POV: How to Triple Your Salary in 5.5 Years as an Engineer | Career Advice

Here is a summary of the key points from the transcript: - The speaker is a mechanical engineer sharing career advice for other engineers. He wants to help others maximize their earning potential and achieve their career goals. - In college, he recommends making lots of friends as you never know who may help you get a job later. Choose an industry with money like defense contracting. - For your first job interview, bring a laptop and PowerPoint to showcase your skills and projects. Be enthusiastic and likable. - Get a master's degree as soon as possible, as it gives you 2 extra years of experience. Do it quickly and cheaply. - Job hop every 2-3 years to increase your salary. Get promotions and raises by negotiating salary, not by loyalty at one company. - Move from a large defense company to a subcontractor role to increase pay by ~50%. Get security clearances to be more marketable. - Always do good work, take on side projects, and add skills to make yourself employable. Update your LinkedIn and resume. - Think 2 jobs ahead. Choose roles that set you up for the next opportunity. Hit your earning ceiling as fast as possible. - At some point, working harder won't yield more pay. Manage your effort based on incentives and diminishing returns. - Mentor others and pay it forward when you achieve success. Help people who are in the situation you once faced.

I just want to make a video on my story that I know for a fact will help others out there in their journey. Whether you're a freshman in college, whether you've already graduated, you know, whether you're maybe three years into the workforce, etcetera. I know that this video will be applicable and useful to someone out there. All right, welcome to the channel, everyone. This video is how to triple your salary as an engineer in five and a half years. So I do a lot of driving on this channel. I'm an engineer, mechanical engineer. I've been in the workforce for six years out of school, and I never really had a mentor growing up. And it was only until I got one mentor for a year at my one job that it really helped me out with my career and kind of changed my trajectory and my forks in the road. And this is my, like, giving back. You know, I don't really think anyone can. You know, people can do everything on their own, but when you have a guide. Let's go this way. So, like, driving cars, I'm an engineer. Um, I got into mechanical engineering because I led cars, and I thought I'd work at some factory, like, Porsche factory, one day. But, you know, I ended up going into defense contracting. So I just want to make a video on my story that I know for a fact will help others out there in their journey. Whether you're a freshman in college, whether you've already graduated, you know, whether you're maybe three years into the workforce, etcetera. I know that this video will be applicable and useful to someone out there. So I'm just gonna hop from this, go from the. From the jump to start, whatever we're gonna go over, like negotiating strategy, career strategy. A lot of career strategy is gonna be in this video as an engineer, because I want you guys to maximize your earning potential. Money isn't everything, but money makes your life easier, okay? So I'm not here to sell you some fucking book, you know, watch out, squirrel. But I just wanna give back. You know, I wish I had this video when I was younger and, you know, had this advice, and I know how powerful that this advice can be to people out there, especially with those with no, you know, dads, moms, friends, mentors, etcetera. So this is my story. It may not, probably will not be 100% accurate to your life, but it will. There will be a Venn diagram here. Okay. So I pretty much started out undergrad. This is in America, by the way. Mexico. Started out undergrad. Wanted to be pre med, wanted to be a surgeon. Figured out I wanted to do that for the money, not for the right reasons. So I switched over to engineering, did undergrad engineering for mechanical engineering, and then was hard as shit. You're going to have no life. It's like, pick three, sleep, social or grades. Sorry, pick two, sleep, social, grades. So pretty much I just did grades and sleep. Never really partied in school. That wasn't my lifestyle. I'd recommend first, starting with your goals. Like figure out what your. I don't want to use the word goals. Start with a dream. Okay. What I like to ask people, oh, what are your dreams? And they'll be like, oh, I don't know, that's so far off. Like, think to yourself, like, if you could wave a magic wand today, what would that look like? Are you living in Europe? Are you driving a Porsche? Like, I went into engineering cause I wanted to buy these cool fucking cars and it helped me fucking get there, you know? Right now I own three porsches, a few motorcycles, et cetera, et cetera. And like, this job and career path undoubtedly helped me get there and acquire these things. Now this is my hobby. I didn't buy this to flex on people. I just fucking love porsches and driving and I couldn't give a shit what other people think. So let's get it out of the way. So maybe you're wave of magic wand and maybe you want to have a family, wife, kid, I don't know. Kids are very expensive. They require money. So our wives and houses and everything else in America these days. So maybe you want to retire at the age of 40 or 30 or. I don't know. So what I would recommend is starting with your dream and then working backwards. So for me, my dream was to buy a few porsches and have a motor sport style lifestyle and hobby and be able to afford that stuff. You know, if I could get hit in the head with a rock and just be into running, all I would have to buy are tennis shoes and a water bottle. Like nothing these hundred thousand dollar fucking cars. But, you know, here we are, so. So I went into mechanical engineering. The first thing I'm recommending you guys do in undergrad, make as many friends as possible. Like, make sure that you have a large friend group. You don't have to have like, concrete, super tight friends, but just make friends. Just be nice to people. Because you never know when one day when you're gonna like, need to call that person for recommendation or a job. Like, here's a great example. I was in one class at my undergrad. And there was this guy named Vinny. And I did homework with Vinny once in one of my classes and we just went, hey, man, let's do the project together. It's not gonna on a Friday, yada yada. We did it. Don had a nice time. Two years later, Vinny was working at this defense contract company and he goes, yo, Chad, like, I know you're only working one, you know, one class your last semester, would you be interested in taking over my internship? And I said, sure. So not only did I get, you know, a lead for an internship, but I got a referral from an inside person. So here's one thing I'm gonna tell you, you know, off the bat, if you can get an inside referral to a job from someone, you know at that job, you're automatically getting an interview. So you're already skipping the line because someone ate that place of employment is referring you if you want to work at SpaceX and your friend and goes, yo, my friend John is referring me to SpaceX. Well, you're going