<p>Please tell me you are not an engineer. Your lack of comprehension of basic statistics is unbelievable. The mode will tell you nothing. The median for the company would be a much better indication. Even national average will tell you more than the mode.</p>
<p>I like how someone who doesn’t understand the difference between mean and median and thinks that the mode is the best representation of salary is lecturing me about statistics.</p>
<p>The one who should be questioning who is actually an engineer is me. What you fail to realize is that at the level you are being hired the mean, median, and mode are practically the same but the company will offer you the mode: the approx. salary they have consistently offered to inexperienced engineers.</p>
<p>Honestly, this is not difficult to understand. This is the kind of information you catch on the street.</p>
<p>To make it clear to my shockingly dense audience:</p>
<p>If new hires at company XYZ were offered $10, $10, $10, $10, $20, $20, $30. It does not matter what the median or avg are. The company will offer you $10 initially because they’ve been able to get away with it most of the time.</p>
<p>
The BLS does some interesting work, courtesy of your federal tax dollars. One product of this is the Occupational Employment Statistics data center: <a href=“http://data.bls.gov:8080/oes/search.jsp[/url]”>http://data.bls.gov:8080/oes/search.jsp</a></p>
<p>The interface can take a little getting used to, but this is really an excellent tool.</p>
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<p>Or because that $10 in that sample is the median… You can not come to the assumption that the company will offer you what they can “get away with”. For example, if you are an impressive candidate, company’s are going to want to offer a competitive salary. The mode of that sample doesn’t say anything about why Company X has offered what it has and thus your assumptions make your arguments futile.</p>
<p>Well now that you made that story it totally makes sense haha. Enginox, first of all, obviously a company isn’t gonna offer a college graduate the national average salary, nobody is saying that. But what they probably will offer you is the average starting salary of aerospace engineers in that city (or close to it depending on how good of a candidate you are). There are definitely a lot of variables, but they will offer you the mean or median, the mode seems useless.</p>
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<p>There’s quite a bit of aerospace work there. Northrop Grumman is perhaps the biggest one, but other notables include SpaceX and a lot of Honeywell’s aerospace operations. Perhaps it’s still too early to call SpaceX notable though :P.</p>
<p>Enginox, your argument makes no sense. Starting salaries do not range from one value to three times that value. Your example doesn’t even hold up with your own flawed logic. The median of your data set is 10. Not only that but you are completely straying from the original question. The OP was referring to median salaries for aerospace engineers, not starting salaries from a sample size of 7. If you want the best representation of salaries for aerospace engineers, median is what you want. The mode tells you nothing.</p>
<p>Even though everyone is telling you your reasoning is wrong, you call us the dense ones. You should just stop.</p>
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Did the OP ask about starting salaries?</p>
<p>Wow… seriously…</p>
<p>Let’s try again. $10, $10, $10, $15, $20, $20, $30. New median, new avg, same mode. Impressive candidates are not the norm. Most companies will offer you the lowest possible salary that will keep you from walking out. Overtime, you see a pattern where a specific salary has been offered to the majority of candidates. Is not going to be a perfect mode.</p>
<p>If historically a company has offered new hires a specific or approximate amount, chances are most candidates will receive something close to that specific amount. They will not offer you the median or mean if they see the mode is actually lower (chances are the lowest amount will be the mode).</p>
<p>The median simply shows the MIDDLE value of a list of ordered salaries; the mean tells you the arithmetic mean of those values; the mode tells you what ACTUALLY happens in real life. </p>
<p>So many people living in the clouds.</p>
<p>This is one of the funniest things I have seen on here, and that is saying something.</p>
<p>Ok, I give up. Seriously. </p>
<p>The OP asked about median salaries. I explained to the OP that looking at national median salaries in order to make a career decision is useless. Even looking at local median salaries is useless if the company that hires you offers you a lowball salary and they actually get away with it.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I have a small group of “engineers” challenging reality with useless statistics. Anyone who thinks they will be earning a median or average salary is delusional. If the company thinks they can get away with the lowest salary they can reasonably offer, they will offer it. You might not take it, but some fool down the line will. And the cycle will continue.</p>
<p>Enginox, how long have you been out of school?</p>
<p>Here in CA, I think 10 years to 100k/year.</p>
<p>“Anyone who thinks they will be earning a median or average salary is delusional.”</p>
<p>Hahaha</p>
<p>Mr. Payne, I am currently in school. I’m also in the workforce and I possess some practical experience that has shown me that reputable employers do not base their decisions on obscure statistics but on solid, pragmatic business plans.</p>
<p>It is incredibly stupid for a company to base their business plan on shaky statistics if the realities of the market dictate otherwise. Salaries will be based on how much return on investment that company expects from that hire. As the company hires new people, the company will notice some patterns relating to the salary offered to those hires based on their skills, qualifications, etc. Overtime, they will know what to offer to a new hire that brings those qualifications. </p>
<p>If they know they can get it at the usual price, they will not pay a dime more. If the hire’s skills become scarce, then yes, they will offer more. If the hire’s skills are abundant, they will offer less. They will not offer median or mean if they know they have been obtaining those skills for mode price.</p>
<p>If you go to the store and consistently buy a bottle of water for $1 and the supply of bottles of water has remained steady will you suddenly pay $2 if the clerk mentions that the median for bottles of water is $2? If you can get it cheaper or at the same price, of course not. Why would salaries behave differently? </p>
<p>Because you obtained your “engineering” degree? Please, catch a clue, people.</p>
<p>Basically, dude, you have no clue about how major corporations design their pay scales. My company uses a freaking bell curve to do it (not perfect, but close enough)!</p>
<p>In which case median/average are very similar. Oh yeah, we also base our salaries off of competitors.</p>
<p>In which case, good engineers generally fall at one end, bad engineers on the other, and the rest swim within the bell.</p>
<p>At that point, whatever range you fall, the other values do not apply to you. The company knows what they will pay you. End of story.</p>
<p>And the expectation for this question is when would the median/mean of this bell curve reach 100K/year. That’s how the English language works.</p>
<p>People can be on a accelerated schedule or decelerated schedule depending on performance/industry/luck/politics/etc.</p>
<p>There are so many other factors that can bump your pay.</p>
<p>Remember that front-end/GUI software called PowerBuilder?? I lucked out and learned that while it was hot and that allowed me to snag 15-20% raises on two job switches.</p>
<p>I caught data warehousing when it was hot.</p>
<p>It’s really all about supply and demand.</p>
<p>One more thing, $100K a year is merely the median income for 6 of the surrounding counties around the Washington DC area, so $100K/year (which took me about 8-9 years) means that you STILL have to budget.</p>
<p>That’s most likely derived from tax return data which includes double earners.</p>
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<p>That’s probably true but those areas still have plenty of $1500-2000/month apartments and $600-$800K homes, so $100K won’t have a person exactly spending blindly.</p>