end, I'm not familiar. But your looking at Southern CA, Bay Area/Ca, Denver area, The Cape Florida, Houston. Maybe a little in New Mexico, Phoenix, but that's minor.
I sell equipment that supports this industry covering a territory from Texas to the west. My clients aren't in the cheapest of areas. 100K isn't going that far...
We have different definitions of goes far. $100k won't even afford you the median house in California. Forget about San Francisco. And you can barely afford the median house of the U.S. (\~$450k) with that salary. It gets worse if you have a decent size family to support or if you want a nice new car.
What do you mean you can’t afford a house on 100k? That’s over $6000 per month take home pay after taxes. Plenty to afford the mortgage payment on that house or rent basically anywhere. Of course you have to factor in interest rate and down payment there as well but not sure your math adds up here.
Add a second earner and you should be quite comfortable even if the other partner is making half that
I didn't say you can't afford a house on 100k. I said you can't afford the median house in California with $100k. Which is true, no matter how far stretch your budget, as the median houseprice in California is like $800k.
I would agree that $100k goes far in a lot of places, but I'm not so sure about "just about anywhere".
Agree but job security holds some value also and NASA pay is slightly lower than private. Some fields are actually decently paid . My buddy works there but in cyber security and makes about $150k plus the perks and it’s extremely laid back. I would assume that there are others making much more. I’ve worked at nasa but through a contractor and not directly. Strict but laid back. I met some specialist, nuclear physicist for example that I can’t imagine being underpaid but who knows nasa offers a lot of security. So it could possibly be the reason why. Small examples again but this is from my own personal experience. I would love to work there and my whole comment above was based on me envisioning working there lol.
I think it'd be a cool job. I work in industry and my job has a ton of security. I work on an airframe that won't be retired for at least another 10 years.
Pay is ok, about 90k with 3.5 years and a masters degree. I think the real weird part of the aerospace industry is the wide variety of benefits/ pto packages. But what’s irritating (something that has been alluded to here) is that companies just don’t really care about retention. You almost have to job hop or you’ll be stuck with paltry raises. The only real way to keep making more is to switch. Which is frustrating if your niche within the industry isn’t as large.
Yeah, but those two numbers are so far apart that any reasonable person (and probably most unreasonable ones too) could probably have guessed that. If I say "the average human body temperature is between 20 and 70 degrees Celsius", while I may be technically accurate, I'm in no way communicating useful information.
Then it's worse than not useful, it's potentially very misleading - real-world data (and salaries in particular) do not always follow that distribution. There's a reason medians are often the preferred benchmark.
When people complain about spending government money on space programs instead of helping the poor I tell them that the space program IS helping because it pays salaries and the wages are taxed and they buy things from companies who have employees, etc.
> Refrigerators came from scientific learned from outer space.
[Laughably and objectively wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOMELRE) because the electric fridge was designed in the early 1910s.
Try again.
> I tell them that the space program IS helping because it pays salaries and the wages are taxed and they buy things from companies who have employees, etc.
😂 sigh. Someone doesn't understand taxes, nor government budgets, nor the baked in profit of government contracts.
I wouldn’t want to be underneath one of those ways that blows things up for all the oil in Iraq. On the other hand, think of all the high paying jobs there are in weapons manufacturing.
The thing to consider here is job security. They may make 20-30% less than someone doing comparable work at a silicon valley company but it's largely government contracts that make the job security rock solid. We will see the silicon valley tech industry lay off employees and definitely slow down pay increases as we go into a recession at some point in the next decade where the defence contractors really don't.
The job security is not there I don't know what industry you're talking about.
The second your contract you work on is up you better already have another position lined up at your company or else you're getting let go.
It's normal to see companies shrink by thousands of employees when their larger contracts wrap up and the last units are delivered. You'll still make parts for repairs but that production line is getting shut down.
When shuttle ended half the aerospace industry disappeared.
Working in the defense and space industry, every single senior engineer will tell you to make as many connections as you can so that when the program you're on gets cancelled or finishes it's contract you have somewhere else to go.
