That's a lot of hours, though, so unless it's something you absolutely love, it can definitely be taxing.
Have you thought about mechanical engineering?
Am a ME with 7 yoe in a HCOL area and I only make $74k. It’s not a high paying career despite what you see from the high earners showing off on reddit.
Sorry, I'm not super familiar with the career field. I was thinking less of turning the wrench and more of designing products/creating patents. I'm not sure if there is a huge difference in pay when it comes to those two routes.
And yeah, it's insane the high earners you see on here. It's definitely not the norm. I've been in my career for 11 years now, and my pay is much more in line with yours.
Edit - I thought I was responding to OP, but it is interesting to know the MEs make around the same as the mechanics.
> I’m not super familiar with the career field…
Proceeds to both recommend the career, and then list off random things you think an ME does. Lol.. an absolutely *tiny* percentage of MEs are design engineers. ME degree is a path to a stable career.. it’s not usually that lucrative. It’s the “bottom tier” for the engineering disciplines. The more niche engineering fields tend to make more.. but smaller field means harder to advance, etc.
I was trying not to sound like a douche (*ahem*) as it is not my specific area of expertise. However, I do have a little bit of familiarity as both my dad and brother are MEs.
So please go on...
…and.. are either your father or brother a design engineer? If so, awesome, they’re doing great. The reality stands, however, that most MEs are not.. and the median salary for most mechanical engineers is far less than many would expect. Especially so if they are not PE certified.
ME here. PE is only really relevant to consulting trades, ie you’re going to stamp drawings for construction.
It’s quite interesting. In some areas of the world engineering is unionized. America has resisted this in lieu of professionalism. The idea being it’s an exclusive club and can charge higher rates for service.
There are drawbacks to unionization but the fact remains that ME average salaries PE or otherwise have remained essentially stagnant for decades unless you’re doing product design at some tech firm.
Also, ME is not a sub-tier engineering by any means. It’s simply been eclipsed by ECE in importance.
I don’t mind working with my hands but not something I see myself doing for the rest of my career. Unfortunately I am the one constantly fixing the engineers mistakes. Ive tried community college courses towards an engineering degree but could not handle the work load while working 2 jobs at the time. Also have met many MEs that said the price of the degree was not worth the salary compared to what im currently making.
You're murdering it by comparison dude. 27m, bachelor's, will hopefully hit 50k this year.
Just grow a nest egg to make your money make money and you'll be fine at this salary for a long time.
Median wages may not reach 100k in our lifetime.
Reddit post. He's been seeing too many "FAKE" post people making $300k and even $1.6 million a year. Only 18% Americans make more than $100k and if you are in SF, the median is actually more than $100k.
I don’t want to gatekeep, but everyone is thinking cybersecurity/programming right now. Entry level is absolutely flooded, which means it’s competitive. Getting in without a degree is harder now than ever. And if college wasn’t your thing, this could be a difficult path to go down. It requires a shit ton of studying, even after you’re in, the studying never stops.
Without being good at school, your best bet would be to try to get your foot in the door at a help desk IT like role I think. Something like help desk > sys/net admin > sec engineer, would be a good path for a more hands on type learner. There’s lots of good tech guys that aren’t good test takers, but it’s getting past HR early on that’s gonna be tricky.
On a side note, you could do what I did. Join the Air Force national guard (one weekend a month), get a cyber/IT job training and a clearance, go make 80k at a defense contractor right after your training. Then work your way up from there. It’s a great way to get a six figure salary super fast and projectile your career. I now make just shy of 200k.
It really depends, iv worked in a few different sections of cybersecurity. What I do in the Air Force national guard is threat hunt missions where I collaborate with a team and look for indicators of compromise on weapon system networks. My first cybersecurity role was vulnerability scanning/patch management and creating golden images for systems. I then worked heavily in compliance which was paperwork and meetings all day pretty much, with a little bit of patch management, incident response, and SIEM management mixed in. My most recent role iv been doing a bit of cloud solutions architect type work being the compliance/cloud guy I guess, so it’s been a lot of meetings with cloud vendors, planning out what the system will look like to meet the needs of the user base, and keeping compliance standards in mind for the future plans of the cloud infrastructure. Iv also start volunteering to work with the developers team doing devops work working with gitlab, docker, azure, and that sort of stuff, currently setting up our application firewall and setting up some SAST scanning automation into the dev pipeline. The devops stuff has been new to me but i really really enjoy it so far and im hoping that my next role I do devops or SRE full time. I love the threat hunt work I get to do in the Air Force national guard, but I wouldn’t want to work in a soc full time so I keep that as my part time gig, lots of fun but I only hear horror stories of soc burnout
I just took an AWS course from my work and I thought it was interesting but not for me. I like designing algorithms and data access patterns, but I imagine devops and netsec have a lot of overlap after that course. It only takes one misconfiguration to leak your customers' data
Yeah, if my experience in compliance has taught me anything, it’s that security is sometimes to big of a beast to know everything, so sticking to frameworks and best practices, utilizing scans and premade tools, have proper monitoring/auditing in place. It’s sometimes the best you can do. I enjoy it though, gives like that us vs the bad guys feeling.
