Spent my lunch break digging up actual salary data after reading this thread

Your numbers match what I've seen over 12 years doing power systems work at a utility. Started around 78k out of school, hit six figures around year six, and only crossed 130k after I took a lead engineer role and started covering on-call rotation. The on-call stipend plus overtime is honestly what pushed me over the top, not the base salary itself.

The 300k crowd I know personally is exactly the mix you described. One went to a semiconductor company in the Bay Area and the stock grants do the heavy lifting. Another left engineering entirely for sales engineering, where commissions can double a base. Neither of them is doing circuit design eight hours a day anymore, wich is kind of the point. One thing I'd add is that the field you pick inside EE matters alot too. My college roommate went into RF and bounced between defense contractors, and his pay has tracked well above mine the whole time. I chose stability and a pension, so we basially traded ceiling for floor. Both of us would call ourselves fairly paid, which tells you the average depends on what you're optimizing for.

Comparing medians to medians is the only honest way to do it. Anytime someone quotes a big number, I ask if it includes stock, bonus, and overtime, because base pay alone almost never gets there.

I'll chime in from the chip design side, because the numbers look pretty diferent there. I do board level design work at a semiconductor company in the Southwest and the stock grants are doing a lot of heavy lifting in my total comp. My base is nothing wild, but between the RSUs vesting and the annual refreshers I've been north of 200k for a few years now without ever touching a management ladder. Half my team is in the same boat, and the senior folks clearing 300k are just the ones who stayed thru a couple of stock cycles instead of job hopping every two years for a 10k bump.

So I'd push back a little on the original post. It's not only managers and Bay Area people. Industry segment matters more than most students realize. A grad who lands at a big fab or design house in year one can be out-earning a utility engineer with a decade of experience, and neither of them is lying about thier salary. That said, I agree the forum skews wierd. When someone asks what EEs make and the thread fills up with semiconductor and FAANG-adjacent numbers, a civil engineering student reading along gets a totally warped idea of what their first offer will look like. Segment and location shoud be the first two questions asked in these threads, not an afterthought.

First post here so go easy on me, but this thread hits close to home. I did a year of EE before switching to civil, mostly because the starting salaries in my area scared me off. Now I'm fixing HVAC systems instead, and funny enought my takehome with service call overtime is right around what my old roommate makes doing controls work at a plant, at least on a good year. Always figured I made the wrong call on the money side, but reading this it sounds like the ceiling gaps only show up way later in a career, or in fields I never would have gotten into anyway. Kind of reassuring honestly, though maybe I'm just talking myself into it.

Funny reading this as a guy who never took the engineer path at all. I run my own little handyman and electrical service outfit, mostly panel swaps and fixture work for homeowners. Some years I clear what my cousin makes as a staff EE, some years I don't, and it comes down to how many jobs I book and whether I feel like working Saturdays. The difference is nobody's handing me stock or a pension, so the floor is way lower. Made me realize the salary debates all assume someone else is guaranteeing your paycheck. When you're the whole company, the median doesn't mean much, it's just whatever you hustle for.

I don't work in any of this stuff but my uncle does wires for office buildings, and when I showed him threads like this he just laughed and said half those big salary numbers include stuff like yearly bonuses that may or may not show up. Is stock stuff like actual company shares they hand you, or more like a coupon that might be worthless by the time you cash it? Genuinely trying to understand how someone's paycheck gets that big without them doing different work.