to get that interview. You know, let me back up some more here. When you, when you go to graduate undergrad, getting your first job sucks. Okay? You're going to apply to a hundred fucking jobs. And you might get like, don't quote me on this shit, like, like ten responses back. And on the ten responses back, maybe you get like five interviews. And the five interviews, you get like one job offer. The point is, like, you're not gonna apply to 100 jobs and get 100 interviews and 100 job offers. It just, it's just not how it works. Like, no one knows who you are. So it's a huge numbers game. There's many people out there who are gonna have a very little self confidence where they're gonna apply to a job. You're gonna get turned away and like, oh, nobody wants me. And, you know, blah, blah, like, no, it's just not. It's just a fucking numbers game, you know? Keep fucking at it. Once you get your first job, your entire career set, good to go. Because now you have references at a real fucking engineering job. Okay? I'm trying to make this video and have a good time myself. So this guy hates me. We're getting quiet by his house. I don't think anyone's home. Alright, so make as many friends as possible. Undergrad, they don't have to be, again, tight friends. Just make friends in undergrad, you never know. We're gonna have to use them later. Add them all on LinkedIn et cetera. You know, try to do, like, group study sessions. Do not be lone wolf in undergrad. It will not help you out unless you're a fucking savant. You know what? I don't want to even make a qualifier on this because one of you guys out there. Oh, I'm a folk in Savon. No, just make friends, okay? Pick an industry that has money. So, you know, if you want to. For me, I knew defense contracting in America. It's a $1.1 trillion budgeted, you know, thing a year. Like, that's where a lot of my money is. I'm not selling out to defense contracting. And, like, the war machine, it's like, look, like my one vote in America is not gonna overcome, you know, trillions of dollars of crap. So just go where the money is. If the money is in SpaceX, go work at SpaceX, etcetera. So I know that defense contractors make a lot of fucking money. They have great lifestyles. And I know for me, if I want to have my hobbies, I need money. If I want live, I need money. If I want to travel, I need money. If I want to help my friends out, I need money. If I want to build a house, I need money. Like, it's just. It's the lubrication of society. It's the way it is. If you want to pay off your student loans, you need money. If you want to be stressed out, you need money. So here we are. So I got the in for my first internship at this company, company a. We'll start with that. And small defense contractor, and, you know, got the interview. So here's my another piece of advice. When you go for your first interview, bring a laptop. Bring a little laptop. You know, we're going to do it is you're going to have your resume and they're going to be, oh, tell us about yourself. Rather than tell about yourself, you're going to show about yourself. You're going to have a laptop with a PowerPoint, and we're going to go crazy. You're going to have pictures of things you've done. Maybe it's your senior capstone project. Maybe it's a side business you work on. You know, for me, what I did, I. I published. Hey, like, I. At the time, I was like, I don't know, ten year, maybe, like, seven year mechanic where I worked on porsches. You know, I do all my own oil changes, my transmission drops, whatever, you know. You know, you guys today, you know, people who are graduating in 2024, you guys are fucking smart. Like, you're very savvy. Like, you can say, oh, like, I do solidworks and I made little widgets here and there or whatever. Whatever you do on the side, show that you've applied your engineering skills, whether it's software, computer, electrical, or mechanical, outside of school somewhere, even if it's in school, that's fine, but just show a way that you applied your engineering skills in your life. So for me, I built like a, like a, like a tire rack in my garage to hold all my race wheels. I designed it in CAD. First I went to Home Depot and I built it and then I hung it up. So it was like, I prototyped it in CAD. I built it with my fucking hands and then it hung it up and then it fucking worked. Sick. I showed up on my fucking PowerPoint. Amazing. Additionally, if you don't have solidworks experience out there, you can download like Fusion 360 or Solidworks student version for free. And I'm gonna put a link in the description of the video below. It's called like Verit. It's like vertinox one. So this guy will take you from zero to a b minus. Install works okay. And it can be step by step literal hand holding you on how to use solidworks and make like, engineering designs. Okay, you're gonna go take screenshots of those designs and then put them in your PowerPoint. You're gonna put screenshots of, you know, thing, you know, things you've made or in class, in Capstone or whatever it is, and put it in your PowerPoint. Now, rather than talk about what you've done, you can talk and show what you've done. Thirdly, you're gonna be the only person at this interview who's brought a laptop to an internship interview. Like, they're like, wow, this guy is so. Or girl, whatever is so prepared. And once this job so bad, they brought a laptop. And if you get the fucking Amazon clicker, dude, game over. Game over. I brought the Amazon clicker to my interview and I showed myself, you know, who is chat? Oh, make a slide on who you are. What's your personality like? People want to work with people that they like. You can be the smartest engineer in the world. If you're miserable to work with, no one's going to want to hire you. Okay? If you're friendly, outgoing, please smile, please be, please be enthusiastic in your interview, okay? Like, people want to. You have, you have two friends who call you, okay, about to call you one friend you hate and one friend you love to hang out with all the time, and you're happy. You laugh with the guy, whatever. Who would you rather bring on a vacation with you? Okay? And this vacation is going to be your job and your career. So that goes a long way. There is a thing called personality hires, where people only hire you because of your personality. Now, like, just don't look it too far into that. But that's a thing. Okay? So a little Venn diagram action there. So please be enthusiastic at your interview and be happy. Smile, whatever. Be likable. Okay? Because you're going to have a slide in your personality. You know, hey, like, my name's Chad, and I'm very outgoing. I like making friends. I always have a positive attitude. I like to learn. I like to work on cars. I race motorcycles. I. I don't know. I mean, you know, like, great. Okay. So I don't get too far into the weeds here. So you're gonna have. Your friend recommended you for your first job. You got your laptop, you presented. I had three people interview me for my first job, and the first guy, his name was Eric, okay? He walks in the room. I do the PowerPoint, the clicker, the whole fucking thing. He told me in retrospect, he walked out of that interview, and he told the next two people, I don't care what the fuck you guys say, we're hiring this person. He brought