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>On a side note: anyone feel like it's a bit weird how low (aerospace) engineers are paid in comparison to us in software? Software produces gobs of money, the

>On a side note: anyone feel like it's a bit weird how low (aerospace) engineers are paid in comparison to us in software? Software produces gobs of money, the likes of which the world has never seen. Aerospace as an industry may not ever be profitable. It's as easy as that.

godelski 3y ago
It doesn't seem as simple as that considering revenues are above $700bn. Plus, it's not like the defense industry is considered small by any means. I'm willing to bet everyone you know (or nearly) has flown in an airplane. I'm definitely not an economist but googling around it doesn't seem like the difference in revenues is an order of magnitude. But I'm willing to believe I'm misinterpreting and/or didn't look hard enough (most certainly the latter is true). I definitely agree that software is more profitable, but the gap is a bit surprising, especially considering the high skills and training required.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Software has almost zero overhead beyond base line business expenses. Anything that requires making real stuff depends on many more people to produce the product. They all need to be paid which means engineers and management need to take a smaller slice of the pie.
- godelski 3y ago
  Sure but I always have a hard time comprehending these arguments tbh. Because I honestly can't tell the difference between someone who has a billion dollars and someone who has 200 billion dollars. There's essentially no difference other than a number. But while writing this I decided to check instead of making what I thought was a reasonable assumption. Apparently the net worth of the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon are under $100m? That's a bit surprising if the numbers I googled are accurate. That would make the net worth of the two primary shareholders of BMW 1000x their counterparts. Each! I scrolled through Forbes billionaires and I didn't find aerospace anywhere but I did find pig breeding, shipping, and Chick-fil-A, candy, soy sauce, videogames, legos, in-n-out, dental implants, "Star Wars", "Billboards", and even "drones". Especially considering that there's a lot of shipping on there and a drone billionaire. Really makes me think some of the other things are over priced tbh. Especially with how many crypto-bros are on that list. Edit: Wait! "762 Charles Edelstenne" is listed as "aviation" but he cofounded Dassault... Edit 2: "868 Neal Blue & family" is listed as "Defense" for General Atomics and "871 Eren Ozmen" as "Aerospace" for Sierra Nevada. "916 Fatih Ozmen" also for Sierra Nevada. So okay, maybe some are on this list but my intuition suggested defense and aerospace would have at least someone in the top 100. Surprised not even the top 500. All of them under $4bn btw
  - sgu999 3y ago
    We can find countless examples of high paying jobs that are absolutely useless to our industrial civilisation. The answer is likely a mixture of both: salaries are not that much correlated to skill and value overall, and some industries have much lower margins than others. Having to compete with the likes of Airbus and ULA for workers, SpaceX doesn't need to inflate the salaries that much to get top talents.

godelski 3y ago

It doesn't seem as simple as that considering revenues are above $700bn. Plus, it's not like the defense industry is considered small by any means. I'm willing to bet everyone you know (or nearly) has flown in an airplane. I'm definitely not an economist but googling around it doesn't seem like the difference in revenues is an order of magnitude. But I'm willing to believe I'm misinterpreting and/or didn't look hard enough (most certainly the latter is true). I definitely agree that software is more profitable, but the gap is a bit surprising, especially considering the high skills and training required.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

Software has almost zero overhead beyond base line business expenses. Anything that requires making real stuff depends on many more people to produce the product. They all need to be paid which means engineers and management need to take a smaller slice of the pie.

godelski 3y ago
Sure but I always have a hard time comprehending these arguments tbh. Because I honestly can't tell the difference between someone who has a billion dollars and someone who has 200 billion dollars. There's essentially no difference other than a number. But while writing this I decided to check instead of making what I thought was a reasonable assumption. Apparently the net worth of the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon are under $100m? That's a bit surprising if the numbers I googled are accurate. That would make the net worth of the two primary shareholders of BMW 1000x their counterparts. Each! I scrolled through Forbes billionaires and I didn't find aerospace anywhere but I did find pig breeding, shipping, and Chick-fil-A, candy, soy sauce, videogames, legos, in-n-out, dental implants, "Star Wars", "Billboards", and even "drones". Especially considering that there's a lot of shipping on there and a drone billionaire. Really makes me think some of the other things are over priced tbh. Especially with how many crypto-bros are on that list. Edit: Wait! "762 Charles Edelstenne" is listed as "aviation" but he cofounded Dassault... Edit 2: "868 Neal Blue & family" is listed as "Defense" for General Atomics and "871 Eren Ozmen" as "Aerospace" for Sierra Nevada. "916 Fatih Ozmen" also for Sierra Nevada. So okay, maybe some are on this list but my intuition suggested defense and aerospace would have at least someone in the top 100. Surprised not even the top 500. All of them under $4bn btw
- sgu999 3y ago
  We can find countless examples of high paying jobs that are absolutely useless to our industrial civilisation. The answer is likely a mixture of both: salaries are not that much correlated to skill and value overall, and some industries have much lower margins than others. Having to compete with the likes of Airbus and ULA for workers, SpaceX doesn't need to inflate the salaries that much to get top talents.