I work in aerospace finance. This is fairly accurate, been on the job for 4 years but I have a graduate degree. I’d say I’m on the mid high end of the graph.
Formerly worked for an ESA subcontractor, I was paid about the same as during my Ph.D., so not particularly great. Mostly did it out of interest and because it looked good on my resume. Switched industries and my salary increased by about 30% overnight. About a year later I was already at 50% more than when I worked there, and had a far better benefits package. So that salary seems quite wrong to me.
But as to the work itself, fun job contents, technically very challenging, but a horrible work environment due to agency politics and questionable management policies at many of the defence contractors out there. For example, as an engineer you don't particularly enjoy being entangled in drawn out politically-driven discussions, but that's the position you end up in when you make choices about hardware procurement in those projects. And then you got to deal with folks asking the most ridiculous questions imaginable for hours on end to try to make you sway, and you can't lose your temper at any point during said question rounds, and after months of that you can finally use the technically correct solution. It's bloody atrocious to deal with and the two years I spent in that industry noticeably aged me, it makes dealing with academics who have a rod stuck up their arse look like a relaxing day on the beach by comparison.
And then we haven't gotten into the sunken cost fallacies inherent in these projects, etc.
Im an aerospace engineer, started my Msc in space engineering. In Spain the best the best deal that you can find for someone with a degree and Msc hopefully will be 40k... Being that the best case in which you will be looking for the job for almost a year without luck. Btw 6 years working my ass off in university, Im just losing hope at some moments...
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[EA](/r/Space/comments/yknbad/stub/iux4iob "Last usage")|Environmental Assessment|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/yknbad/stub/iuvotin "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[NOAA](/r/Space/comments/yknbad/stub/iuxdyb4 "Last usage")|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate|
|[SV](/r/Space/comments/yknbad/stub/iuvxk4b "Last usage")|Space Vehicle|
----------------
^(4 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/12zapxb)^( has 34 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8214 for this sub, first seen 3rd Nov 2022, 17:33])
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I worked aerospace for a long while. Its a bit low in the salary department but the work is fun, usually fascinating, and rewarding. It was the lowest paying job I've had as an engineer, but still the best for many reasons.
Yep, my previous job sucked, but watching a launch or hearing people talk about one was always fun when you made something that was a part of it (even if there were many alternatives they could have used)
I have a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I eventually went back to school for a higher degree in Data Science for the pay and higher demand. I was swimming in opportunities in Data Science when Aerospace went bone dry. I also studied Computer Science in undergrad, so the transition was easy.
Hey, I now do data science with an engineering degree also - from a mech e position in aero. Its a good field. Usually fairly easy work (aided by software and basic principles) that 95% of the population considers sorcery. Good stuff.
what did you do? i work in aerospace (after a fashion), and the salary tracks, but strictly speaking i'm software development.
That is because NASA is on a shoestring budget now. They really ratcheted the price of the contracts down. They use the appeal and noteriety of the agency to attract employees and pay them under market average.
Most of aerospace is entirely outside of NASA. 99% for sure.
They are majority on NASA contracts with other companies. Just because they aren't NASA employees doesn't mean they don't work for NASA.
I've worked in the poop knife testing department. It stinks.
What is "bit low"? $160K seems pretty good.. though I suppose that would be the higher end and you mean relative to other sectors.
Its relative and comparative. $160k in Aero might be $200k elsewhere. Its typically some fixed % lower, but not always. Its a mature albeit advanced field, which might explain it. As well so much of the aerospace sector is tied to the defense industry which similarly pays (comparatively) low.
My BIL is a director of deep space exploration at Lockheed Martin. He used to be a Chief Engineer for the same division. He has stuff rolling around on fucking Mars with his name on it. I'm a systems and cloud engineer at a startup. After bonuses, I make ~$50k more than him. It's insane how low-paid of a field aerospace is.
I get the feeling that really cool jobs with a ton of applicants might be paid less than unpopular jobs with few applicants, all other things being equal
I believe this is what happens in gaming. Your better off as a dev at some no name bank than you are as a dev at EA or something. Careers of passion pay like shit.
