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Comment by Matthias247 | Hacker News Reader

That's not a japanese phenomen. In the german automotive industry it's the same thing - and it's one of the reasons I left one of the big german OEMs.

Salaries are very fixed at those companies. You will start at around 50k€ after university, advance to 70-80€ during the next years and will be basically stuck there. The corporations have defined fixed salary levels together with the unions and these don't contain any "super-complex", "in-demand" or "rockstar" levels. It doesn't even matter whether you are doing mechanical engineering, software, or powerpoint engineering. There exist higher salaries, but only for team leads and above - which mostly don't perform technical work anymore.

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I love the phrase "powerpoint engineering" and I think I'm going to use it in my daily speech patterns now.

Sounds like the US defense industry.

I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is decently paid, as all contracting work.

Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

> I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is decently paid, as all contracting work.

"Contractor" does not mean the individuals doing the work are 1099 contractors. It means the work is done through government contracts to private companies. There is serious cost pressure on those contracts and the people actually doing the work are generally making below market compensation.

> Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

If only. Sure, you can skate by doing that if you don't mind wallowing in a boring role with 3% (if you are lucky) annual raises. If you want any sort of decent career progression you'll be doing 50+ a week and doing whatever needs to be done to hit the often unrealistic delivery targets.

I think that contracting is also similar in automotive, as the OEMs mostly work on the requirements and integration parts and most of the component development is done by external contractors.

However contractors there will rarely mean individuals. It's mostly medium to very large companies (Tier-1 suppliers) themselves. As these are usually under cost pressure it's often not that well paid.

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