a laptop to the interview. He presented. He showed me solidworks crap. FBA analysis, this. And, like, he's on it. Like. Like, this kid's hungry. Okay? So I got hired immediately. I don't know what I made. This is back in 2018. I don't know, $20 an hour, $30 an hour. I have no idea. It's been too long. It wasn't bad. And I would consider myself not the smartest engineer, but a very hard worker. And so, you know, I'm a good engineer. I'm a b plus engineer and a minus engineer. But I am not, like, the be all Bible mechanical engineering resource. I don't know every equation, etc. Etc. But I will outwork anybody. I will outrun you, I will out work you, etcetera. So, during my internship, guys, this is where you're gonna make your career, right here. Your internship. Grind, fucking grind. And you're gonna make a name for yourself, and it's gonna come back and pay dividends in the future. And so I did that for, like, six months. I got my job offer. Amazing. Now I'm employed. I started out at, like, $71,000 a year. Back in 2018. Cool. I literally cried that I got a fucking job offer. It was the first day I said to myself, this is the first day of the rest of my life. And to this day, that panned out. True. So now I'm a mechanical engineer. I'm working defense contracting. I'm not fucking killing people. One other thing. People think that because it's defense contracting, you're, like, in some shipping container with an Xbox control, sending drones to, like, some foreign country and bombing people. Let's see if we can run by this guy. So that's not all defense contracting. Yeah. Like, you can work for Raytheon missile and defense, or Raytheon intelligence in space, Raytheon Colin's aerospace, or you can make planes. You can make missiles. So, like, not every defense contracting job is killing people. It sounds crazy. Like, I had a combo with a kid one day, and I was like, hey, man, like, you should do defense contracting and back up real quick in defense contracting. In my first job, I used every single. Every single class. I took thermal vibration. I did material science, machine design. Like, nearly every important class in mechanical engineering, I used. At my first job, I was designing, like, widgets, and I was the only mechanical engineer designing these low production widgets, and I was doing, like, conceptual install works. I would do material selection. I would design it myself, install works. Then I would get it made in the mid, in the machine shop myself on a fucking Bridgeport end mill doing the lathe, yada yada, all that stuff. And then I would test it in real life. Iterate, yada yada. I work with RF engineers, electrical engineers, other engineers out there with multiple disciplines, and then we would field it, you know, then I would train, like, operators on how to use it, and that was it. I mean, it was great. It was the perfect product lifecycle of mechanical engineering. Like, nobody wants to go to school and be, like, some sales engineer on excel all day, and you don't get to actually use what you learn in school. It was kind of like a waste of money. So I like defense content because you get to use all your classes, and normally you're the only mechanical engineer on the job of what you can do, so an amazing experience. Let's see. So let me back up here. I don't know where I was. Sorry. So you're gonna out grind everyone? Like, make a name for yourself, whatever. And then one day, my boss comes to me and he says, chad, this is your career without a master's. With a master's, okay? I'm like, dude, I hated school, please. Like, I can't go back to school. Please. Please. No mas. No mas, please, sir. Dude, like, you gotta do it. Lesson number whatever. Do your fucking masters. You're gonna hate it. But the longer you wait to do your masters, the harder it gets. And that is so true. The older you get, you're gonna lose motivation to go back to school. Maybe you have a girlfriend, a wife, maybe you have a house, maybe you have a kid, a dog. I don't know. The older you get, get normally, the more responsibilities you get. So do your masters early on top of the masters. Do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible. There is no winner for whether you went to an Ivy League school or a state school for your masters. Now, if you want to go work on a Wall street at some private equity firm at Goldman, you're need a harvard MBA at. From fucking Wharton or Upenn or like, whatever the fuck, but for 99% of the people out there, you do not need that. You just need the masters. And I asked my boss at the time, said, eric, does it matter what I get my master's degree? And he goes, no, as long as you get it and it's relevant. I said I wanted to be, like, sharp and get a master's degree in electrical engineering. I wanted to be extra employable for my future, but I was like, but I also don't want to, like, kill myself learning a whole new fucking discipline. Because your undergrad is a mile wide and an inch deep. Your masters is an inch wide and a mile deep. You go so deep in the equations, it is hyper outer space crazy. Like, it's. It's hard. It's hard fucking work. And you're gonna be like, I'm gonna fail like this. This is too hard for me. Thank fucking God I passed everything. So I teamed up with a co worker, my friend Eddie. And I was like, dude, let's do our masters together. I did it close to school. Sorry, I did close to work. So I was commute. I was working 60 hours a week, 50 hours a week. I leave in the middle of the day, go to school, and then I would take a class in the morning, in the evening, maybe at night, something like that. Additionally, on top of that, do not draw your masters out. Do it as fast as possible. The faster you get your masters, the faster you make more money. Okay? If you take five years to get your masters, that is five years of delayed income earning potential, period. So I did my masters in a year and a half. I would say three courses is probably the absolute hard max on what you can do in a semester while working full time. For me personally, I didn't have time to sleep, eat shit, shower, shave. Like, it was just work school. That was it. There were literally times where I would sleep under my desk at work because I was like, all right, it's. It's 10:00 p.m. at work. Do I go home right now and sleep for 3 hours and then wake up, go back to work, then go to school? No, I just, like, slept under my fucking desk and then woke up, went to eight at my 08:00 a.m. did my fucking class, went back to work, grinded the whole thing. So I got done in a year and a half, and I go, yo, boss, got the masters done. Where's the money? And they were like, dude, yeah, we'll get it for you. We'll get it for you. So the second thing that you're gonna learn is just because you get your masters at your current employer does not mean you will cash it in at that employer. You will really only cash in that chip when you leave. Okay. It's gonna be the same thing with the clearance. So I started my first defense contractor job with no clearance. I got t's, sci, whatever, and then I was like, hey, I have a clearance. I'm more marketable. You know, like, I'm making 70 grand. Like, I should be at 90 grand. And they're like, eh, not how it works, buddy. Sorry. And I was just so frustrated. I tried to get fair market value. My goal in