Boy has been working at one of the areas largest employer in our field and he started roughly a year ago. He has been working as an hourly technician, on paper, but he was given the responsibilities as lab manager and also given engineering responsibilities. All this is what he has been going to school for, so it is all in line with normal. He was hired as a technician because the job was for a new person and he did not have his degree yet. He is scheduled to complete his degree this December, if his last three classes hold up. Right now they are a mix of in class and online because of Covid, so he is able to juggle these as night classes and working during the day.
He was told a few months into his job that within the year, he would be promoted to the level of engineer, so he started looking into what that would mean for pay. He found out the median pay for his type of engineer is around $85,000. He also found that the average pay for his level of experience in Austin is supposedly above $70,000. Naturally, he was expecting his promotion would land him somewhere in this region, and with the cost of housing in the area, it almost has to be in that pay scale, as houses pretty much average above $400,000 here. It would make sense that all that schooling and his position being considered a professional job, he should at least be able to afford a house where he lives.
Last night, he mentioned he was given an "offer" by his company and he was not even amused. They offered more than what he was making as an hourly but well short of even the low amount he expected. He refused the offer, I didn't know that was an option. He told his manager thanks, but no thanks, and he needed to make that offer better if he expected to retain him. He has been frank with his boss, who my son says likes him a lot and doesn't want to see him leave.
His manager told him he would get with HR and work on getting him a better offer, which sounded amazing to me. He has the advantage of living with us, he is not desperate for a couple more nickels and dimes. Worst case, if he gets let go, his car and housing are not payments he has to make, he lives with us and we paid off his car. We told him awhile back, this is the time to be bold and take chances, I think that is what he is doing. All that has happened in the last year is he got more experience with a huge semiconductor company, there are a bunch of those in the area, not to mention Tesla, which is hiring tons of people plus all sorts of smaller companies. His company needs to loosen the purse strings if they are going to hold on to young and coming talent, they are short handed hundreds of people currently and with the pandemic, people are still not coming out in droves to work. My son is willing to show up and put in an honest day's work, he just needs to be compensated accordingly.
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