Comment by tedggh

Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.