life was always to get fair market value as fast and fairly as possible. So I worked at my first job, company a, for three years. Beg, pleaded, borrowed, cried, bled for fair market value, and it just, like, wasn't happening. Now. I learned a ton. I got probably the most skills, hands on skills in my career. At my first job, I literally did it all. I took on as many products as possible. The more I took on, the better I looked. And the more experience I got. The more experience you get, the more you put on your resume. I kid you not. I took on a side project during my first job at company a where I was doing, like, space Cubesat satellite radiation analysis. You sent a satellite to space? How much radiation is being, you know, impinge upon that satellite, you know, at that orbit, at that time, blah, blah. Those couple bullets on my resume from 2018 helped me get my current job today. And I hated that fucking task. I hated that fucking project. But when I interviewed for my current job today, oh, essentially, here you have radiation now. I was like, yeah, technically, I do. You know, like, it was great, you know, blah, blah. Oh, it's perfect. Like, it'll be. It'll come in use for this job that you're interviewing for. I said, okay, cool. Helped me get my job. So the more you take on, the more you can add to your resume and the more hot search words that recruiters can use when they're looking for your resume on LinkedIn, get a LinkedIn. Another thing is, save every job description that you get. So when I apply to company a, they're like, oh, like, mechanical engineer will work with interdisciplinary fields of rf engineering, electrical engineering, digital engineering, manufacturer engineering. You know, you will build prototypes. You'll work in a machine shop. Yada, yada. Recruiters. Recruiters, and. What's the word? Yeah, recruiters. They make those job requisitions. They type all that out. It's not often the case that the hiring engineer makes a job description. They might pass it. Bye. The, you know, hiring engineer. But more often than not, the recruiter makes those bullet points. So if a recruiter already made these really great thought out sentences of your job. Copy and paste that. Don't reinvent the wheel. Copy and paste that onto your LinkedIn. Copy and paste that onto your resume. Now, if there's things left out, obviously add it. So, on my job description, there wasn't much about thermal analysis, FEA analysis, stress analysis, vibration analysis. So I added that in there myself. A material section, yada, yada, yada. So. But one of my quick hacks, people, oh, like, I gotta talk about my job and, like, what I did and, you know, and, you know, what I've done at previous jobs is copy. Save that job description and post it on your resume. Post it on your LinkedIn, and you will get people reaching out to you. Okay. All right, what's next? So you got your masters, maybe you got your clearance. Get the clearance, and you've tried really hard to make your current job work for you. You're gonna find that it won't work. I think I left my. After three years, I went from $70,000 to $100,000 working at company a, and I just tried so hard to make it work. It was a family to me. I loved my boss. I loved my mentor. It was amazing. And then one day, like, I wasn't getting market value. Like, I knew market value was running $140,000 back in 2021, 2020. And I get a recruiter, reach out to me, hey, like, you be a perfect fit for this job, you know, at company b, and I'm like, okay, cool. I take the phone call. I interviewed one other thing. Job interview all the time. Okay. It's not that you're gonna be unloyal to your current employer, but you're practicing your interviewing skills for when the big day counts. Additionally, the more you interview, the more you can find what fair market value is for these roles that you're in and your years of experience. I love interviewing. I'd probably interview once a month at jobs, so. And when you interview, one thing that you can do on LinkedIn or wherever, they reach out to you to not waste anyone's time like this isn't even more applicable in your. In the later part of your career. Hey, recruiter, thanks for reaching out so that we don't waste time. What is the budgeted salary range for this role if it's way below what you want, respectfully, this is way below what I'm currently at right now or what I'm looking for. All the best. No hard feelings. You're gonna save their time and your time. But if it's reasonable, then take the job interview. You're gonna learn more about how job interviewing works. And again, when you're interviewing, smile, smile, smile. Be enthusiastic. Be someone who you want to hang around with and be with. Okay, where are. Okay, so you're gonna find that you're gonna be working at your first job and you're not getting market value. So eventually you gotta jump ship. Like, do not be loyal to your current job. Be loyal to yourself, okay? You owe it to yourself to be the best person to yourself. Your boss today is not going to be paying your bills. Your boss today is not going to be taking care of your future kid, your future wife. He's not paying your mortgage. He's not paying for your Porsche or your motorcycles or whatever, your travels, whatever. And they can be a great boss. But, like, you know, it's no hard feelings. So be loyal to yourself. Okay? So, you know, don't job hop all the time. Don't be like, two months here, two months there, blah, blah. That's gonna look bad. I usually give every job I start, two years. Unless you fucking hate it, then quit. Don't work somewhere where you fucking hate. But if it's not bad, give it two years. Okay? So every three years, I pretty much look for a job, you know, more realistically, you know, eventually, like, you're gonna hit a ceiling, and your goal is to hit that ceiling as fast as possible. So I know for mechanical engineering in the US, the year is 20. 2024. My GoPro died. Please make it over. This is why I'm a fucking engineer right now for this fucking shit. I want to enjoy life. Goddamn. All right, so the most you can make as a mechanical engineer is probably a quarter million dollars a year. And so you gotta figure out how to get there, okay? You gotta reverse calculate. So first you found what your dream is. You had your magic wand. You wanna buy a house in Italy. You wanna have ten kids, I don't fucking know. Figure out how much that's gonna cost you and figure out a job that's gonna afford to get you there. Okay? Maybe your dream is to have a ton of free time and you want to work from home half the time or the full time. Find that job. It's going to do that and pay that at the same time. Then work backwards, you know, figure out what this ceiling is on the job that you're going to go into. So I knew for me, that the most you can make as a mechanical is like a quarter million a year. So I'm like, how do I get there? It's defense contracting, mechanical engineering, a few job hopping years of experience, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, when I was at job a, every year I made 10,000 more a year. But I was, like, fucking grinding for it. Like, pleading with my boss, like, please. Like, I'm working so hard. I'm at the top of my class. Can we please pay me more? You know, whatever. I was fighting so hard for it. Anyways, I get a recruiter in my inbox on LinkedIn, and they're like, hey, do you want to make 140,000 at company B? I was like, wow. And they were the nicest people. They wanted the best for me. It was like I was getting abused at my. At my first job, taking advantage of whatever financially, and here comes this person on LinkedIn, and they're like, oh, you poor baby. Like, come here. We'll take care of you. We'll pay you 140, and we'll have all these fucking benefits. Yada, yada, yada. So one thing I'm advising you as well is, like, for your first job in defense contracting, like, you're gonna work for a big name company. Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon base Systems, general Dynamics, whatever. They're all out there. We go, go google it. And then once you get that job, you get your clearance, you get your masters, because then you're gonna subcontract, okay? Subcontracting will pay you way more than working for Raytheon or Lockheed or Northrop directly, often maybe like a 50% premium. So when I was working at Raytheon, I was making 140, and my engineering counterparts and friends, they were making 100. Okay? And then after I worked there for two and a half years, I was making like 170 base, 160 base, 100, 6170 base. I was getting, again another ten k each year. So after three years, I doubled my salary from 70 to 140. And then from there, additionally as a subcontract, now this is a plus or a minus. You pretty much are not allowed to manage anybody. Like Raytheon, where I worked, if you're a subcontract, you're on your own little island, and they plug you in to their team. You can't manage anyone. You can advise unofficially, younger engineers, but you cannot officially give them reviews. You can't be a project manager, generally speaking. Don't go into it thinking that you're gonna be a project manager, because more often than not, the big company wants to use their own as a project manager. So I said, great, I get to be paid 50% more. I have nearly no responsibility. No bullshit responsibility. When you become a manager in engineering, you more often than not get more responsibility and no more peter like, you get more work, but no more pay. That's a bad trade deal. Okay? Think about yourself. Think about what's fair to you. Now, if you have to take on the management role so that one day you can become a director to make $300,000 a year, well, you got to make that. That deal with yourself. See what we got out here? All right, what are we talking about? So, all right, subcontracting. Subcontracting will always pay you more than working for the large company itself. Additionally, you can become a govy. So you work for the government directly, and you get, like, soft benefits, but you don't make that much money. You become a civil servant. So if you want to work for NASA, you're gonna get shit fucking pay. All right? Subcontracting will always give you the most bang for your hour and dollar, you know, etcetera. So I worked at Company B for three years again. I again LinkedIn messages all the time, updated my resume, and, you know, I needed to get another. Another level of clearance. And that's what I was looking for, for my next step. So whatever my next job was, I wanted the last clearance and more money. So I waited and waited and waited. Some fish come along. They nibble, they nibble, they nibble. And it's up to you to hit the job or not. And I told myself I was not leaving my job at Company B for less than 50,000 more a year. My work life balance was a dream. It was the dream work life balance. I got to work from home. I got to be in the office. I got to be in the lab. I got to be at my desk. I got to use. I get to use solidworks. No. Solidworks do presentations. No presentation. It was just, like, whatever I wanted to do, more or less, like, I got to do. And it was just great freedom. A really good. Get a millennial manager. They will not micromanage you. And shout out to my manager at company B. You'll probably never even watch this anyways, but you were a great manager. Thank you for what you did. Hands off. Checked in. I pretty much checked in. I think one meeting a week for half an hour and then a half an hour. It was like, I talked for two minutes. My update is XYZ ABC is in my way. It would be great if I had blah, blah, blah, and then that was it. And, like, it was my manager's job to make sure I had what I needed to do my job. And when you're in defense contracting, the budgets are pretty high, so you can, like, spec, like, titanium fasteners or, like, 316 stainless. Everything for, like, corrosion or whatever. Like, there's no strict budget or, like, beam counter is going to get in your way with your design, which is amazing. So you get full freedom and autonomy as a mechanical engineer. It's. It's. It's so sick. Like, I love it. What else do we got? All right, so I had a company come along and another subcontracting thing, and they offered me 200 in, like, 10,000 a year. I said, great. I interviewed. I had to get my last clearance. It was contingent upon that. And there it was. I mean, from 2018 to what year was it? 20. It was like, 2018. In five and a half years. I went from. In 2018, I went from 70,000 a year to in, like, early 2024, five and a half years later. 210. Okay. That I tripled my salary in five and a half years. How did I do it? I ordered my fucking ass off. I got a master's degree. So the master's degree will give you two years of experience. Okay, so if you've worked on a calendar year for five years, we have a master's. That counts as seven years of experience. If you get a PhD, that's four years of experience. A PhD takes fucking forever. You couldn't pay me enough fucking money to get a PhD unless they were like, we'll pay half a million a year after your PhD because it just takes so long to get a fucking PhD. And all the while you're like, not making any fucking money, et cetera, et cetera. It was always my goal to reach that maximum earning potential of my field and career as fast as possible. The faster I make 250, the more money I accumulate over my lifetime and the less stressed out I am. I can afford a house, afford the vacation, afford to take care of my fucking girlfriend, my wife, my kid, whoever, you know? Like, it's just. Anyone who says that money doesn't buy you happiness, shut the fuck up. At a certain point it doesn't, but you need a certain minimum for a standard of life. And yeah, you know, I think for me that mark was around, like, I would say 200k. Like, this is the first time in my personal life where I. I'm not stressed about anything. Any bill can come my way and I'm like, oh, got it covered. Plenty of savings, no worries at all. So to conclude all of this, make friends in undergrad. You never know when you're going to need them again. Make friends at all your jobs. Make a good name for yourself. Cause, oh, yeah. So the last job I got, company C, I knew a kid who worked there and I said, yo, David, how is company circumental even working there? You know, I had a recruiter reach out to me, see if I was interested or not. And I told the recruiter, hey, I'm interested in the job. What is the budget salary range, you know, like for the role. And their range was actually below what I wanted to accept. And I said, I will sign today if you can meet me at like 200 around there. And