IEEE Salary Calculator
Are you alternating between being so happy that you have a great job with lots of money and being depressed because you are sure your Dilbertian employer is undervaluing your contributions? Well then you sound like an engineer that needs to use the IEEE Salary Calculator to put some reality in your engineer-employer dialog.
"It will report the complete range of full-time income
from
primary sources being paid to IEEE-USA members -- electrical,
electronics or computer engineers and scientists -- in
specified employment situations.
The "complete range of full-time income" means that
the
system will report both a most typical result -- the median or
50th percentile, the value that is at the middle of the
distribution of pay -- and also eight additional percentile
values, from the 10th (low) to the 90th (high). This range data
provides a context for
assessments of the effects of such unmeasurable influences on
pay as the skill and
talent of individual technical professionals."
--- From the web site https://www.ieeeusa.org/careers/salarycalculator/
If you filled out the salary forms last year you already received a free account on this system. I believe it costs $10 to get a one year subscription...well worth it if you are even losing one hour of sleep because you don't know what the salary market values are for your career. You answer 10 questions such as your company's business, your highest education, your geography, your specialty, and your years on the job. Then then you get the salary spread for those in your situation. You can re-enter the terms to see which are the most sensitive parameters for your situation (what if I earned another degree? what if I worked here 10 more years?).
So what did I learn? Since I work in the overlap of CPMT and MTT Society technical projects, I learned that there is no market advantage to being in either specialty. This contradicts the hot market for new MTT type graduates we have seen in the last few years...on the other hand I am not a spring chicken. So maybe this means that after a while experience wins and you should follow the path of your own and your company interests...or maybe not. Second I learned that the "responsibility level" is a big influence on salary. For example, the difference between GSA 13 and GSA 14 type job descriptions was 10% in salary. This may explain the many times we see people hiring staff and creating structure under their position despite the fact that it looks like a few person job at best. Third, it was clear that the spread of salaries for any category was a factor of 2...so some things besides the obvious 10 questions lead to some being paid twice what others are (at least for us old-timers). Although this web approach has the same information as many salary data books it is more responsive to the many questions that one asks when looking at a chart.
All this brings me back to one of the lessons I learned from a grizzled engineer (many years ago before I became grizzled). Everyone was complaining about the raises that were just announced. He asked me the following questions: