Why should financial engineers be paid more than actual engineers?

[MrOmnos]

In Australia, talented electronic and embedded engineers are paid crap money compared to civil engineers , "train" engineers, "building" engineers and "finance" engineers. We only do it for the love of electronics or coding. Else we'd be doing something else that pays a lot better for something requiring less brains and stress.

They have exploited that love for work for many years.

[VK3DRB]

I hear sob stories every day at work about how little engineers get paid (by engineers).

My opinion is that if you aren't satisfied with the pay don't do the job. Find something else to do. Leave the engineering to some other guy and don't be the fool to do it.

I think this is also the part of the problem. I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to do what you love and earning the same amount of money at the same time. I don't think that is sob story. I think that is natural of a human beings. Monetary incentives are a huge part of job satisfaction even when you are doing what you love. Besides, I am not saying engineers should be paid millions. I am saying they are not compensated well enough for the jobs they do.

Funny that. I resigned last week after working almost 5 years as a senior electronics design engineer in a medical electronics company. I start a new job in a few weeks. More great state-of-the-art electronics to work on! Better pay was only a part of the reason, but it was not the whole reason. If you don't pay people competitively, they are more inclined to move on.

That being said, I will miss some of the excellent people I work with , but hope to maintain some of these friendships out of work and of course make new friends in the wonderful world of electronics  . Woohoo!

[CatalinaWOW]

One thing that always haunted me, but seems ignored by many engineers, is the question:  Did I pay for myself?   

It can be a difficult question to answer, but restated, did sales that directly resulted from my work generate enough margin to pay my salary.  That is a very crude measure since lots of other things have a claim on margin, but in many cases is not as low a bar as you would think.  Be honest in evaluating your fraction of the sales.  Sure you were solely responsible for the electronics design, but what about the enclosure, and packaging, and assembly, and BOM, and sales, and (gasp) management (include accounting, HR and all of those).  A product is like a table.  All legs are important (don't take this down a classic engineers rathole and point out that a twenty leg table can do without a leg or two.  It is an analogy and is only instructive, not congruent to the real problem).  Each leg loves to claim that the product wouldn't exist without them, and usually they are correct, but so are the other claimants.  Who should also be haunted by the same question.

Once you have determined that you are actually paying for yourself you can go on to argue about who has the right share of the spoils.  During my career I worked with many engineers who did not in my opinion pay for themselves.  They were often some of the loudest complainers about low engineering pay.