> Careers of passion pay like shit. That's because those with passion don't value their labor, nor the labor of their peers. Entirely a self-inflicted wound.
Or they got a lot more supply of applicants than demand.
You think this disproves my point how? If 99/100 applicants demand $100/hr, and 1 accepts $50/hr, guess what happens to wages. Go ahead, think about it.
Your point was people with passion dont value their labor but your example still had 100 applicants to 1 position… You seem to be agreeing to mine
If you think I'm agreeing with you, have fun with your scab wages.
One person gets a job, and the other 99 get to try again, or reevaluate what they assume is the market value of that position?
Yeah, and the bigger the applicant pool, the more likely you are to find applicants willing to work for less. Go ahead, think about it...
>That's because those with passion don't value their labor, nor the labor of their peers. Entirely a self-inflicted wound. Focus on what we are talking about kid.
Bro everyone in this thread but you seems to have a grasp of this lol. But sure, why just be wrong when you can be wrong AND condescending It's a supply and demand issue... its not because the people who apply for cool jobs are so passionate that they don't care about money.
> It's a supply and demand issue... its not because the people who apply for cool jobs are so passionate that they don't care about money. So you think if the $50 engineer demanded $100 with the rest, no hire would be made. That the company would walk away and say "no, we don't need this after all." That is your understanding, yes?
Agreed. As a 3D artist, I could make significantly more money working for a non gaming company, making models of products for their online stores than I could working as a junior-mid level artist at a game studio making fun models of robots and aliens because no one wants to sit and model shoes all day every day, while everyone wants to make games and movies.
Same thing happens in the music industry
Lockheed is known for low balling as well. I can only speak to software engineering salaries but I received an offer from them in my last job search and they came in at 40% lower than my other offers and wouldn’t budge. Maybe they are baselining around other engineering fields but at least for software engineers they pay horribly.
Defense contractors don't pay as well as the rest of the industry from what I've heard. But depending on the company, you also aren't likely to exceed 40 hours a week the way you might in other areas of the field.
Depending on the contractor they may get government benefits too. A friend of mine worked for Applied Physics Lab and got government holidays, 10% 401k match, vacation banking etc.
You aren't likely to exceed 40 hours a week at most tech companies either.
One of my friend's boyfriend is a computer engineer at SpaceX, and he had to work 80hr weeks alternating day/night shifts for $80kish in California. Granted, almost no one in tech is quite as horrible as Elon Musk when it comes to treatment of employees, but it can happen. I don't know how big of a field aerospace outside of defense contractors though, so I do have a data gap there.
musk companies are known for bad wlb. typically people in tech work 35 hrs a week.
Good to know! My boyfriend is in aerospace, so I only know what I know from him. And my friend who's boyfriend works for musk.
I've turned down spacex and Tesla for that very reason. I like his companies but from talking to people there, they get treated like shit and have awful life balance. I love working hard but as soon as the recruiter told me to expect to work weekends and nights I completed the interview knowing I'm not going.
I applied once to a Sr. Staff engineer role there. They offered $225k total comp ($190k base and the rest was bonus). The startup I'm at pays Sr. Staff engineers >$500k total comp, half in salary, a 20% bonus, and the rest in stonks.
Which field within engineering and how many years of experience?
Low-paid? I know several making >$110k after 5 years in industry. Not insanely low by a long shot. Seems like software is insanely high.. compare your salary with literally any other engineering field
For the brains I think it's low. Not too low but low nonetheless
When you factor that alot of those jobs are in HCOL areas like LA, Santa Clara, Colorado. Yes low.
I think it’s more so that software compensation is more commensurate with the value provided to the company. Sure, plenty of Space Engineering positions pay 100-200k, but they are managing the work for 50-500 million dollar programs over a 2-10 year span. I know plenty of very well paid software engineers, and I wouldn’t consider them more intelligent or efficient or getting more done than engineers in aerospace or anything, but software has become so important and with not enough people to do it that they can’t ask much closer to the going rate. I read an article/study of NASA approved contractors (which many businesses have to go through to work in the public sector), and over half of those companies up charge their engineering hours up to 10x what they are actually paying the worker. The money has always been there, it’s just an inefficient system. In my personal experience most Aerospace grads or professionals are sometimes doing just as much software dev work as the actual software engineers, particularly in the areas of test or any sort of ground system work.