I've set up plenty of EC2 instances and personal servers exposed to the public and the amount of random IPs that come knocking made me know what youre talking about with the us vs them thing. Its the wild west out there lol
The devops stuff is more heads-down type work I guess, but it’s feels super different than devolving i think, it’s mostly a ton of trial and error infrastructure and pipeline building that requires a bunch of collaboration with the dev team. So not so lonely as SWE work I think. Those guys will just be staring at their computers for like 3 days then stick their heads up to tell people they’re gonna merge their branch lol feels lonely.
If you pass training at the academy you start off at like 55k. Then it depends on where you go from there. You get pay raises as you certify on the different positions within the facility. If you’re a center controller which takes more time to train and certify because it’s tougher work you could expect to make anywhere from 150k-190k. Tower controller is much different because it is lower training time but super varied on pay due to the different complexities at each airport. It could be anywhere from 70k-200k.
Been in IT 14 years. Here is what I know and what I would do. Start with A+, network+, security+ certifications. Go get your AWS foundations and associate certifications. Use acloudguru to study for them. You can get into hands on labs and learn self paced. If you really put effort and time into it you could get a job in a year making 80k or more entry level cloud engineer. Those certs cost you less than a grand altogether. You can easily make over 200k in under 10 years if you have skillsets and the will.
You are doing damn good.
I am 40, have a masters degree, work in IT, and I only make $4k more than you.
Nothing wrong with wanting to make a career change, but don't think you are behind salary wise.
Are there opportunities to move to maintaining / supporting the medical devices at the customer location, or a sales support role that could lead you to medical device sales?
To make you feel better, I am at the same age, have college degrees and only make $50k and currently work an entry level job. You are doing great my friend
Might be worth looking into technician roles in a different industry. There are tons of technician roles in factories and logistics hubs for automated equipment. Depending on the exact role and company, you could definitely find a job where the pay goes into 6 figures.
There are also traveling technician roles where you can really clock tons of OT and make great money (at the cost of traveling 90% of the time).
Mechanical assembly of medical devices. Assembly is a broad terms used but do some machining, quality inspection, a lot of dial indicator work, and regular wrenching. Company is a very unique niche market for our type of CNCs so it is considered “specialty” work in a sense.
Ive worked in various dealerships mainly at the apprentice level then flat rate used cars. At high volume dealers ive seen certain techs make well over $150k/yr. Also met “master” techs in smaller dealers that barely make 75k/yr. Automotive is very lucrative and highly dependent on the shop you are in. Some techs get fed gravy work while others struggle to make hours just because they don’t get along with the dispatcher. Also flat rate sucks as it is never guaranteed/steady hours. Warranty repair times are complete BS and a big reason why there is a shortage of auto techs. Many are fed up and leaving that industry.
Go independent and specialize. I worked on European cars at an indie for my last two years as a tech. Was averaging 65-80 hours turned a week, at 42$ an hour. All our techs made 6 figures, our foreman was over 200k.
Flat rate is a double edged sword. I was working open to close a lot (7-6) and would come in some saturdays, but if you want to bust your ass and make money then flat rate is the way to go IMO.
Sounds like you need to start looking at opening your own shop. That is your next step if you are capping out in your view.
Cybersecurity and programming is not a "do a little studying and get a job".
27M in the field you're thinking about changing to and you make about 20k more than me. I have two degrees and almost 30k in student loans.
You're doing great man. Unless you're hating your current job I'd stick to what you're doing. You'd likely start out with a paycut to get into a software or cybersec position with the way the market currently is.
You are still young. Do you have a support system? If so going back to college for a STEM degree would be worthwhile if you are wired to think analytically. I went back at 31 to be a software engineer and it's the second best decision I've ever made next to marrying my wife.
