From my experience, asianautica’s estimates are about right. What you have to realize is that there are many different ways to hire engineers. Because of that the pay scale can vary a lot.
For example, after a few years of experience, I managed to find a contracting job that payed double my hourly rate as a salary worker. As a self employed contractor, however, you don’t get any benefits, pension, etc. Plus, your job is not as stable so it would be pretty risky to stretch yourself on mortgage payments.
Some contractors work for contracting companies, where the company finds work for the contractors and take a cut of the contractors pay. The percent cut can vary, based on the amount of service they provide. sdrealtor’s HR exec friend was probably hiring one of these. Space and Defense doesn’t generally pay that much unless you’re a contractor.
Some high tech companies (sellers) sell software products to other companies (customers). Sometime, the customers need help using the software product so the sellers contract out engineers to help the customer. The engineers are salaried employees of the seller, but they are hired as contractors by the customer. In this scenario, you might see cases where the customer is being charged $100/hour, while the contractor is being payed $30/hour. The customer might be thinking, “Wow, this kid is making $100/hour!”, but the truth is that he’s not.
The point is that there are all kinds of pay scales. This can lead to a lot of misperceptions on how much an engineer is taking home. On top of that, there can be a lot of anecdotal cases which are outside the norm. But when you’re talking about averages, then I agree with asianautica’s: Go look at salary.com.
