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 $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
> Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.
kooi · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ 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.
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.