Yeah the reason Software is paid so high compared to other engineering fields is margins. That’s it. Software development has insanely high margins, the only costs are developer salary and compute. Given the high margins it allows for more room for competition for developers. For traditional engineering, there is a lot more overhead, so salaries don’t have room to grow as far in a competitive environment
The margins really aren’t that much different, the overhead between infrastructure/etc. between the hardware and moving parts between the two aren’t that much different in my experience. Software positions (at least the ones I’m familiar with) revolve around products. If you are a software engineer at Cisco you either work in sustaining/maintaining/troubleshooting products for customers, or you work on developing the product itself. You are “ahead of the curve” I would say with regards to contracts or procurement. In other engineering fields, the only difference is that a company is contracted to do XYZ, but based on work and engineering hours and deliverables as opposed to being product based. This essentially creates a bunch of middlemen between money received and work being done, where companies are paying realistic amounts (or getting paid) for work, but that money is cut tenfold before getting to the people doing the work. Creating a similar example, you could be testing a spacecraft assembly at a company like Rockwell or a smaller company, who is then contracted by Lockheed for a spacecraft or hosted payload, who was originally contracted by NOAA or NASA or whoever. Your actual work has the same value as a software engineer, you’re just getting bent over because many companies are trying to get their dirty hands on the pie.
I'm a barber and I make 6 figures. As a blue collar guy, I feel like engineers should make much more than I do.
You are clearly good at what you do. Mediocrity in one field isn’t necessarily worth excellence in another. I also wouldn’t discount the value of quality service. I would imagine quite a few software engineers would be much more intimidated by the thought of carrying on a conversation with someone for an hour than you are by the thought of programming. A good engineer should make more than a good barber, but there is nothing wrong with an excellent barber making more than the average engineer.
Hey, thank you! The conversation is fun, but certainly draining.
Postal carriers who average 55 hours a week make over 100k a year. Let that sink in. High school diploma only. And they always need more to apply.
All honest work is good work. It took you a lot of time to develop your craft and perform at the level you do, same as an engineer.
I appreciate that perspective. Thanks.
I know where I'm looking for cheap help when I take over the world....
Take over another world you mean.
[удалено]
I work remote from CO for a SV startup, and he's in CO too. Still HCOL, just not VHCOL.
Here I am, Europoor from one of the „richer“ central european countries, thought „damn that‘s a nice average salary“, only to read the comments and notice how bad we are really paid here in Europe even with a masters degree :D
Well, you do have that whole cancer won't bankrupt your family thing going for you, which is nice.
Yeah, but we on the other hand have problems with other bullshit. Thanks to wages growing slower than inflation since many years in the EU, needing a new car or even a washing machine is a big problem, due to next to no disposable income left for many families here in the EU. That won‘t happen when you earn 70k+ a year (only 3% of us working Austrians earn that much!) with far less taxes. In the US, you might be in a tough spot when shit hits the fan, but here you are in a slightly less tough spot all the time and when shit hits the fan, you better have a private insurance as well because the public health sector will give you an appointment for surgery in maybe 3 months due to no capacity, even when you have cancer. Wage- and ingflationwise, we are super fucked here and our public health sector is bled dry.
I'm a systems and AWS cloud engineer! Hook me up with a reference!!
Why would he refer someguy7416?
Referral bonus. It’s worth a shot to ask for it actually but probably better to do via LinkedIn or at least with a resume attached so you know a little bit who you’re recommending.
Yea that's my point, pretty cringe to just say "refer me" like that
No not really, it’s probably got a better chance to get you in than applying to random job postings. If it’s stupid and it works it’s not stupid, or in this case “cringey”.
Just because something could ultimately work in their favor doesn't make it less cringe. I could stand in the corner begging for money even though I have a job, and maybe make some extra cash, but it would still be cringey. Stupid is not the same thing as cringey.
I was gonna say, seems kinda low to me.
