Criteria include pay, difficulty of attaining a career within a given field, and future outlook of the field.
Not much has changed. Healthcare is still DOMINATING the US economy, it’s easily the best field to be in and will be for the foreseeable future. White collar work continues to get decimated, manual labor is still low paying garbage for the most part.
Discuss.
Because I chose a low paying, dogshit career path (Mechanical Engineering).
The issue is compounded by the fact that people THINK we make a lot of money (we don’t) and think that I have some massively increased future earnings potential as a result of having this degree and working as an engineer (I don’t, we don’t make any more money than dental hygienists for example, people think we earn as much as dentists).
All of the money I have comes from me living like an extreme miser from the ages of 23-30, not having hobbies, renting what amounts to a storage closet (with 5 other roommates), not dating, not spending money doing anything unnecessary and cramming every last dollar into index funds while subsisting on a few hundred bucks a month.
I have never had a W2 income higher than $70,000. I will likely never make more than $100,000 as a Mechanical Engineer unless I relocate to the most expensive places to live on earth, but then the higher income is offset by the higher cost of living.
If you want to make it in life, DO NOT do what I did, pick and become fully obsessive with a high paying career, don’t pick a mediocre path (Mechanical/Civil Engineering instantly come to mind). I have friends that went to law school, they got out at age 25 and were only making ~$70,000, I thought I’d made the right decision becoming an engineer. Now they make $300,000+, I realize I wasted my life and my youth. Don’t end up like me, kids.
Dogshit white collar careers (traditional engineering, accounting, HR) still consider $100,000 a senior level wage. Most white collar jobs are on identical payscales these days, so they all start at 70-75,000.
It takes 7-12 years to grind your way up to senior level. The extra 20-25,000 you get per year by reaching senior level is mostly eaten up by retirement contributions. Moreover, these roles often require more hours and dramatically more stress.
Your day to day quality of life therefore does NOT improve by climbing the ladder in these careers, you’re working more and the extra income is used to support yourself in retirement. Meanwhile, in top tier careers like medicine or being a pilot or the skilled trades, you do all the hard work at the start of your career and then get paid enormous amounts of money ($300,000+) later in your career while the number of hours required goes down.
Becoming a white collar worker was the worst decision of my life.
Only $5 million dollars working at a non-profit, only the highest paid employee at a non-profit in the entire state as a gastroenterologist, he’s still underpaid! I bet he worked 250 hours a week during residency!
Personally, I plan on catching a flight to Nebraska and seeing him so I can allow him to perform multiple unnecessary procedures on me, he needs to collect some more RVUs, gotta hit that sweet production bonus. Then I’ll make sure to leave him a tip because he’s just so underpaid!
What are you people even talking about anymore? Is this person suggesting our healthcare premiums should just go directly into the doctor’s pocket?
The insurance company is the one that PAYS the provider (the doctor), the astronomical bill you get after receiving care is from the doctor or whoever employs the doctor, NOT the insurance company. The insurance company has legally mandated maximum margins that are lower than most other industries (the ACA mandates that a minimum of 80% of collected premiums be spent on healthcare), they are NOT “making bank”, in fact, doctors are some of the only people “making bank” (top 1% incomes) in the entire equation.
Moreover, in some specialties like Dermatology, over HALF of what is collected by the provider’s office actually does go to the doctor (not 8% or whatever fake statistic you’re going to scream at me).
You can even see doctors performing these calculations on forums trying to decide what the best compensation model is:
https://forum.whitecoatinvestor.com/practice-management/503090-rvu-vs-of-collections-compensation
None of you have a basic understanding of any of the subjects you come on here and bloviate about, now I’m starting to see why I get so much pushback but none of it is ever substantive.
Is it because they want the public to view them as victims despite them making top 1-.5% incomes?
I’ve never seen any other profession get so weird about hiding how much money they make.
Doctors seem to want the public to view them as drowning in debt, working long hours, and making mediocre salaries, any data that comes out that contradicts that view makes them upset and they want it hidden or suppressed. I literally don’t see this from any other profession, ever. The second software engineers or travel nurses started making good money they told everyone. Doctors seem desperate to hide it. Anyone know why?