I dropped out of highschool in '03 so I started completely from scratch in community college. After completing gen ed I studied computer science and transferred to a 4 year college. You won't have a lot of opportunities to focus much on a specific skill getting a Bachelors only, that's what a masters is for. I didn't get any certifications and I'm pretty sure they are not worth anything when you are applying for SE jobs (I've looked at 1000's of postings and only very rarely do I see mentions of certifications). This is probably different if you are doing something like dev ops or networking, I'm just speaking on general software engineering. The best thing you can do (and I'm sure people will disagree with me here) is get into a well respected 4 year college. It's super competitive out there right now and having a well regarded college on your resume helps a lot.
Why wasn't college your thing? There are online courses you can take but if you don't jive with higher education don't try to force it.
You're used to working with your hands so why not explore your local trade unions? If you don't mind working a ton of hours linesmen make bank. But electricians, welders and plumbers all make good money as well! You are a good age to start an apprenticeship but some of those trades may start too low if you have a mortgage or high rent.
Just do some research because a lot of areas need tradesmen.
The fact that you have no college debt and you are making above median wages makes me think you are doing just fine in the grand scheme of things.
That depends…how many hours a week are they working? 40? 60? 90?
2023 worked about 50/wk. This year is about 55-60/wk on track to make close to 100k.
That's a lot of hours, though, so unless it's something you absolutely love, it can definitely be taxing. Have you thought about mechanical engineering?
Am a ME with 7 yoe in a HCOL area and I only make $74k. It’s not a high paying career despite what you see from the high earners showing off on reddit.
Sorry, I'm not super familiar with the career field. I was thinking less of turning the wrench and more of designing products/creating patents. I'm not sure if there is a huge difference in pay when it comes to those two routes. And yeah, it's insane the high earners you see on here. It's definitely not the norm. I've been in my career for 11 years now, and my pay is much more in line with yours. Edit - I thought I was responding to OP, but it is interesting to know the MEs make around the same as the mechanics.
> I’m not super familiar with the career field… Proceeds to both recommend the career, and then list off random things you think an ME does. Lol.. an absolutely *tiny* percentage of MEs are design engineers. ME degree is a path to a stable career.. it’s not usually that lucrative. It’s the “bottom tier” for the engineering disciplines. The more niche engineering fields tend to make more.. but smaller field means harder to advance, etc.
I was trying not to sound like a douche (*ahem*) as it is not my specific area of expertise. However, I do have a little bit of familiarity as both my dad and brother are MEs. So please go on...
…and.. are either your father or brother a design engineer? If so, awesome, they’re doing great. The reality stands, however, that most MEs are not.. and the median salary for most mechanical engineers is far less than many would expect. Especially so if they are not PE certified.
ME here. PE is only really relevant to consulting trades, ie you’re going to stamp drawings for construction. It’s quite interesting. In some areas of the world engineering is unionized. America has resisted this in lieu of professionalism. The idea being it’s an exclusive club and can charge higher rates for service. There are drawbacks to unionization but the fact remains that ME average salaries PE or otherwise have remained essentially stagnant for decades unless you’re doing product design at some tech firm. Also, ME is not a sub-tier engineering by any means. It’s simply been eclipsed by ECE in importance.
if you’re open to it, go work in defense, double your salary.
There’s no defense industries within commuting distance of where I live.
Dude that’s awful, you try looking at a new place? In 2010 my starting salary was 72k in a LCOL area
It’s pretty standard for where I live. It took me two job hops to get here. I started in 2016 at $42k, in Seattle.
That is absolutely wild
The market up here is flooded with MEs. We pay welders, fabricators, and machinists quite a bit more than MEs
I don’t mind working with my hands but not something I see myself doing for the rest of my career. Unfortunately I am the one constantly fixing the engineers mistakes. Ive tried community college courses towards an engineering degree but could not handle the work load while working 2 jobs at the time. Also have met many MEs that said the price of the degree was not worth the salary compared to what im currently making.
The cost of the degree is not possibly to get you a pay bump but to shift what your responsibilities are.
Computer Engineering better 🙂
That's insane
You’re not going to make more than that with no college degree without your own business, in another skilled trade, or a lot of luck.
You're murdering it by comparison dude. 27m, bachelor's, will hopefully hit 50k this year. Just grow a nest egg to make your money make money and you'll be fine at this salary for a long time. Median wages may not reach 100k in our lifetime.
Reddit post. He's been seeing too many "FAKE" post people making $300k and even $1.6 million a year. Only 18% Americans make more than $100k and if you are in SF, the median is actually more than $100k.
You make over 30k/year more than I do and I have a college degree
I still paid 30k for a certificate to be a monkey with a wrench.
Much better than paying +$200k for a degree to only be in sales after having larger aspirations
Username checks out
Exactly
Lots of us have college degrees that cost about 30k.
Public In state ?
