Originally posted by: blahblah99
Let me elaborate more... there was a massive layoff a year back in my company (of less than 500 people), and in the engineering department alone, we lost about 20% of the engineers. Yet, they want FAST time to market designs, with multiple designs occuring simultaneously. Now that doesn't mean that I am doing all the design work - I'm working on one design, while the next engineer works on the other design. And in such a small company as this one, you get the priviledge of doing all the design work from architecting the design to prototyping it, to testing, qualifying, and supporting it. The downside is if there is a problem, you get the blame. Now, there are concurrent designs in progress, they want more with a smaller workforce. That means a) we all have to work harder, or b) we have to work smarter and more efficiently, or c) both of the above.
Four months from now, I hope to have my design near completion and ahead of schedule. That will be my leverage for asking for a huge raise at the end of the year. Even though I have those skills listed above.. what makes me better than the guy waiting to replace me?
Well, there are many factors. For one thing, if you're only 25 and you've known this much, how much more will you know when you're 30, 35, 40, 45? Also, intution is an acquired skill that occurs over an extremely long term. It's not something that you can learn in a month, or two, or even a year. Why hire a $15 guy to solve problems if it takes him two weeks while a $30 guy takes a day? Not only that, but project managers and test/manufacturing come to me for support quite often due to the complexity of our designs (which I had no part of, and had to spend time learning the architecture of it).
It's not like I demanded a huge raise first, then proved myself. I've PROVEN myself, and now I'm asking for a raise. And because engineering is such a broad field, you're not limited on what you can learn unlike other jobs in the same salary range.
