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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah no kidding. I was shocked at the numbers in this article. A 15-year engineer in aerospace gets you ~120k.

At my first job in financial software, one of my coworkers was an MIT-grad aeronautical engineer with ~5 years experience in aerospace, ~6 months software. He took a pay cut (though not much of one - I think he went from about $90K -> $75K) to get into finance, because aeronautical engineering doesn't really pay you enough money to have a decent life in the Boston area. Within 2 years he'd jumped ship to a hedge fund and was making about double his aerospace salary.

And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...

Coincidentally I currently work in aerospace (in a software engineering role) and I have 15 years experience.

I wish I made $120k/year.... :(

Makes me wonder if it’s worth it to just say fuck it and leave software development for some other mediocre paying field I have interest in.

Sure, there’s probably gonna be big financial hit in some form, but I don’t see a good reasons to stay in software development anymore if I’m not someone who can command the massive salaries.

I'm not surprised. I'm guessing the aerospace industry is relatively stable in size (we don't suddenly need a lot more planes, spacecraft, or weapon systems than in the past), so employers in that industry don't need to offer big compensation packages to lure away scarce employees from competitors in order to enable that growth.

I would guess the opposite. There is a ton of new stuff going into space, and by a larger variety of organizations than in the past.

from talking to friends I think its more that there are really only 2-3 viable employers in the US, so there is little option to jump ship for higher salary. This keeps salaries artificially low. For example a friend of mine worked at raytheon, jumped to lockheed for a raise, back to raytheon for another raise, and then back to lockheed. You can only do that so many times before companies stop hiring you. Whereas in my field (IT consulting) there are an almost infinite amount of small companies to work for

There is a lot more to aerospace than just the primes (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics). There are thousands of smaller companies that produce the parts and services that are used for the big projects.

I don't know if this was anomalous, but I was making a smidge more than that in the aerospace industry with 5 years experience

what region, if you don't mind me asking?

Los Angeles area

I've seen fpga engineers pull down $150k

Real drought of senior talent in that area

A lot of the fpga talent is going towards Finance and ML companies nowadays from what I have seen, that's probably causing the salaries to bump up in non finance world.

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