A few comments and a few words of advice for engineers looking for jobs in San Diego. First my story in brief.
In Oct 2006 my employer eliminated half the positions in their San Diego R&D center, and that employer offered me a comparable salary position in Japan, but my wife refused to relocate. So I had to take the severance pay which was generous. I spent a couple months hiking in the mountains and surfing; then in early 2007 I figured I had better get serious about finding a job.
I’m a masters-degreed mechanical engineer with a very solid resume (blue chip companies only) and 10+ years experience, and my previous position was as a principle staff engr making exactly 100K, not including bonuses, for a large San Diego multinational.
Here are my leassons-learned from job hunting in San Diego during early 2007:
1) San Diego pays competitive wages ONLY in a few select engineering / tech specialities, and UNDERPAYS (relative to cost of living) in most other areas. Mechanical engineering is one of the UNDERPAID fields, again relative to San Diego costs-of-living
2) Pay a professional resume editor (costs at least several hundred $$) to interview you for several hours and create a completely custom resume for you. I did that early on. It IS worth the money! Then post it to dozens of websites; then sit back and watch the offers for interviews stream in. For me, they did stream in…but in the San Diego area the salary was always too low, less than $100K.
When inquires come in, be up front and tell anyone who comes knocking: “I’m interested in interviewing with your company as my primary motivation is to find the right employer. Money is secondary; however, I’m getting multiple inquires for positions involving salaries of $###,### and above, not including bonuses. Before we move to the interview stage, please confirm that the budgeted salary range for this position extends at least to that annual salary for the right candidate”
I really did communicate that at the $100K level to ALL soliciting employers and I do NOT regret it. It filters out the bottom feeders, which I found San Diego has plenty of. However, you must objectively know your market value so you state a salary requirement that inspires respect from employers, as opposed to ridicule. I had previous paychecks to back up my salary request, and a very strong resume.
3) Be willing to move if San Diego doesn’t pay a competitive salary high demand for your specialty. I got multiple offers from Silicon Valley at and above $115K, not including bonus. We moved and I ended up with a significant raise over the San Diego job I no longer had.
4) Don’t be too proud; File for unemployment the moment you lose you job. One of my greatest joys (go ahead laugh) was getting about $5,000 of my CA state income tax dollars back in the form of $1800 of monthly unemployment checks
5) If I was looking for a job NOW, as we head into the worst recession in twenty-five years, I would TAKE ANYTHING IMMEDIATELY as long as the company was relatively recession-insensitive. The unemployment rate in CA is currently climbing about 0.5% every three months!
6) Regarding “automated test engineers”, I’ve noticed TWO distinct catgegories. First, there are degreed engineers who are specialists in this area, such as automated test software engineers with years of experience. I sit next to one of those guys in my current job. He makes a solid six-figure salary.
In the second category are the countless technicians (no engineering degree) who migrated themselves upwards into positions until they became something of UNDERPAID “automated test engineers.” I’ve worked with many in that category and they don’t dream of making six-figure salaries. They are a dime-a-dozen because they are really technicians who imagine they are as valuable as a good degreed engineer.
