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Zap said:Some of my engineer friends talk about having entry level jobs that are paying over 100k salaries. How is this possible? How can someone who just graduated and has little to no professional experience be worth over 100k? I won't be going back to school anytime soon to get another degree because a few people got extraordinarily lucky, but it deosn't make any sense to me. Are these 100k entry jobs still going to train them? They get 100k salary plus additional training? How is 100k justified here?
I think it's important to realize that from a statistical point of view, these cases are outliers. Median entry-level engineering salaries seem to fall in the $55k - $70k range.
That's not to say that such jobs don't exist, just that they are exceedingly rare. But you're asking why they exist at all.
The answer comes down to basic supply and demand, I suspect.
Say, for example, you're a petroleum engineering company and oil prices go up to the point where it's economically profitable to attempt a new means of extracting oil from a natural deposit somewhat and you need engineers to refine your process. But (i) you need to recruit people to live far away from cities and often their families in a camp that you've set up, (ii) you need new engineers that have a general understanding of industrial standards and a set of very specific skills that aren't taught in most engineering programs, and (iii) anyone who knows anything about the industry will know that over the next year or so, the price of oil could drop, the operation will no longer be viable and those jobs could be cut. As a company, you have to sweeten the pot to attract the applicants that you want.
It might also be worth considering that the case of an applicant just scattershotting a generic CV through an online job board and landing one of these high-paying entry level positions is far more unlikely still. Chances are when getting hired on with an exceptional salary, the successful candidates are those who've already done an internship with the company and quite possibly they've beat out other intern candidates in a competitive process.
And of course sometimes, it's just a plain old case of being at the right place at the right time and having a network that includes the right people.