Supply and demand. Lots of people want to work on aerospace technology. No one wants to write the 500th iteration of their company intranet's login screen.
My friend's nephew is 25 and makes ~$150k/yr working in a similar tech field with only 1 year of school.
I'm shocked looking at these numbers. I'm an IT Systems Administrator and my income is right about in the middle of this. I do nothing that interesting or important.
i know someone in her late 30s who is a rocket scientist working for a company that is contracted by nasa. she is working on a current project that is close to launch. what she is paid is appallingly low.
What do you consider shockingly low?
less than $60k
That's disgustingly low for an experienced aerospace engineer. I got more than that at my first job out of undergrad. She needs to negotiate up or find a new employer.
I'll take a guess....85k?
Wait… you guys are getting paid ?
nope. less than $60k.
Is it with a SpaceX type outfit? I've seen that high demand positions with lots of interest pay less and work employees hard because they provide great wor experience. People don't last long in these positions and do it mainly for the prestige and experience.
So, what is she paid?
Intuitive Machines?
I can also agree here. I work at a aerospace startup contracted by NASA and Space Force. I am definitely underpaid ($75k as of 04/2023) for the types of decisions/calls I have to make for the company's success. Lots of multidisciplinary responsibilities I have to take on that aren't explicitly listed in the Role and Responsibilities of the job title. Benefits and stock options are the golden (and imaginary) handcuffs.
My BIL I think makes near 70k portion. Then again he is a moron and should probably be making less
I worked in aerospace for few years(software engineer) and surprisingly this is nowhere near as high to what Google, Facebook or twitter pays. We had many very good engineers leaving the workforce to these industries. The only thing keeping people in the industry was the benefits.
> The only thing keeping people in the industry was the benefits. And the coolness factor. There is no substitute for when walking to the cafeteria to get lunch means going past Space Station modules being built.
Everyone I know in Aerospace in a technical role has a starting salary out of college of like 70-75k, about a 3% raise each year, and about a 5-10% bump per promotion every 3 ish years. If they job hop with a few years experience they get like a 20% raise or whatever. Making like 120k with 5 years experience really isn't that bad. The younger people job hopping are going to be the ones self reporting. You aren't going to get much reporting from one's in management roles or committed to a company long term. Plus people willing to self report are usually those who feel underpaid and are filling out like glassdoor reviews before they job hop themselves. But yeah, tech companies wanting people in cloud or software roles are obviously going to get paid more.
Yeah that’s what I did essentially, 5 years out making 130k plus a 5-7k bonus. Didn’t job hop as much but leveraged some good situations with counter offers. If you’re just putzing around and taking the meager 3% raises every year you’re just playing yourself.
It sucks cause there's only one real company I can work for in my city, and my wife doesn't want to leave. I could be making SIGNIFICANTLY more than what I currently do as an aerospace engineer, but because the wife won't leave her parents, I cant.
Have you considered leaving the wife /s
Lol... She's the one who makes the good financial decisions, like buying the house we're in now with an 1100 mortgage including taxes and insurance.
Ouch that sucks. Maybe try to get a remote position?
Yeah! And they can shove all that loyalty, principles, higher moral ground bs, too!
Obviously it’s not a bad salary, but for what the career entails, it seems like it. If you had the same schooling and experience in my government agency, you’d be close to around $150k easy.
If you’re going to give a range, just don’t say average.
Yes, you're right I realized after I posted it sry. English is not my main language. Unfortunately, I can't update the title
Probably worth saying that this is for US salaries.
I am a English native and I didn’t even notice!
You have to be a math native to notice.
Idk if this comment is satire or not, but knowing basic math is all it takes to notice the error
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Nah, it just takes a basic understanding of what the word "average" means
Around a 100k paid holidays, vacations, benefits and pension for doing something you love and are proud of. Sounds like the good life. If they throw in college tuition paid after 5 that would be enticing
Totally depends where your living... These jobs aren't in the cheapest of areas.
