Personally I have no actual anecdote to qualify the above, but I am sure it happens–how frequently, I cannot say. Or even if you are a doctor, and out throwing away money at a nice fancy steakhouse and some gentlemen swallows his steak in the wrong way. You get the idea. I personally have never even fathomed the idea (until now) of an engineer having to pull a bridge (at least not usually as a spur of the moment thing, required quite promptly, or death my ensue) out of his ass when the surrounding society is instantaneously faced with a dilemma, but those “is anyone here a doctor” moments seem much more realistic.

Spouse worked in ski town north of TO. Family doc spouse worked with grossed $27k a month on 3.5 days a week work! Overhead is only $5k for her share of the building that all the docs OWN (ie paying herself). gov’t chips in $$ for nurses, under Family Health Network.

ER docs at fee for service hospitals (Trillium Mississauga) or St. Josephs, can make $600k-$1 million. You start doing procedures during a night shift and rates are doubled. Note that a pretty full month is 20 – 8 hour shifts.

OB Gyne can make $400-$500 and most overhead covered by hospitals. A baby delivery is like $300 and doubles after midnight and more for a C section. One 24 hour call and a OB Gy can make $10,000. Not kidding.

Spouse just came back from rural health conference where rural town were recruiting. Number one point for Elliott Lake was family physicians can make $400k-$600k there with incentives..

Anyway, just shedding some light..

Here is where the numbers came from:
http://www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com/issue/2006/10_15-30/3_PM_your_practice01_16.html

While expenses can vary widely among medical practices, the vast majority can look to some benchmarks for comparison purposes. According to the CMA’s Physician Resource Questionnaire1, overhead rates are reported as follows: family physicians, 36%; medical specialists, 25%; and surgical specialists, 33%. Support staff—typically a practice’s largest expense,—often comprise 40%–60% of total overhead costs. The full-time equivalent (FTE) number of support staff generally ranges from 1.00–1.25 for each FTE physician. Other benchmarks include occupancy costs, generally in the range of 20%–30%, with the remaining costs of medical and office supplies, professional fees, telephone, information technology (including computers, billing, scheduling, electronic medical records systems, etc.) also in the
range of 20%–30%2.

I know that the engineering curriculum in university was one of the toughest. But, for my money, easily one of the most underpaid professions is a police officer in a big city. When there is a very realistic chance you will be injured or even killed on the job, the stress on your family life, the lack of respect from the public… there aren’t many jobs worse and only 1st Class Constables have a base pay greater than $70k in Vancouver (it takes you at least 4 years to achieve 1st Class).

I got my degree in chemical engineering several years back. I’ve been on both sides of it in terms of difficult of how difficult many pre-med courses are and the pure chem e aspect as i specialized in biomolecular engineering.

I’m looking at the six figure salaries listed here, and comparing it to my paycheck (65k/year) thinking what an absolute joke. Our work is surprisingly boring – something I was unaware of before I graduated, there’s absolutely no respect from society, very little knowledge on what we actually do for a living, and no understanding on the impact we make on people’s lives. People think products magically appear on the shelves at Wal Mart or Best Buy overnight. People think clean water, cheap, abundant food, just “happens”.

The education is HARD, and our income doesn’t reflect the difficulty of the curriculum. I think the only people who have it worse are science academics who will never get tenure.

Time to look into other careers. Unfortunately, many graduate schools are out of the option as my grades are shot to hell due to ridiculous deflated engineering curves.

Maybe engineers and scientists in this country are ridiculously underpaid. That being said, I’m really curious how our financial crisis will play out. I’m not entirely surprised it happened as the emphasis in our country looks to have shifted from created and innovating products to moving money around and providing services. 20 years from now, I can’t imagine the jobs making the big bucks now will be doing as well down the road like banking or law.

The water your drinking…from a waste water treatment plant designed by an engineer.
The car your driving…desinged by an engineer.
Along a road and bridge…designed by an engineer.
To a home/apartment…designed by an engineer.
Where you’ll sit at a chair (manufactured by a process designed by an engineer) while typing on your computer (designed and produced by engineers).

But of course those all just improve your life. I mean you could live without anything produced in a factory (which is everything) as long as you had a doctor to take care of you, right? Of course without engineers that cat scanner wouldn’t be there, the isotopes required for tests wouldn’t be available, and the pacemaker keeping the old ticker ticking wouldn’t be around.

Everything’s a business, and how much you make is purely dependent on labor supply and service demand.