My 1st Million At 33 – yes, you can do it too

The following 2006 salary numbers are from http://www.salary.com.  (Took me a long time to pull all these numbers out).  The salary is defined as total cash compensation (cash + bonuses). From my personal contacts & experiences, the numbers seem to be fairly accurate. All the experience levels are defined as follows:

1. Level I: 0 to 2 years experience after Bachelor’s degree.
2. Level II: 2 to 4 years experience
3. Level III: 4 to 6 years experience
4. Level IV: 6 to 8 years experience
5. Level V: 8 to 10 years experience

A master’s degree I believe counts as 1 or 2 years of work experience, and a Ph.D degree counts as 2 more years of experience beyond the master’s degree.

I have used San Jose metropolitan area, and only looked up job titles related to IT, software, and hardware because they’re the more commonly held positions. Other good sources of salary surveys include http://www.engineersalary.com/, and IEEE salary survey which you need to sign up. Somehow http://www.engineersalary.com/ was giving a smaller salary number.

If there are any missing entries, such as Design Engineer V, it is because it is not available. The last two entries, Engineering Manager and Director didn’t seem to be specific enough. I expect that the data may be mixed with all kinds of engineering.

After my recent salary raise, it appears that I am still underpaid by about 10% to 18%, which will take a 11% to 22% salary increase to adjust to the market. Obviously, it is fairly unlikely to get such a big salary raise from the boss. The fastest route of adjusting your salary to the market price is still changing jobs.

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