they said, deal. I said, no fucking shit. So do not be afraid of to ask for the maximum allocated budget for the role. And I ended up making more. So I came in as a system engineer one and that maximum was like around like 190. And a system engineer two Max was 250. I knew through asking people at my current work, like, I'm making more than system engineer two because I want to negotiate and pretty much push for that high salary. Which brings that to another point. You will never make more money in your entire life than the ten minutes, even that ten minutes of negotiating your salary. If you're, if you're at a hundred grand and you fire back and ask for 120, you just made $20,000 in salary, five minutes. Because more often than not to go from 100 to 120. That could be two years. Two fucking calendar years. You just save yourself by asking for more money. They don't have to give it to you. The worst they're going to say is no. And even when they give you a great offer, I would say, hey, my current employer wants to retain me, and they gave me an amazing retainer offer. Will you increase your current offer by 10%? It's not a huge act, but 10% on 200, give me 220 on 100, can be on a ten k. Okay. Do not be afraid of asking for more money. Additionally, I want you to know that when you apply for these jobs, like, an engineering team will be interviewing you. Do not think to yourself, oh, I'm not qualified for the role. Like, I'm not good enough. Like, there's better people out there than me. Like, that's just true. There will always be a smarter engineer than you. Always. I am by far not the smartest engineer at my current job. I work with world class PhD engineers right now and physicists and chemists. They are the mega minds of the world. But when you go to ask them, yo, like, you guys are the smart people in the world? Well, they say, you know, not so much. I got a PhD. Took me a year to get it. And during the eight years, I made 30 grand a fucking year versus me. In five and a half years, I went from 70 to over 200 grand a year. Who is smarter in society? You know, there's street smart, book smart, whatever. There's a balance in between. Yada yada. Where am I going with this? What are we talking about? Yes, I had a friend, David, working at company C. I had a recruiter reach out to me. I asked for a high number, whatever. And then I. Because I put David on my referral, I immediately got the interview for the job. And once I get the interview, I know with my personality, I'm a very outgoing person. I'm personable, I'm likable. You know, I can talk a good engineering talk. I know the equations. I know how to be a good engineer. Not the best engineer, but a good engineer. And also a good engineer is someone who can admit that they don't know everything. Like, ask for help, ask your coworkers, you know that, like, smart people love to teach. I love teaching. The reason why I'm making this video, because I love to teach, you know, and I want to make sure that someone out there can learn. No one's born with this information, and this type of video is kind of hard to come by, and this information is not very readily available. So anyway, so I got the Internet. You know, I talked to the, you know, a seven person team, walk the walk, talk the talk, whatever, the next day, got the offer, sick. Sign for it. Bob's your uncle. So now I am working at my current job, making great money. You know, the work life balance is a little tricky. I gotta be on site every single day. There's no work from home. But one thing I want to tell you as well is at every point in your career, career, I want you to think. I want you to think two jobs ahead. How will this next job, how will job b get me to job c? How will job c get me to job d? I knew job c, for me, gave me the highest clearance I needed and some more experience. And so if I want to start my own subcontracting company and contract myself directly to a contract, I need to be the most employable person with a wide variety of skill sets. So I knew that Washington part of my plan. So if I want to unlock $300,000 a year, $400,000 a year, you pretty much got to like employ yourself and contract directly to these companies. Like, rather than me going through a subcontract, you skip the middleman and you just bill directly. So I'll give you an example. So my second job, company b, I was a subcontract for company b, a big name company, and they were paying me 140 a year. One day I needed to make a purchase, a large purchase. And when you make large purchases at engineering jobs, they have a thing called like, sole source justification. You know? Oh, like here's a, here's a dumb example. Like, we have to buy a Sony OLED tv because Sony is the only company with this computer chip and this OLED technology. To, uh, let me go back. A good example would be like, we have to use Starlink for our Internet service because in the middle of nowhere, the only way that we can get Internet is through Starlink. So although it costs 100,000 fucking dollars, Starlink is the only person that we can do. So this is why we're doing it. A lot of times companies will want to overcharge the government because it's the government, and the government has unlimited money and so they just charge them whatever. So anyways, I asked my boss, the company be, hey, man, you know, this is big form. Can you send me an example of an SSJ? And he sends me the form used to hire me. That company be used to hire me. So I found out that company B was making $240,000 a year on my contract, but I was making 140. So now, you know Company B, it was a subcontract. It was a staffing agency. You know, they got to pay their overhead or whatever, and so, well, they paid me 140. They're keeping $100,000, like, to themselves, so there's margin in there to make more money. Anyways, if you want to make the full 240, you got to be hiring yourself anyway. So we went over job interview. Don't be married to a company. What? Don't be married to a company. Be married to yourself. Make friends in undergrad. Make friends in the workplace. Make a good name for yourself. That will come in handy at my current job. Right now, I know probably ten people from my first job that worked there, and it helped. It helped get me in the door. You can't do this all alone. There's a lot of soft skill that you need to do as an engineer, like, for a career chef. So do your PowerPoint at your first internship. Make friends in undergrad. Make friends at all your jobs. Do good work. Think two jobs ahead at all times. How will this next job give me the one after that? How will it line me up? If you want to work at SpaceX, you probably got to work on satellite stuff to work at SpaceX. So even if your current job isn't SpaceX, but it's satellite shit, you can get a lot of experience there and then go work at SpaceX, etc, etcetera. Now, this is applicable to any job, field, whatever. I mean, this has to be engineering. Anything you want in life, okay? Like, just think about your end goal and work backwards from there. Okay? What do you need to get to that spot? Like, everyone's goals and dreams are different. So, you know, just write it down. Like, think about how much money you're needing to make a year, how much money you're needing to save a year. Like, once you make all lot of money, things become easy for