The state of Nebraska has a public owned utility (or something like that) and all of their payroll information is public knowledge.
No, it’s not just in California that lineman make several hundred thousand dollars or only workers in “HCOL” areas.
No, googling ”average lineman salary” will not return numbers like this. You need to dig a little bit deeper than that to actually see what’s going on.
Overtime (1.5x or even 2x) pay is the bread and butter for blue collar work. It’s where they make all their money. Excluding this gives an extremely skewed perception of how much money these guys actually make. These guys can and regularly do make $170,000+ in their 20s working ~50 hour weeks. They’re not lying, your seven second google search didn’t “prove” that tradesmen are lying about how much money they make.
Source:
https://salaries.flatwaterfreepress.org/organization/omaha-public-power-district/
Many of my young engineering colleagues still live with their parents due to intense wage stagnation at the entry level (60-70k entry level wage for 20+ straight years) while housing costs skyrocket. And even STILL my company is trying to outsource entry level work to India because they think college grads in the US are too expensive.
Absolutely brutal. I’m an adult man living with 4 strangers in a literal broom closet, Id honestly rather live with my parents. Becoming an engineer was the worst decision of my life.
Source:
It’s time to put this debate to bed.
From the dozens of discussions I’ve had on here with people, many of you are financially/economically/numerically illiterate. Literally can’t even write a budget level illiterate.
The median med school debt is like $220,000, you’re set for life in any of these professions. There is an enormous shortage of doctors in the US, you’ll never be without work, your job has an enormous licensing moat to keep it safe, the government more or less controls the exact number of workers in your industry and they’re awful at responding to shortages (unlike the private sector).
Numbers of hours worked are just mythology at this point (”I know a doctor that works 95 hours a week! I know a deep sea welder that took on a contract on one of Saturn’s moons, he makes $40k an hour bro!”), the actual number of hours worked aren’t dramatically different than standard white collar office work unless you’re a brain surgeon. Myself and my engineer coworkers have all been working 50+ for the last 6 months.
The debate is over, being a doctor is the best career in the US when all factors are considered, nothing else comes close.
Yet I STILL see people coming on here saying $100,000 is an enormous salary, you should be grind 15+ years in an engineering career to ”earn” the honor of making that much etc etc.
I just cannot fathom how some of you are so unbelievably out of touch. The person that knocks on your hotel door and says “housekeeping” now makes more than your average engineer in 2026.
Ben Felix says everyone should be funneling all of their money into Index Funds, why doesn’t Jane Street do this? Why do they continue to look for gains in high frequency trading?
Does Ben Felix’s advice only apply to those of us that are too low IQ to employ higher alpha strategies?
I just slam all of my money into Index Funds but I can’t help but feel like it’s an enormous bubble that has no justification beyond ”it went up in the past so it’ll keep going up in the future, bro!”
Meanwhile I come on Reddit and people are STILL, UNIRONICALLY telling high schoolers to major in worthless white collar careers like engineering.
Only 4 years after I’ve begun posting about the US turning into a giant nursing home with healthcare being the only sector hiring am I starting to see the halfwits on here catch on.
Meanwhile, as I documented here (https://www.reddit.com/r/Salary/comments/1slpvls/brutalwhere\_on\_earth\_are\_all\_these\_kids\_going\_to/), students are flooding into worthless degrees like Mechanical Engineering in the hopes that they can get a white collar job (it’s super broad, bro!). Even actual Mechanical engineers (besides me) are starting to admit their degree is more or less worthless in 2026, that students have no clue how bad it’s going to be when they graduate https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalEngineering/s/w3Mp03RLem
The US economy doesn’t need or want US white collar workers. This has been obvious for nearly half a decade now, they continue to lay us off and replace any work we’ve done with cheaper overseas alternatives (or AI). We are not wanted or needed in the modern US economy. Almost any time a US company lays off US based white collar workers, their stock goes up. We are a huge drag on the bottom line in 2026.
