<p>Engineering salaries is an issue that I don’t think gets discussed enough. People may think that 50K or 55K is good but the average house price in a major NA city can be more than ten times that. Try saving for an $800K house on a $75K salary. And forget supporting a family in the process. </p>
<p>Personally I left engineering becuase I got SEVERELY FINANCIALLY RUINED - my salary led right to the door of financial wreckage and yet I graduated with no debt. Why? Because I (chemical engineering) had a job in a mid-size engineering firm. While the base salary was average, it didn’t go up. For the first 5 years, it went up a TOTAL of 12%. To make a long story short (and I would love to go into more detail) I couldn’t get on the right projects and all the overseas projects- my resume kept getting rejected by the clients for lack of experience. I went on a local job site where I was told to work with a mentor on a PLC/controls project and when I asked questions he told me to shut up because he had to debug and meet the client expectations. He also took all my training hours allocated to the budget to show a small profit. Also in my firm, when their was real design to be done (not in a study) everyone would take the design and re-do it (a) to claim design experience and (b) to have their names on the design drawings. Real design induced a complete frenzy because there was so little of it and everyone always played the proverbial game of ‘last touch’. Most of the work was some type of study document which was destined to collect dust somewhere.</p>
<p>I left engineering disillusioned and put in my application to law where I make real money, own a home and investment property and have a real career.</p>
<p>yes, I meant 50 to 55K to either start or early career. Why didn’t I change - well it wasn’t for a lack of trying. BUT, my problem was a lack of good field experience and many employers turned me down flat on that basis, including for many overseas oil and gas jobs. That has to be worse - when clients/employers keep rejecting your resume for lack of experience. Truth is, for instrumentation and controls work, you need a lot of experience in the field. My firm was bidding jobs with razor thin margins so training and development were often non-existant. As mentioned, clients would reject my resume which foreclosed working on overseas jobs. My firm had many amazing certified engineering technologists who had years of experience and they would have no trouble getting on major projects - that seemed unfair somehow since I had gone to university. </p>
<p>After several years, I realized that I could not compete in that field anymore and basically, market circumstances dictated an end to my engineering career. An engineering degree may be a good degree, but it is essential to find in one’s career good training and mentorship as well as professional development.</p>
<p>It seems to me that the problem has to do with expectations. Why do you have to necessarily own a house in a major NA city? The vast majority of people in NA do not actually live in a major NA city at all (rather, they commute in if necessary), and even those that do live in those cities rarely actually own their housing.</p>
<p>Even if you do insist on owning a house in a major NA city, there are cities in which you can do exactly that. Houston is a major city that, along with most cities in Texas, is notably cheap, and also provide the tremendous advantage of plentiful jobs and a roaring economy due to high oil prices, as Houston is basically the oil-business capital of the world. Here’s a nice 4-bed, 3-bath, 2-car-garage, 2750 square foot house in Houston for less than $150k.</p>
<p>Look, I endorse the general sentiment that engineers are underpaid, and indeed have written numerous posts stating exactly that. But to say that engineers should expect that engineers should be paid well enough to expect to own a house within an expensive city such as Toronto (or New York, San Francisco, Washington, etc.) on a single income stream is going too far.</p>