职业生涯中期的工程师的薪资前景

Amid the gloom and doom, a sliver of good news for mid-career engineers

by Karen Field

Hiring activity is up, says one recruiter, and senior engineers are the most in demand

It’s tough times for engineers who are in that mid-career death zone: On the one hand, their high salaries (relatively speaking) may be under scrutiny by corporate cost-cutters looking to bring in hired guns at lower pay scales to do the same work. On the other hand, their salary growth rate is likely to be asymptotically approaching zero.

To make matters worse, Recruiter Mike Delaney says that while engineering salaries have historically started to plateau around that crucial mid-career point of 15 to 18 years, it’s now happening even earlier. “Salaries are maxing out sooner than they did back in the 1990s,” observes Delaney, founder of the recruitment firm Global Network Recruiting (GNR), which specializes in the high-tech industry and an EE himself. “That’s because technology is evolving and pay rates for engineers who are experts in certain domains escalate sooner.”

As a case in point, Delaney mentioned that he recently placed an engineer with three years of experience in a $120K position designing graphical processors. Silly money, he calls it, but the going rate for some in-demand skill sets.

Though the current economy is probably not a fair indicator, Delaney says that in the early years of their career, it’s not uncommon for engineers to get annual pay increases of 8 to 15%. But by the time they reach mid-career, those increases are likely to have shrunk to as little as 2 to 3%. Without a couple of job hops, a move into program management or sales and marketing (gasp!), or complete dominance as an expert in a technical area, he says most engineers—at whatever scale they’re hired in at--who choose to continue along the same career path will hit their prime earning years by their mid-forties.

But it’s not complete gloom and doom for engineers at the mid-point of their careers today. Activity started picking up in July for GNR, and many of the new open positions are for more senior staff. “The sweet spot for hiring today is engineers with 12 to 20 years of experience,” asserts Delaney, whose firm has been so busy this past quarter trying to fill engineering positions that he says he has had to hire another recruiter to help handle the workload. The database of open jobs on his company’s website reflects a variety of senior-level positions—from Senior Principal Design Engineer to RF Lead Engineer.

The reason for this, says Delaney is that many companies who have had reductions in force are now hiring back engineers, and they are not looking to fill all positions with entry-level candidates. “They’re looking for seasoned engineers who are familiar with the product and familiar with the technology and are going to require a lot less of a learning curve,” says Delaney. “They’re also looking to bring in senior leadership who can provide the guidance and mentoring to younger, less experienced engineers.”