you. Like, like, you don't stress out about stuff. It's really nice. And, yeah, I wish everyone out there success. I want all of my followers, whoever watches this, to be successful in life. Live a happy life. I don't want anyone to struggle, and I wish that my parents told me this stuff, but I never had that, and I kind of had to, like, figure it out on my own. And I had a good mentor at my first job for, like, you know, a year and a half, and that was it. You know, he kind of, like, I was going over here, and he kind of just nudged me in a good direction, and I'm very thankful for that. And this is my way of just giving back to you guys as engineers, because a lot of people, there's not going to be a class that tells you this stuff. Save your money as well. Like, I'll give you a quick little tip right now. Like, where am I gonna go? I think I want to go this way. If you want to make, you know, even more money, you can invest that money. And the long and short of it is, like, just put it in an index fund and walk away. So for the american people out here, put it in the S and P 500, spy. Put it in there, walk away. You can kick, scream, you know, splash the water all you want, and, like, 90% of private equity firms can even beat the fucking s and P 500. So just put it in there, walk away. Save yourself time. One thing I will also advise is, like, just if you want to buy a house one day, get familiar with, like, interest rates, bond markets, the Federal Reserve, how monetary policy affects the price of things around you. I bought a lot of my porsches and cars and toys in life at market lows. But how do you know a market low from a market high? Well, when Covid happened and the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell dropped rates to zero, you know, when everyone thought the sky was falling, we had low prices and low interest rates. I said, holy fucking shit. Like, this is a time to buy. Six months later, everything took off. Big inflation, yada, yada, yada. You know, it's just, like, more of the story. High interest rates will cause lower prices. Low interest rates will cause higher prices. There's a quick little takeaway right, right there. You can teach yourself anything on YouTube. Don't be afraid to Google stuff at work. One thing I want to tell you as well is, like, do not think that you have to go into your first engineering job being Albert Einstein. You will never have. You will never have too much responsibility that you can cause, like, someone to die. Like, you're not designing the Boeing engine or airplane wings by yourself, like, as an intern. You're, like, given, like, quasi bullshit tasks. And eventually you work your way up through the designs, and you get more responsibility. And even if you're a senior engineer, your design designs are checked by other engineers. So don't think that, like, because you're not the smartest engineer that, like, you're gonna, like, kill someone or whatever. Like, that's. That shit is a result of, like, bad company policy and mismanagement of, like, people not checking your work and checks and balances, whatever. So even if you're starting out, like, you're gonna have other engineers, you know, to learn from and work from, senior engineers, principal engineers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, eventually, you're gonna reach a spot in your career where you have all the credentials you need, and it's just churning and burning. It's just adding years of experience from there. So at this point in my career, all I can do is really hours of experience. Like, even if I job hop tomorrow, I'm really not gonna make more money. I've kind of plateaued and hit the ceiling of my earning potential. Maybe there's a job out there, but we're really talking about, like, the top. .1% if I'm in the 1% of earners right now at my years of experience, you know, the only way I can go up is to reach the. .1 now, it's not realistic for me to chase the. .1 you know, hey, if it comes along, great, but at some point, you got to be, like, realistic with. With yourself. If you have any questions, put a combo. I hope this video helped you out. I've always wanted to make this. I just want to give back to people out there and help them out, you know, hopefully. I don't know. You know, I'm here for a drive. I'm in the middle of nowhere. I like to drive these cars on the weekends and afternoons. This is my hobby. I work on these cars myself. You know, it's just fun for me. If you have any questions, put a comment below. Consider subscribing. Give it a like, if you want to. Yeah. You know, if you have any feedback on another video to make, let me know. Talking with other engineers at your current job will also help you figure out whether you got a good deal or not. So when I was working at company B, making 140, and I talked to, you know, core employees who actually work for Company B and weren't subcontractors, and they were making 100, I was like, wow, I have a good gig. I'm making great money. Like, I should be happy. And everyone working at that job was pissed. They loved the job, but the pay was shit. So I would say of the 30 engineers who worked there, two were subcontractors. It was me, another girl, and we made a lot of fucking money, but we did the same fucking work. And the only downside of being a subcontractor contract is, like, some of the benefits aren't as good. Like, they won't pay for your education and grad school. So at Company B, they gave you like $20,000 a year towards educational expenses. Now, I already finished my fucking masters, so I didn't need that. So I didn't really care. Our 401K was, was okay anyways, so if I have to give you advice, you know, start out at the core company, the Raytheon, the Lockheed, the Northrop, blah blah blah, the base system, general Dynamics, whatever, then go subcontract, work there for two, three years, you know, get your masters, get your clearances, hop again. Also figure out like, whether you like working from home or not. Like, I. I think the perfect job, in my opinion, is not all work from home, but the ability to work from home. And there is a lot of times where even when you're working in a cleared space where you can work from home, not, not everything you do at a clear job is cleared. Like if you're researching thermal analysis, there are times where you can do designs at home and designs that can only go into a skiff. So a job that has both options, primo, and they sometimes they have core hours, like nine to two, nine to three, and you can work from home and flexibility. And it's really nice, like, you know, like you don't have to be locked into a job the whole time. My current job, I have to be there for 8 hours a day, every fucking day. And it sucks. But like, the way I hack that is like I wake up at 330, I start work at 04:00 a.m. i get out at noon, and I'm home at like 1230, 1245. And now I have 01:00 p.m. to like 10:00 p.m. to myself. The caveat, I don't get much sleep, so at my next job I want good pay, but the flexibility of working from home, even if it's one day a week, primo, like really fucking nice. So figure out what you want again, not all DoD jobs are killing people. A lot of them actually prevent wars, they prevent death, etcetera. A lot of them are research base. And you can really like, explore as an engineer. You