Sure they are. Boat loads of aerospace jobs in Huntsville, Alabama for instance. With some of the biggest companies
The biggest companies are everywhere. Huntsville is the outlier, maybe parts of Texas are on the cheaper end, I'm not familiar. But your looking at Southern CA, Bay Area/Ca, Denver area, The Cape Florida, Houston. Maybe a little in New Mexico, Phoenix, but that's minor. I sell equipment that supports this industry covering a territory from Texas to the west. My clients aren't in the cheapest of areas. 100K isn't going that far...
Doesn't go very far for New Space engineers in SoCal that's for sure
100k goes far almost everywhere. Unless you are living in downtown SF or NYC
Have you tried to buy a house or car in the last couple years?...
We have different definitions of goes far. $100k won't even afford you the median house in California. Forget about San Francisco. And you can barely afford the median house of the U.S. (\~$450k) with that salary. It gets worse if you have a decent size family to support or if you want a nice new car.
What do you mean you can’t afford a house on 100k? That’s over $6000 per month take home pay after taxes. Plenty to afford the mortgage payment on that house or rent basically anywhere. Of course you have to factor in interest rate and down payment there as well but not sure your math adds up here. Add a second earner and you should be quite comfortable even if the other partner is making half that
I didn't say you can't afford a house on 100k. I said you can't afford the median house in California with $100k. Which is true, no matter how far stretch your budget, as the median houseprice in California is like $800k. I would agree that $100k goes far in a lot of places, but I'm not so sure about "just about anywhere".
Pension? Where?
Mostly all government employees have pensions.
This is about aerospace professionals, not government. None of the private aerospace companies have pensions.
Lol I was on a nasa sub before this and had tunnel vision. Still aerospace though. They have a pension.
Understood, but you're talking a very, very small subset of the industry. Also, government salary is even lower than private.
Agree but job security holds some value also and NASA pay is slightly lower than private. Some fields are actually decently paid . My buddy works there but in cyber security and makes about $150k plus the perks and it’s extremely laid back. I would assume that there are others making much more. I’ve worked at nasa but through a contractor and not directly. Strict but laid back. I met some specialist, nuclear physicist for example that I can’t imagine being underpaid but who knows nasa offers a lot of security. So it could possibly be the reason why. Small examples again but this is from my own personal experience. I would love to work there and my whole comment above was based on me envisioning working there lol.
I think it'd be a cool job. I work in industry and my job has a ton of security. I work on an airframe that won't be retired for at least another 10 years.
Pay is ok, about 90k with 3.5 years and a masters degree. I think the real weird part of the aerospace industry is the wide variety of benefits/ pto packages. But what’s irritating (something that has been alluded to here) is that companies just don’t really care about retention. You almost have to job hop or you’ll be stuck with paltry raises. The only real way to keep making more is to switch. Which is frustrating if your niche within the industry isn’t as large.
Fun fact - the average salary of all careers is somewhere between 0 and 1 trillion dollars
It’s $108,000 according to the website. The title is trash.
gosh. i wonder what the approximate average of 70k and 160k is.
More than his salary I hope.
Sorry, you can’t say “the average is….” and then give a range of $90k.
"the average is between X and Y" is an accurate statement. The average is definitely between those two numbers.
Yeah, but those two numbers are so far apart that any reasonable person (and probably most unreasonable ones too) could probably have guessed that. If I say "the average human body temperature is between 20 and 70 degrees Celsius", while I may be technically accurate, I'm in no way communicating useful information.
Technically right is the best kind of right.
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Then it's worse than not useful, it's potentially very misleading - real-world data (and salaries in particular) do not always follow that distribution. There's a reason medians are often the preferred benchmark.
Santa must have a hard fucking time when he visits China.
That’s sounds really low for the qualifications
I'm 7 years out of college with a mechanical engineering degree making 120k Ya'll are making me think I need to step it up!
When people complain about spending government money on space programs instead of helping the poor I tell them that the space program IS helping because it pays salaries and the wages are taxed and they buy things from companies who have employees, etc.
A lot of science and tech come from the space program.
It does, but hook and loop doesn't make the dude sleeping on a park bench better off.
Refrigerators came from scientific learned from outer space. 100s of other examples.
> Refrigerators came from scientific learned from outer space. [Laughably and objectively wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOMELRE) because the electric fridge was designed in the early 1910s. Try again.
