I see a lot of dumbasses posting here.
There is no better education to prepare you for the real world than engineering.
You're taught to think logically and solve problems - not restricted to the domain of your specialty.
For smart people - these skills transfers beyond just a job at Intel or any engineering firm.
I'm starting to think that the whiners here are just not real engineers. Just glorified robots collecting a paycheck.
See the reason why 1/2 of the 30% of the engineers capable of playing the politics game end up moving to marketing and sales, is because it's a much easier job... You can pretty much say anything to the customer/partner to make the sale/partnership to get paid. And once you get that sales/partnership and you get paid you have very little accountability as to what eventually gets delivered. That's what engineering is for... I mean, if you ever been a senior principal or principal engineer, you would know exactly what I'm talking about. You would know that you get called into this nice "emergency meeting" with sales/market/director of engineering+vp of engineering, because your company has a crisis... Someone in sales sold technology XYZ to a company in Asia described as "production ready", despite not having a single line of code written nor a single eval board built"... You have 2 months to deliver, despite having no code, no hardware designed or built, and the penalties for not getting done in 2 months is sanctions/concessions from your Asian OEM that will probably cost you $1 per chip per device sold if production is delayed. So your job, is to round up all the engineering teams and compress what normally would have been a 6 month development cycle into 2 months....building something that was sold as "production ready" when reality was, there had been no work done on it... Sound familiar?
Oh, and when you get your engineering teams to kill themselves with lots of long hours/etc. You and them get a nice pat on the back, lots of free food btw, maybe a nice "thank you gift card"...Meanwhile, those guys in sales and marketing get their nice fat commission check and where playing golf at the local country club on the weekends with their next customer, nice and relaxed, just in time to give you your next "production ready assignment"....
I see why Intel is in trouble LOL!
PE's with this kind of attitude...
If you hate it so much I recommend you retire from engineering and find work elsewhere. It might be beneficial for your health - mental and otherwise. Not everyone is cut out for engineering. It's ok.
-smi. Like I said, you don't know what you are talking about. Because neither you are anywhere near a principal/senior principal, nor are you even an engineer.
If you were, and were in this profession for a long time you would acknowledge that 95% of engineers are engineers because they hate politics and they hate dealing with it. Out of that 70% of the engineers stay at the levels they are at because that extra tiny compensation for dealing with it is not worth the going batshit crazy for having to deal with...And of the 30% remaining, half of those realize that while they would do well as a principal engineer, the would make much more money moving into marketing and sales, where their compensation is typed more to commissions and partnership successes.....With the remaining 1/2 of the 30% remaining "technical" and dealing with politics because they are placing more emphasis on technical than pay...Noble for them to do that, until they are old and are subject to getting axed...
By the way - dealing with politics and management issues are also a form of engineering. Just another problem to be solved.
Good engineers understand these issues because you cannot scale a business with one person. It takes many people and you need to learn how to manage them.
This should be obvious to good engineers.
-lhm. Yes, but you aren't one of them either....You see, if you were, you would be posting about how it is, not about what some website says. And they way you say it, says nothing about you personally achieving this.
You're probably one of those young aspiring engineers that don't like to listen to the harsh reality that nope, you aren't going to be one of those making close to $200k total comp, let alone $200k base. I was like you when I was in my twenties. Reality didn't hit until I was 30, and noticed that just about every other white collar profession exceeded my compensation, and that even with me hitting the stock option lottery, which you clearly will not hit. Not in this economy, not in this stock market, and not with the latest strings of (lack of IPOs). Fortunately, my wife, my friends were smarter than me, and got me involved in a lot of investments. Real estate, stocks, metals. Some of it didn't work out. Some of it worked out really well. Thankfully, spouses take care of you when you're to blindsided just working as a engineer not thinking about anything else. Thanks to my wife, our passive income matches my compensation. So I don't give a flying fck about what happens here. But it was definitely a lesson learn. There's a lot better ways of doing it. $200k on a W2 sucks even when compared to $100-150k elsewhere. Why? You can't hide most of what you earn on a $200k W2. You're looking more like $120k after taxes, especially once you hit AMT.
Bunch of whiners with no solutions.
They feel trapped by a lack of imagination.
Probably because they have never seen the outside of their sheltered Intel cubes.
There's a whole wide world out there with people willing to pay handsomely for engineers to solve their problems.
These replies pretty much speak for themselves.