get to use your classes, you get to use your mind, you get to use great facilities, state of the art equipment. It's amazing this isn't some pitch for me to join defense. If you can find this stuff and something else, go for it. I'm just saying what worked for me and why I did it. Yeah, I'm trying to think of anything else out there. I thought of one more thing. Okay. If you want a promotion, go to your boss and say, hey, John, I want to get promoted. I want to make this much money. I want to learn this. I want to do that. I want to be a manager. I want to be a principal engineer. I want to insert that here. How do. How do I get there? Starting today, give me the roadmap, the qualitative and quantitative requirements for how to get to where you want to go. You know, let's say you want to be a manager, okay? Or, you know, whatever. You know, like, you want to make 120 a year. Well, hey, you know, people can make 120 a year. They're this. They're this level engineer, and they require XYZ. You have those bullet points laid out. You factually can start checking off those boxes, and you can go back to your manager once. That doesn't say, hi, John. Remember a conversation that we had? You gave me the path, and I walked it. And here I am today asking to cash in on that promotion or whatever it is. Do not think that your manager will voluntarily just give you the promotion. It's not going to happen a lot of the times, and I pray that everyone out there has a good fucking manager, but it's not always the case, and you cannot bank on that. Additionally, you're going to find at some point in your career that. So your first job, grind, grind. Your second job, do good work. Always do good work. Okay? Never not do good work. But there comes a point of diminishing return that no matter how hard you work, that will not be a direct correlation to how much you make. Okay? At the end of the day, we're working here for money. You know, once you retire, you can start figuring out, oh, the money's whatever. And I want to be self trying to be happy every day. At some point, at the sliding scale between happiness and money, sometimes you get the happy job and all the money. So that was, like, my last job. It was a really good fucking job for my years of experience at that point. The point I want to make here is, during COVID I was an essential worker, and I had to show up every single day to my lab thinking today was my last day on earth. I was gonna die. I was gonna go to a gas station, pump my fucking gas. Well, you know, while there's no one around and, like, touched my eye, and I fucking die of COVID I didn't know. No one knew. Everyone thought at some point, they're gonna fucking die. You know, at some point in the COVID train, we thought, we're all gonna fucking die. Obviously it wasn't true. But, like, whatever. The point of this story, what I'm trying to say here is, like, there was somebody at my job where they didn't have to work every single day. They were a lot of work from home, and they just, like, weren't a good employee. Like, they just, they just did, like, bad work. It slacked off. They didn't really care. And I was there every day grinding, slaving, the whole thing. And at my first job when, when the yearly raise came around, I got 3% and this other kid got two and a half. And I said, oh, hell, hell no. A half percent more on $100,000 a year is $500, pre tax, post tax, $300 cash. I would have taken that $300 and gone to my boss and said, hey, here's $300. I'm working from home. I'm not coming in, I'm slacking off. I'm not going to kill myself here. I'm laying back, I'm lounging, yada, yada, yada. Like, the math doesn't make sense. So at some point, like, no matter how hard you work at your job, it doesn't matter if there's no incentive for you. Now, if you're in a sales role, a sales engineer where the sky's the limit and you are your own limit to your own success, earn it potential. Yeah, like, grind. Like, but as a conventional plug and play engineer, like, no matter how hard you work, like, you're not gonna get that reward. You may get only a $500 reward for killing yourself, skipping birthdays, skipping dinner with your family, yada, yada, yada, over the guy who didn't do that stuff, or the girl, whatever, just manage that, okay? There's a time where you have to grind, and there's also a time where, like, just, just know the diminishing return. Again, I hope this video helped you out. Thanks for riding along with me. I'm gonna go ride up into the sunset right now, and I hope you enjoyed it. You know, I'm pretty much probably upload this video in one shot, and if you have any suggestions, let me know. I'm happy to give back. I think it's important in life to mentor others and give back to communities and, you know, like, the only way you can learn is by learning from others. So I love helping people out and helping people get to where they want to be in life. I make my friends problems, my personal problems, and we're going to solve that together. I love doing that because I've always wanted that myself. My parents, when I was growing up, all they did for me was give me a roof over my head and food on the table. They said, the rest is up to you, advise you. We can't tell you what to do. We're not that smart. We wish we were. Sorry. So here's a roof, here's food. All the best, you know, and it can be a good or bad thing. You know, I. You know, it created hyper independence in myself, you know, I wish I had parents who I could go to for advice, but I don't, you know, and it sucks that I'm in this alone. I have no one who I can go to. So, yeah, a lot of people ask me like, oh, how's going to work on all your cards? It's like I told myself, like, I didn't have a parent or whatever. I'm happy I have parents. They didn't get in my way of anything in my life. They were always supportive of what I've done, but I could never go to them for advice or help. So this is the least I can do for people out there in a similar situation, because I want everyone to succeed and be happy. And with that, I thank you for watching this video. I wish you all the best. Again, if you have any questions, ask it down below. If it's a very common one, I'll make another video, and all the best, guys. Good luck. Work hard. Do your masters, make sure it makes sense, all right. Only do a master's if it makes sense. Do not get a master's in poetry if you're gonna only make the same amount of fucking money. Don't get a master's in English if it's not gonna pay out. If that master's degree isn't gonna pay for itself, don't get it. Okay? If that education or that degree, whatever the degree is, is it gonna pay for itself? Don't get it. Like, the price of school this day is astronomical. I was fortunate enough to go to a state school, and it only cost me $5,000 a year. And, motherfucker, I did, I would say, pretty well for myself, going to a non Ivy League school, a state school at that, and living the lifestyle that I have today. And I'm proud of myself for making it happen for myself. And I thank everyone who helped me along the way, all my friends, my parents are giving me food on the table while I was stressed the fuck out and I had time to even cook for myself or even get a meal. And my mentor, shout out to Eric, thank you for hiring me. And yeah, guys, all the best. See ya. Cheers.