Who's Your Data?: How Much Do You Really Make?

Random thought of the day: on a recent Sopranos episode Tony Soprano called message boards, chit-chat sites. I loved that.

There has been a lot of chit-chat on the web about how much money American engineers make overseas. There are thousands of US engineers in the Middle East, Asia and Europe. The salaries I have heard thrown around are $200k to $250k a year.

Last week I talked to 5 engineers stationed overseas. I believe I got to the bottom of the story…the rest of the story, Good day. As usual there is less to the wild stories about money and compensation than meets the eye.

Engineer A is stationed in a secret location in Asia. Although I don’t know how secret it is, he told me. He is a mid-level engineer who works with Windows based systems and some telco gear. He has about seven years of industry experience. He was trained in IT by the military and has that important Top Secret/SCI/BBKING/REM clearance.

BTW – Since it is a secret I thought about giving Engineer A the alias of Mr. Pink for this blog– I saw Reservoir Dogs last week. I watched it on my video ipod on the plane. All of the bad guys are named after a color. As it got more and more violent I cupped my hands closer to the screen so the Mother with the two little babies sitting next to me didn’t lose it. That’s one of those movies where you can accurately say…everybody dies in the end.

I digress. Mr. Pink, uh Engineer A, makes $200k a year. Wow! Case closed. He is about a $60k a year engineer in Colorful Colorado and about an $80k guy in DC. It seems he is making a lot of money in Korea (oops, so much for the secret location). Until…I asked a few more questions. How many days a week do you work? All of them. Weekends? Yup. How many hours a day? Ten. What? Seven days a week, ten hours per day? That’s, wait a minute…seventy hours a week. That’s 3640 hours of work a year. Divided by $200k a year, that’s about $55.00 an hour. For a normal DC engineer that would be equivalent of roughly $115k a year. A premium, but not as wild as it first sounds.

Engineer A tells me that there is absolutely nothing else to do where he is located but work. His wife (no children) is in New York. He hasn’t seen his Mom or Dad in two years. Engineer A and the others I talked to are ready to come back to the states. Engineer A was hoping to make $150k in DC, New York or Boston. The best offer he is getting in the US is for about $90k. Mr. Pink is feeling blue.

Who's Your Data?

How Much Do You Really Make?

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