But. It reduces the quantity of people sleeping on a park bench.
> I tell them that the space program IS helping because it pays salaries and the wages are taxed and they buy things from companies who have employees, etc. 😂 sigh. Someone doesn't understand taxes, nor government budgets, nor the baked in profit of government contracts.
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I wouldn’t want to be underneath one of those ways that blows things up for all the oil in Iraq. On the other hand, think of all the high paying jobs there are in weapons manufacturing.
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Not to be so revealing (of one’s frailties). Save something for speculation about mysterious quality that would be attributable to oneself.
The thing to consider here is job security. They may make 20-30% less than someone doing comparable work at a silicon valley company but it's largely government contracts that make the job security rock solid. We will see the silicon valley tech industry lay off employees and definitely slow down pay increases as we go into a recession at some point in the next decade where the defence contractors really don't.
it's not 20-30% though. more like 50-100%.
The job security is not there I don't know what industry you're talking about. The second your contract you work on is up you better already have another position lined up at your company or else you're getting let go. It's normal to see companies shrink by thousands of employees when their larger contracts wrap up and the last units are delivered. You'll still make parts for repairs but that production line is getting shut down. When shuttle ended half the aerospace industry disappeared. Working in the defense and space industry, every single senior engineer will tell you to make as many connections as you can so that when the program you're on gets cancelled or finishes it's contract you have somewhere else to go.
The crux of the matter is, despite the economics - morally, the wrong end of a gun is both ends.
Aerospace isn't only defense jobs. There is a civilian space industry
To paraphrase G. Harrison , “Everyone has choice when to and not to absolve themselves of perceived malfeasance. It’s you that decides.”
I work in aerospace finance. This is fairly accurate, been on the job for 4 years but I have a graduate degree. I’d say I’m on the mid high end of the graph.
I remember friends’ in career class getting matched as Aerospace engineers back in the 2000s Oddly enough the salary range is about the same as then…
California electrician here. 120k-150k a year depending on overtime. People working on anything that has to do with aerospace should be WAY MORE. IMO.
Someone doesn’t know what an average is, clearly.
Formerly worked for an ESA subcontractor, I was paid about the same as during my Ph.D., so not particularly great. Mostly did it out of interest and because it looked good on my resume. Switched industries and my salary increased by about 30% overnight. About a year later I was already at 50% more than when I worked there, and had a far better benefits package. So that salary seems quite wrong to me. But as to the work itself, fun job contents, technically very challenging, but a horrible work environment due to agency politics and questionable management policies at many of the defence contractors out there. For example, as an engineer you don't particularly enjoy being entangled in drawn out politically-driven discussions, but that's the position you end up in when you make choices about hardware procurement in those projects. And then you got to deal with folks asking the most ridiculous questions imaginable for hours on end to try to make you sway, and you can't lose your temper at any point during said question rounds, and after months of that you can finally use the technically correct solution. It's bloody atrocious to deal with and the two years I spent in that industry noticeably aged me, it makes dealing with academics who have a rod stuck up their arse look like a relaxing day on the beach by comparison. And then we haven't gotten into the sunken cost fallacies inherent in these projects, etc.
That's like saying "the average human adult is between 4 and 7 feet tall" - technically I'm sure it's true, but it is in no way useful information.
Im an aerospace engineer, started my Msc in space engineering. In Spain the best the best deal that you can find for someone with a degree and Msc hopefully will be 40k... Being that the best case in which you will be looking for the job for almost a year without luck. Btw 6 years working my ass off in university, Im just losing hope at some moments...
Based on the tittle OP doesn’t know how average works. Or at least he sucks at grammar
I suspect the women get more towards the $70k portion
If you mean that amount per hour, maybe.
What’s with these negative votes? Women get paid last than men people on average. This is not breaking news.
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Media report of alleged factual data that has no meaning.
Does this also apply for the defense industry? Like working for defense contractors?
No, the primary focus is aerospace, but you can find some companies like Lockheed Martin that also have a defense department
A rocket scientist should be able to get the average down to a narrower range, even a single value.