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Engineers Working Harder for Their Paycheck
Editorgirl35 writes to tell us Design News has posted their annual engineering salary survey. While it does offer encouraging results with salaries up a bit from last year it also shows that engineers are, on the average, doing a lot more to earn that paycheck including supervisory and budgetary functions. From the article: "Kody Baker, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer agrees, "Yes, we are doing far more than just designing products," he says. He's a project manager, manufacturing engineer, product designer, R&D engineer, test engineer, CAD systems specialist, CAD instructor/mentor, and more, juggling many roles in his job as a mechanical application engineer at Honeywell."
and the fact that your actual job duties will entail far more than what your job description said.
Seriously, someone managed to write an article about this concept?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
"Engineers earned an average of $73,000 last year," if you can find a job that pay the "average" salary, half of people that i know get far less than that.
What this may be showing is the trend towards smaller companies (already noted elsewhere) or larger companies using smaller, self-organized teams rather than groups of hundreds or thousands who have several layers of management for one project. My current project team has less than twenty staff assigned, including support and management -- and it's the largest team I've worked on since 1979.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think the reason we are less likely to acheive more net worth is because we all spend like drunken sailors. We spend every dime we get and when that isn't enough, we run up credit card debt at 20-30% interest (the mafia gives better rates). As an aside, we then wonder why our government carries on the same way. We get what we deserve.
I have to disagree, although I grant you it's true that *some* people are incredibly irresponsible when it comes to their finances.
... working 2 jobs and struggling like mad to keep our heads above water without stooping to government assistance and subsidized housing - but to an outsider, we appear to be fairly "middle class".
In the cases of most people I know (and even in my own case), we're in that majority of Americans who are expected to do more work for less pay - and yet, we're striving to scrape together some kind of lifestyle we aren't ashamed to have around our friends and family.
EG. I could theoretically "put away" more of each paycheck in investments, rather than spending all of it, BUT I'm just about out of corners I can cut. My current salary is thousands less per year than I was paid to do a job involving LESS responsibility, 6 or 7 years ago - and that's after a long stint of unemployment/self-employment and heavy job hunting. Meanwhile, gasoline costs roughly 3x as much as it did back then, and even little things like going out to lunch are about double the cost. (I remember around 1997 or 98, it was quite possible to buy lunch for under $4.00. I used to go to Subway and get a 6-inch cold cut trio sandwich with chips and a drink for about $3.90. To do the same today is around $6.00-$6.50 depending on the store and local taxes.) I get paid bi-weekly and the check I receive at the end of each month is completely wiped out by just my house payment, car payment, and my choice of one smaller bill such as electric, gas, or telephone. The other check is well over half gone just paying for my other utility bills and car insurance. That leaves me with maybe $300-400 for everything else, including groceries, gasoline, car repairs and maintenance, home repairs or improvement, and so on. And I don't even live in a good neighborhood or a "big house" by any means!
I have 2 credit cards, but one has only a $500 balance and the other a $250 balance. Even maxxing those out and paying their outrageous interest rates - that's not going to bury me financially. (And for the record, I have a 0 balance on the $500 limit card and try to keep it that way 90% of the time.)
It just bothers me to get "the lecture" from people about not saving for a "rainy day" -- when doing what they suggest would involve something like going without electricity for a month, or running out of food for my kid. There are a growing number of people out there just like me
Actually, the mafia has a tiered compounding interest rate for all of their loans..I've seen their policy. IIRC, the rate chart looks something like this:
1 week: Veiled threat to kill your family.
2 weeks: Tiretreads of a '76 Buick LeSabre or 82' Cadillac Deville over your arm
3 weeks: A lead pipe to the knee cap or lower back - your choice
4 weeks: Gunshot wound to your shoulder, courtesy of Bambino "the Stallion" Carmatsi
5 weeks: A free face stabbing
The chart I saw only has listing for the five weeks, but I hear they have long-term plans as well.
Have you ever considered personality might have something to do with it?
I know you're being humorous, but for those who don't know how these things work, organized crime very seldom breaks arms, or worse yet kills, over loansharking. Instead, they get the debtor to pay back, even if it looks like the debtor doesn't have the money.
For example, the borrower parks his car where it can be conveniently stolen, and waits to report it missing until the chop shop has had 48 hours to strip it. He then collects $20,000 in insurance, but somehow, he ends up driving an old beater. The rest of that payout goes to the loanshark. (The victim usually gets to keep a junker so he can keep working, to get those paychecks that will serve as part of the "renegotiated" payments).
Or, the debtor sells his house for $30,000 less than the going rate to a buyer his loan shark refers. The homebuyer gives an agent connected to the mob a fee of about $15,000 on that 30, for a sweet deal from his point of view. Under lots of pressure, the debtor passes on information that lets the mob rob his workplace, maybe leaves a door conveniently unlocked or even does the pilferage himself. Organized crime squeezes him like a sponge until they don't see anything left to bother with, and then he still gose on their bad list, and they will never loan him money again because they had to go to the trouble of squeezing.
If they can't get a good profit, THEN they get physical, but just like legitimate lenders, loansharks can run background checks and pre-inspect collateral, and they do. After all, it's far better to get the cash than vengance and a short envelope to pass uphill to the boss. Victims almost invariably have some way to give the loanshark at least 50% total profit.
"Getting closer to back on topic, "the mafia gives better rates" is the point. Organized crime still makes lots of money from illegal gambling, because they pay out 80% or better, and State lotteries pay only about 50% on average. Of course lots of Americans will work exceptionally hard for less chance of moving up with the company than in Canada (and parts of Western Europe, which the earlier poster didn't mention). Of course, the USA is where a company can offer people a chance to take a serious drop in salary to join management and get volunteers. Of course some companies can avoid union problems by co-opting employees to become pseudo-management. The same people who go along with all this are the ones who don't see how stupid state lotteries are. They're also the ones who could have saved enough for retirement, but never got around to it, etc.
Who is John Cabal?
I am not criticizing your overall cutting of corners, because I don't know what you are already doing, but sometimes when you think that you can't cut anymore corners, you actually can. You gave the example of Subway, and what the price is now. I actually go to Subway as well, but I don't get a drink; I drink water. If I want chips, I buy my own chips in bulk at the supermarket instead. That saves more than you might guess. It gets the price down to about what you used to pay for the meal with the drink. Yes, you did originally get the drink for the same price, but that doesn't mean that you really ever needed to. We Americans "just get the drink" due to habit, and this applies to many other categories of our spending in our daily lives as well. And, back to the Subway example, it is true that most businesses really do get your money with the pricing of their drinks. Speaking of which, all of the fast food options have high fructose corn syrup in them, which isn't good for us anyway, and extra calories.
Obviously, the above is not a solution to all of your problems, and I am not meaning it to be, but instead I am simply reminding everyone that EVERYTHING adds up, not just the big purchases. Good Luck!