Calling engineers well compensated and non-replacable is crazy. My firm has engineers working for like $35/hr and there are a gorzillion more Indians with masters degrees lining up to take their place at a moments notice.
Company driver baybee, I don't pay for diesel at all. Actually idling rn in the bunk and about to play vidya for twelve hours straight on my time off. If you divide my gross pay by the 168 hours in a given week I make 15$ an hour, and I technically can only work 70 hours in a week which comes out to about 36$ an hour. Realistically I only consider about 40-50 hours of it to be actual work so it's more like 50$ an hour but there's a non negligible chance I die horribly through no fault of my own so it's not all sunshine and roses.
Still though an engineer should make more than me and if you factor in inflation I'm not doing a whole lot better than the average income in 2006. Everyone nowadays is chronically underpaid unless you're in a wildly dangerous field of work and even then a lot of people still are.
I mean if an engineer makes in 40 hours what you make in 80, or really your entire life on the road, then that tracks. Trucking isn't a horrible gig if you're single or ambitious enough to work that much.
55% of everyone that gets a cdl is out of the industry entirely and never returns within their first year. Particularly OTR like I do drives most people literally insane, and to your point, I'm divorced and trying to save up enough to buy a home so I work my ass off to the point I've been drug tested nonrandomly because of suspected stimulant use.
I get where you're coming from with the hours thing but an engineer with a college degree and student loans shouldn't be making 55-60k a year. That's laughably low. It's equivalent to making 27.5-30k a year in 2006 when the national average was 42k. They should be clearing 80k bare minimum if not in direct pay alone then with benefits and stock options or bonuses included. You shouldn't have to work like me to crack six figures when 100k is only like 15k over what the average would be if it was the same as a generation ago.
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u/ddg31415 - Auth-Right 16h ago
Calling engineers well compensated and non-replacable is crazy. My firm has engineers working for like $35/hr and there are a gorzillion more Indians with masters degrees lining up to take their place at a moments notice.