What I want to do

Be able to make a lot of money (atleast >200k $ within the next 5-8 years) or do brilliant direct work. So, mostly raise myself with abilities to jump to a variety of domains or tasks as the world needs, in management, problem solving etc…

Skills

Some problem solving, mechanical discipline related designing and knowledge possibly not relevant to direct work at all.

Credentials

Work is slow, things take too much time to happen. Most of the time in this job I am just doing things that don’t need real brain work. The times when I am challenged are probably 20-30% of the time.

I don’t have any credentials to my name right now, when it has been about 1.5 years. I get feedback every week sometimes. Other companies might be different, but I suspect with the credentials aspect I am stuck, as there is not much happening for a mechanical designer.

Flexible career capital

Well with Management consulting you get to branch out into a lot of things after a 2-3 years of work as an analyst or an associate. I am not sure the idea is the same with design Engineering. I guess after 5-7 years I can start leading project teams to deliver some functionality. But until then I shall be just a designer.

RUNWAY

Low income as compared to DS or Management consulting, less demanding too. In California my friend starts with 95k$ and I started with 40k Euros. Probably he can save more there. In Netherlands for sure, I am not making more than 2k Euros every year extra (5%) for sure. I guess the scene in US is probably like 10%.

Payscale for Mechanical engineering suggests an average pay of 38k (within the ball park for mech engineers in NL I would say.). I know the salary of a good number of friends. I would say the estimate is very good.

Payscale for design engineering in Netherlands suggests the following…

A Design Engineer earns an average salary of €46,246 per year. Most people with this job move on to other positions after 20 years in this career. For the first five to ten years in this position, salary increases somewhat, but any additional experience does not have a big effect on pay.

Experience doesn’t seem to influence this job.

Payscale for Data scientist in Amsterdam suggests the following.

A Data Scientist in Amsterdam earns an average salary of €53,334 per year. People in this job generally don’t have more than 10 years’ experience. A skill in Data Modeling is associated with high pay for this job. Experience strongly influences income for this job.

  • Ask Tim to validate what I am saying?

I suspect with the different jobs the main thing is the impact.

The manager at ASML already told be at the interview, “If you want money then you wouldn’t be here.”

Experience unlike in DS doesn’t seem to account for a drastic raise in skills. My colleague earns about 52k with 20 years of experience (Electrical engineering)

I suspect the value added by an engineer to the company is low. You are not required to be amazing, unlike as I have heard about peers in management consulting.

Connections

I don’t meet top officials everyday. I barely meet the CFO of my company say once a year right now. Impact to the organization is so so low. I am not in marketing, I am just a small leaf in a gigantic tree as a designer and it shows in the treatment, pay and lack of competitiveness.

Growth

Non-existent in the Netherlands in terms of promotions and in terms of salary. No idea about how it is in the US. Not sure if this is such a deal breaker anyway. As said before, credentials is the king. Even to as 80k hours for a job, I need shit loads of credentials and that is it.

TBD

  • How much can I make in ASML in 5 years? ask ayjinkya and sanidhya

P.S

Wanted to start work at 9:30 in the morning, started writing at ~5:30. God help me. Wrote for an hour. Ate. Procrastinated until a while back spent probably another hour getting this ready. “Sad”