Oh and comparing salaries is a sure way to depress yourself.

Just make sure youre getting 30% increases (raises, new jobs) and benefits every couple of years.

Here is how it works:

He charges $205/hour to clients which includes his salary and overhead and profit. Its not just his salary.

He must make more than $150k if his charge-out rate is $205 though. $150k @ 45hrs/week is $64/hr, that's a crazy amount of OH and profit built in to hit a $205 charge-out

Right now the delta between my invoice rate and Client charge-out is only like 13%

Not an engineer but a white collar professional drone like an engineer.

Another positive about staying with the company and working your way up is that once you can pierce the executive level your bonus opportunity usually increases dramatically. In my experience wagecells don't typically have the opportunity for large bonuses (say 5 - 10% of your salary being average). However, again in my experience, executives take care of themselves and your bonus opportuntiy can increase to 35%+. Makes a huge deal when you're evaluating total comp.

I'm an engineering consultant and part owner of a 50-person firm.

We usually are looking at around a 3x multiplier at our firm and its also the industry standard in my line of work, so that math is pretty close actually.

Is it just a crazy amount of overhead that blows it up? I'm on the construction side and we don't see 3x multiples, typically it's more like burdened labour rate + 11% (I think) for overhead + <15% for profit. And we have tools & consumables allowances for direct workers.

Actually come to think of it, this might explain some of the engineering charge-out rates I've seen

Yeah if you do state or federal work as an engineering firm you actually have to have an audited rate (called a FAR) that is done by an accounting firm that is licensed to do them. So they look at combined salaries in your company, then they look at the expense of your office, computers, software, vehicles, benefits, 401k, E&O insurance, etc, anything and everything that qualifies. Our FAR is around 1.33, which is the multiplier of overhead to salary. I'd say most firms have 1.4-1.6.

So looking at 1.5 as an average overhead multiplier, your loaded rate billed to the client would be:

(1x) salary + (1.5x) overhead + (0.375x) profit representing a 15% profit on the salary+overhead.

1+1.5+0.375 = 2.875, or around a 3 multiplier of salary to earn a solid but modest profit.

I do software/hardware, ie writing code from boot to ops for dsp platforms. Hell I design the boards.

Am I getting shafted at $115k? When you say firmware, I imagine its more fpga oriented or something more embedded than TI or AD devices? Do you come up with programming for devices like power supervisory chips, like the actual logical architecture?

Work in a manufacturing plant. Base is around 130. I've made close to 200 with OT. I could work 70hrs a week if I wanted but lately probably putting in less than 50. Engineering jobs usually don't pay any overtime so it's a pretty good gig.

yeah, I see our techs getting paid more just because they get paid ot. Kinda pissening.

Dang that's next level digging into what constitutes overhead, but I guess makes sense when you're talking big contracts (or big dollar values overall) and a multiplier like that

I started out writing the Flash Translation Layer for Enterprise SSDs, which was mostly CS algorithm work. Things like garbage collection, read disturb, scheduling, etc.

I've recently transitioned to working in NAND Integration -- taking the things that the NAND engineers say keeps the flash healthy and translating that into algorithms / code.

Most of my work is done in C++. Certain modules are still written in C. Sometimes I write Python scripts to transform an Excel/CSV file into a CPP header file.

Math wizard of peace.

Sounds like a cool job that you set yourself up with.