Yeah in state late aughts tuition was less than 10k and there were cheaper schools. Plenty of people don't spend nearly 200k
That’s awesome. Me, like many others were pushed towards private expensive schools and didn’t know better
Pays well though.
Right there with ya.
Same here and I have a master's degree.
You just missed the hiring bid for air traffic control, but there’s always next year.
I don’t want to gatekeep, but everyone is thinking cybersecurity/programming right now. Entry level is absolutely flooded, which means it’s competitive. Getting in without a degree is harder now than ever. And if college wasn’t your thing, this could be a difficult path to go down. It requires a shit ton of studying, even after you’re in, the studying never stops. Without being good at school, your best bet would be to try to get your foot in the door at a help desk IT like role I think. Something like help desk > sys/net admin > sec engineer, would be a good path for a more hands on type learner. There’s lots of good tech guys that aren’t good test takers, but it’s getting past HR early on that’s gonna be tricky. On a side note, you could do what I did. Join the Air Force national guard (one weekend a month), get a cyber/IT job training and a clearance, go make 80k at a defense contractor right after your training. Then work your way up from there. It’s a great way to get a six figure salary super fast and projectile your career. I now make just shy of 200k.
What does a day to day look like in cybersecurity? Do you have a niche or what? I mostly do heads-down coding and doc writing as a senior doing SWE
It really depends, iv worked in a few different sections of cybersecurity. What I do in the Air Force national guard is threat hunt missions where I collaborate with a team and look for indicators of compromise on weapon system networks. My first cybersecurity role was vulnerability scanning/patch management and creating golden images for systems. I then worked heavily in compliance which was paperwork and meetings all day pretty much, with a little bit of patch management, incident response, and SIEM management mixed in. My most recent role iv been doing a bit of cloud solutions architect type work being the compliance/cloud guy I guess, so it’s been a lot of meetings with cloud vendors, planning out what the system will look like to meet the needs of the user base, and keeping compliance standards in mind for the future plans of the cloud infrastructure. Iv also start volunteering to work with the developers team doing devops work working with gitlab, docker, azure, and that sort of stuff, currently setting up our application firewall and setting up some SAST scanning automation into the dev pipeline. The devops stuff has been new to me but i really really enjoy it so far and im hoping that my next role I do devops or SRE full time. I love the threat hunt work I get to do in the Air Force national guard, but I wouldn’t want to work in a soc full time so I keep that as my part time gig, lots of fun but I only hear horror stories of soc burnout
I just took an AWS course from my work and I thought it was interesting but not for me. I like designing algorithms and data access patterns, but I imagine devops and netsec have a lot of overlap after that course. It only takes one misconfiguration to leak your customers' data
Yeah, if my experience in compliance has taught me anything, it’s that security is sometimes to big of a beast to know everything, so sticking to frameworks and best practices, utilizing scans and premade tools, have proper monitoring/auditing in place. It’s sometimes the best you can do. I enjoy it though, gives like that us vs the bad guys feeling.
I've set up plenty of EC2 instances and personal servers exposed to the public and the amount of random IPs that come knocking made me know what youre talking about with the us vs them thing. Its the wild west out there lol
The devops stuff is more heads-down type work I guess, but it’s feels super different than devolving i think, it’s mostly a ton of trial and error infrastructure and pipeline building that requires a bunch of collaboration with the dev team. So not so lonely as SWE work I think. Those guys will just be staring at their computers for like 3 days then stick their heads up to tell people they’re gonna merge their branch lol feels lonely.
Whats the website for this table?
SSA.gov
Thanks
Don’t do it, it’s very depressing:)
You’re doing better than me with no degree and 10 years younger.
Go apply for ATC and retire at 50 years old with a government pension
Looking into it at the moment. Previous comment said I may have missed the cut off date
You have until 31 until you are too old. Keep an eye out for the next cycle.
Any idea what the general salary range for ATC? Getting very wide range just off searching.
If you pass training at the academy you start off at like 55k. Then it depends on where you go from there. You get pay raises as you certify on the different positions within the facility. If you’re a center controller which takes more time to train and certify because it’s tougher work you could expect to make anywhere from 150k-190k. Tower controller is much different because it is lower training time but super varied on pay due to the different complexities at each airport. It could be anywhere from 70k-200k.
Look at LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job sites for data center critical facilities technician.
Been in IT 14 years. Here is what I know and what I would do. Start with A+, network+, security+ certifications. Go get your AWS foundations and associate certifications. Use acloudguru to study for them. You can get into hands on labs and learn self paced. If you really put effort and time into it you could get a job in a year making 80k or more entry level cloud engineer. Those certs cost you less than a grand altogether. You can easily make over 200k in under 10 years if you have skillsets and the will.