In contrast to the “$100,000 is good depending on where you live bro, you’ll live like a king on that in LCOL areas bro!” I put together an actual budget using actual 2026 prices for things (not hilariously out of touch and out of date prices from 2004 that most of you use), and it’s not looking good (inb4 “NEBRASKA IS ACTUALLY HCOL BRO!”)
Most of you are comically delusional about how expensive life actually is for those of us that weren’t LUCKY enough to be grandfathered into a lower cost of living by virtue of having a pre-2021 mortgage. The vast majority of homeowners could never afford their current house if they actually had to pay market rate for it, yet they want to come on here and chastise people like me that day $100,000 is a completely mediocre income in 2026 if one wants to attain a middle class lifestyle (the same middle class lifestyle they only needed to earn $52,000 to attain).
Feel free to nitpick the $10 at the margins like I know many of you are going to do (“don’t pay for the gym bro! it’s free to go outside bro! Cut your own hair bro! You don’t need a house bro, I live in a beaver dam and it’s great bro!”)
Also notice this hypothetical person has ZERO dollars budgeted for hobbies, dates, friends, and is putting ZERO dollars into a 401k. But feel free to tell me how rich they are and how $100,000 is an enormous salary.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/many-millennials-over-1-million-210009905.html?guccounter=1
“Nobody has any money, bro! Nobody can even afford a $500 payment, bro! Everyone you see with nice stuff is drowning in debt, bro!”
Meanwhile millennials, who arguably had a better housing market than the boomers, are now seeing themselves become millionaires in their 30s and early 40s.
As a highly experienced Mechanical Engineer in the US, I’ve come here to warn you against pursuing a career as a Mechanical Engineer or getting a mechanical engineering degree
1. The pay is extremely mediocre for the effort.
In the past, the median Mechanical Engineer would outearn about 80% of the population. This has fallen to about 70% and continues to plummet with no end in sight. The median Mechanical Engineer now has earnings no different than a man with any generic bachelors degree.
Given current BLS trends, Civil Engineers have very likely passed Mechanical Engineers in median earnings, meaning Mechanical Engineering would be the lowest paying engineering career.
Likewise, one can earn as much as a Mechanical Engineer by picking up a “healthcare trade”, an associates degree in something like Dental Hygiene or Xray Technology.
2. Mechanical Engineering is marketed as “broad and general”, that’s no longer a good thing in 2026
Mechanical Engineering is marketed to prospective college students (remember, colleges are a business selling a product, beware of their marketing tactics) as a “broad” degree that can allow you to “work in any industry”. This is something that used to be true to some extent but no longer is.
First off, it’s empirically incorrect. When we look at job placement rates at different colleges for 2022-2025 grads, ME grads have lower placement rates than grads with other engineering degrees that are less “broad”. This fact along throws a huge wrench in the “broad” marketing line, if MEs were desirable in every industry, one should expect them to have higher placement rates even if the pay was lower. Instead, we get low placement and pay.
Second off, when this statement did have a smidgeon of truth to it, the US economy looked a lot different. The largest companies were oil companies. Manufacturing employed a lot more people. White collar work in general was much less competitive. Nowadays, two of the biggest industries, tech and healthcare, have zero overlap with Mechanical Engineering. You are not broadly employable in the modern US economy. White collar work in general is also dramatically more competitive, employers have more choices so they want specialists, not just generic smart guys.
3. Manufacturing has no real future in the US
Manufacturing is like the bread and butter industry for MEs. Many ME graduates don’t end up in design roles, they end up in ancillary engineering roles created as a result of manufacturing physical products being so complicated (think of roles like production engineer, quality engineer, process engineer, sales engineer, test engineer). If manufacturing leaves the US, so do all of these roles, almost immediately. People will say “oh, you can still design things in the US and manufacture them elsewhere!” and that’s true, but there’s simply a longer delay between when manufacturing leaves and when design work leaves, the knowledge loss from being away from the product you’re making doesn’t show up immediately, it’s a generational thing.
4. If you’re smart enough to get an ME degree, you’re smart enough to make a lot more money doing something else
You would likely make a lot more money in medicine or law or tech, or you’d make the same money in less stressful careers. The US economy has a lot of extremely high paying roles (400k+) in 2026, mechanical engineers do not have access to those roles.