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My cousin accepted his first Engineering Job last month and the pay was $55k which is really low for an Electrical Engineer. I got paid $50k out of school in 1999 and money has lost 50% of the value. His first job offer with $75k salary in March was rescinded and he had a real tough time getting interviews after that. So I would say Covid-19 has really hurt the job market for new college graduates.
Decent enough for your younger years. After a while, your knees give out.
Yup, I come from a family of tradespeople, i'm the first college educated male. Knees, back, other health problems, etc. Money is good, but during recessions, you could be riding the bench for a while. Gotta deal with politics, especially if union. Advice is to make that money and invest it, lots of guys work lots of OT, making good 6 figures and don't save much. You dont want to be that guy in his late 50s with broken knees and back still doing hard labor. If you're smart and can pivot into your own business, that might be a good move as well. Have a few wealthy relatives that were former tradesmen and are now business owners.
Yup, I come from a family of tradespeople, i'm the first college educated male. Knees, back, other health problems, etc. Money is good, but during recessions, you could be riding the bench for a while. Gotta deal with politics, especially if union. Advice is to make that money and invest it, lots of guys work lots of OT, making good 6 figures and don't save much. You dont want to be that guy in his late 50s with broken knees and back still doing hard labor. If you're smart and can pivot into your own business, that might be a good move as well. Have a few wealthy relatives that were former tradesmen and are now business owners.
Yup, and that was exactly the reason I demurred from considering it. Every tradesperson I grew up knowing worked in a kind of boom and bust cycle. When the times were good, they were working non-stop. But when times were bad they could go a good year or more with little to no work. (few unions where I grew up)
My cousin accepted his first Engineering Job last month and the pay was $55k which is really low for an Electrical Engineer. I got paid $50k out of school in 1999 and money has lost 50% of the value. His first job offer with $75k salary in March was rescinded and he had a real tough time getting interviews after that. So I would say Covid-19 has really hurt the job market for new college graduates.
Similar thing happened to me in the last recession. In 2010, I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree from one of the top five/ten (depending on who's doing the rankings) universities in the US, with internship/co-op experience. Landed my first engineering gig at $47k in the Tampa area...way below what I should've been making at entry level in a moderate COL city. Not fun being paid slightly higher than (or the same as) an intern/technician wage after all that schooling. Didn't help that management there was highly inconsistent. Fortunately, I changed jobs a couple of years later to something much better.
After the November Democratic sweep, expect laws/regulations to require every public corporation to have a C-Suite Office of Race & Gender Advancement, staffed with Gender Studies, African-American Studies, and Social Welfare Studies, and Sustainable Society majors.
Actually Big Business is already there because it helps increase productivity in an increasingly diverse workforce and profitability with increasingly diverse customer bases. A company of straight white dudes targeting a customer base of straight white dudes is never going to have profit margins high enough to keep shareholders happy in the 21st century
It's never fun to start with such a low base because it takes much more effort to catch up. However, if you are a good engineer companies will pay you a fair wage after a few job changes. My company in CA pays around $100k/$110k for engineers with 10 years of experience. I hope you are making this much or a little more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianGC
Similar thing happened to me in the last recession. In 2010, I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree from one of the top five/ten (depending on who's doing the rankings) universities in the US, with internship/co-op experience. Landed my first engineering gig at $47k in the Tampa area...way below what I should've been making at entry level in a moderate COL city. Not fun being paid slightly higher than (or the same as) an intern/technician wage after all that schooling. Didn't help that management there was highly inconsistent. Fortunately, I changed jobs a couple of years later to something much better.
It's never fun to start with such a low base because it takes much more effort to catch up. However, if you are a good engineer companies will pay you a fair wage after a few job changes. My company in CA pays around $100k/$110k for engineers with 10 years of experience. I hope you are making this much or a little more.
I pretty much changed jobs every 2-3 years and got great salary bumps every time. Got close to six figures in my last job in a much lower COL area (Greensboro, NC) than SoCal. I just recently switched engineering career paths (previous jobs were all in operations support as a manufacturing engineer - liked the money, hated the drama), otherwise I could've easily gotten another substantial bump.
Actually Big Business is already there because it helps increase productivity in an increasingly diverse workforce and profitability with increasingly diverse customer bases. A company of straight white dudes targeting a customer base of straight white dudes is never going to have profit margins high enough to keep shareholders happy in the 21st century
Then again, it may be a company of robots targeting a customer base of everyone. Nobody knows exactly what the future will bring, but shareholders always like ca$h.
It's amazing how you people want education systems like the Soviet Union's was. All STEM, no questions asked. You know they eliminated most humanities from their curricula? They heavily propangandized that such things were useless & decadent, that good honest manual labor was more valuable and honorable. Although they didn't charge for school.
But then you wouldn't know what the Soviet Union's economy or society was like, because that requires a liberal art subject.
you can take liberal arts classes - and we all should be able to consider, reason, and communicate - without dedicating your life to something that doesn't PRODUCE anything. I went to a STEM college way back when, and *gasp* got a humanities major and they had plenty of humanities classes. The most "social justice" major you could get was Political Science though. And those were either a)planning on going to law school, b) getting that humanities degree to go into sales or c) going back home to work for family/connections in an entry level "management track" job. Even back then, we laughed at Philosophy and Psychology majors.
in other words, even back then 2 of the 3 were not "working in their field", but they entered occupations that allowed them to "get ahead".
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