...but engineers like to fantasize.. about big dicks..big paychecks...and women...That's why they like to read about postings from 1-2 about great compensation packages that only a tiny percentage of the population get. And then pretend they are one of them, as if what they are aspiring to be, is really who they are now...Virtual Reality is pretty cool... It allows most engineers to live the fantasy life they conjectured for themselves...
...that's why many engineers are single. Not out of choice. But out of lack of interest....from the other party...both not having a big dick and big paycheck....
-imn.. Engineers don't have big dicks... Neither do they have big paychecks... oops.
Look my dick is bigger than yours, oops my paycheck, LOL
Two of my colleagues are at google and facebook respectively. So those myth about ridiculous compensation packages are just that. Maybe if you started early with the company (and it was because of the stock grants)...Not base salary, not bonus, not stock these days.
-acm. Liar. Then show me what we should be at.
OP here.
I left Intel many years ago at grade 9.
I am now an equivalent Sr. Principal at another place. You are under paid.
The fact of the matter is if you want to be making $200-250k total comp, you really have to be more than "just an engineer". Principal Engineers (Senior Principal elsewhere before) like me besides being technical know how to sell it. The majority of you who like to keep your heads down are NEVER going to make Principal or Senior Principal for a long long time, if ever, because it's not just about raw technical skills that will get you there. Most of my time is spent talking to different technical groups and bridging gaps in architecture and fighting political battles to smooth things over when you have two groups that don't want to work with each other for whatever reasons, or argue over which solution is better despite neither being wrong or right in many cases...
This has nothing to do with technical issues, in as much as politics and engineers that have big egos that can't compromise because they have too much pride... So for many of you that $200k-50k+ total comp package is a pipe dream that will never happen. And frankly, the time/energy/years you spend getting there, it's really not worth it if I were to start over again and pick a different white collar profession.
Also, the key point is you guys are measuring bonus and stock as if it's going to be there. It's there for old timers, but in case you haven't noticed, those levels are gradually getting smaller and smaller. Because companies, CEO's are less inclined to hand them out to employees? Why? Shareholders...
10 years ago, an engineer could do reasonably well with ISO option grants (speaking from experience). Today, if you work at a public company, you won't be getting option grants anymore, you get RSU's ? Why? Accounting is often cited as an excuse..But reality is CEOs and the board no longer really wants to reward employees with good compensation... RSU stock grants puts a fixed amount on what is granted, in a meaningful defined way by generally acceptable accounting practices. What that means is that those days of taking on risk for a lower salary is not really true anymore, you take on more risk, but get a lot less of the pie. And even now, the RSU grants are getting smaller and smaller, even for top performers. So you younger people are really screwed. Stock option grants are only given at pre-ipo companies now. And then you have the problme of wondering what is the true valuation of those grants.
Stock and bonus are not a reliable measure output, because it varies among other things based on (1) company performance (2) economy...
That's completely different from a doctor out of the bat making $200k base salary.
Also, the $50-100k in bonus/stock grants has historically only been good during the time of the "unicorn tech market", and not every company has this payout. In fact, if you ever worked in Silicon Valley like I have in the past, you would know from experience that for every 1 person that makes it with the IPO lottery, 10 people failed miserably trying and it actually lost money staying in the bay area versus working elsewhere.
-ssm... Like I said, you have no idea what you are talking about. That $200k+ is total comp package, NOT stock or RSU grant.... And that's also bay area.
Frankly, I've been at the $200k/total comp package and I'm not in the bay area.
Stock and bonus are part of compensation.
As an engineer - you should be able to work out the risk/reward of having a variable salary.
So tell me, 10-15 years is worth how much then? Something tells me you have no idea what engineers really make. Not many break the $200k mark on salary alone (maybe with stock, bonus etc)...not strict salary.
To clarify - good engineers pull in way more than 175K after 10-15 years.
RCGs are hired into Google for more than that.
http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
What makes you think I am not, or haven't been? It's not that hard if you're good. It just takes a long time, and then you have a big target on your head once you get there.
$175K after 10-15 years is very VERY low.
I guess one would have to be kind of a dumb engineer to have that outcome.
Actually, the dumb engineers are the one thinking that it's smart to remain an engineer. So what, you make $175k/year after 10-15 years, assuming no layoffs and no job transitions.
Now that's pathetic.
Intel can turn the brightest and most promising PhD into dum technicians, LOL
Obviously I wasn't referring to them. Just the torrents of posts bashing engineering as a profession.
Piece of logic: not all Intel employees are engineers