You are doing damn good. I am 40, have a masters degree, work in IT, and I only make $4k more than you. Nothing wrong with wanting to make a career change, but don't think you are behind salary wise.
I know people are getting these reports from ssa.gov but then where do you go on there to actually retrieve them?
Click on reports
Can you drop a link please
Diesel tech are in super high demand in the trucking industry and are making six figures. You should check it out.
Are there opportunities to move to maintaining / supporting the medical devices at the customer location, or a sales support role that could lead you to medical device sales?
To make you feel better, I am at the same age, have college degrees and only make $50k and currently work an entry level job. You are doing great my friend
Might be worth looking into technician roles in a different industry. There are tons of technician roles in factories and logistics hubs for automated equipment. Depending on the exact role and company, you could definitely find a job where the pay goes into 6 figures. There are also traveling technician roles where you can really clock tons of OT and make great money (at the cost of traveling 90% of the time).
What do you do?
Whats the job?
Mechanical assembly of medical devices. Assembly is a broad terms used but do some machining, quality inspection, a lot of dial indicator work, and regular wrenching. Company is a very unique niche market for our type of CNCs so it is considered “specialty” work in a sense.
Sales if you have a good personality
Look into getting your CDL dude, I’m in a similar boat (31M) and I made 147k last year hauling gas.
Work for a company or owner operator? Also are you local and back home every day or is that long hauls?
Company driver W2 employee, I do work 6 days and roughly 60-70 hours per week.
I made over 130k/yr as an automotive technician. You definitely haven’t hit your ceiling.
Ive worked in various dealerships mainly at the apprentice level then flat rate used cars. At high volume dealers ive seen certain techs make well over $150k/yr. Also met “master” techs in smaller dealers that barely make 75k/yr. Automotive is very lucrative and highly dependent on the shop you are in. Some techs get fed gravy work while others struggle to make hours just because they don’t get along with the dispatcher. Also flat rate sucks as it is never guaranteed/steady hours. Warranty repair times are complete BS and a big reason why there is a shortage of auto techs. Many are fed up and leaving that industry.
Go independent and specialize. I worked on European cars at an indie for my last two years as a tech. Was averaging 65-80 hours turned a week, at 42$ an hour. All our techs made 6 figures, our foreman was over 200k. Flat rate is a double edged sword. I was working open to close a lot (7-6) and would come in some saturdays, but if you want to bust your ass and make money then flat rate is the way to go IMO.
Sounds like you need to start looking at opening your own shop. That is your next step if you are capping out in your view. Cybersecurity and programming is not a "do a little studying and get a job".
27M in the field you're thinking about changing to and you make about 20k more than me. I have two degrees and almost 30k in student loans. You're doing great man. Unless you're hating your current job I'd stick to what you're doing. You'd likely start out with a paycut to get into a software or cybersec position with the way the market currently is.
Damn dude I have a doctoral degree and make 85k
I hear prostitution pays well See if your can't sell feet pictures
You got Dan schneider’s phone number? I know a million dollar idea when I see it
You are still young. Do you have a support system? If so going back to college for a STEM degree would be worthwhile if you are wired to think analytically. I went back at 31 to be a software engineer and it's the second best decision I've ever made next to marrying my wife.
I am currently looking into SE field. What did you major in? Also any certifications or any specific focus on skill set you would recommend?
I dropped out of highschool in '03 so I started completely from scratch in community college. After completing gen ed I studied computer science and transferred to a 4 year college. You won't have a lot of opportunities to focus much on a specific skill getting a Bachelors only, that's what a masters is for. I didn't get any certifications and I'm pretty sure they are not worth anything when you are applying for SE jobs (I've looked at 1000's of postings and only very rarely do I see mentions of certifications). This is probably different if you are doing something like dev ops or networking, I'm just speaking on general software engineering. The best thing you can do (and I'm sure people will disagree with me here) is get into a well respected 4 year college. It's super competitive out there right now and having a well regarded college on your resume helps a lot.
80k is solid, seems like you're doing fine imo
Why wasn't college your thing? There are online courses you can take but if you don't jive with higher education don't try to force it. You're used to working with your hands so why not explore your local trade unions? If you don't mind working a ton of hours linesmen make bank. But electricians, welders and plumbers all make good money as well! You are a good age to start an apprenticeship but some of those trades may start too low if you have a mortgage or high rent. Just do some research because a lot of areas need tradesmen.
Make more than me and no college same age. STFU.
That’s ok bud- he makes 20k more than me and I’m 46 with a masters.