I think the most important aspect of high salary is job demand.
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
There's demand but for all but the most specialized stuff (maybe NVH), the work is brutal and the flag hour system sucks ass. Got a warranty job? Better be happy with half pay. Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault. There's a good reason Ford can't find enough auto techs. There's no way I would go back to earning money as a mechanic over something like HVAC or being a millwright.
> Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault.
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
No, when all the tools fail, they buy back the car or you lemon law it. Story over. It would not happen, does not happen, cannot happen.
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
Lab Scope / Meter
2-channel
Bandwidth 3MHz
Sample Rate: Up to 6 million samples/sec
Scale range 0-100mV to 0-400V
Sweep rate 50 microseconds to 20 seconds (5 min in GMM mode)
It’s slow but it’s an oscilloscope. It graphs electrical measurements over time. They sold CRT scopes on carts for years and years.
Maybe you should move the goalposts and demand FFT or higher bandwidth.
> Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.
kooi · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
rpcope1 · · focus · HN ↗
Scoundreller · · focus · HN ↗
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
They are using an OEM diagnostic tool and following approved shop procedures.
mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
Shitty-kitty · · focus · HN ↗
sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
thedougd · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.snapon.com/EN/US/Diagnostics/Products/TRITON-D10" rel="nofollow">https://www.snapon.com/EN/US/Diagnostics/Products/TRITON-D10
sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
thedougd · · focus · HN ↗
It’s slow but it’s an oscilloscope. It graphs electrical measurements over time. They sold CRT scopes on carts for years and years.
Maybe you should move the goalposts and demand FFT or higher bandwidth.
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.