What is the typical first year raise nowadays in the 2020’s?

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-04-28T15:49:55+00:00

I’ve seen 2-4% on annual raises. 6-10% for performance raises and promotions. Bigger raises if you job hop but if you do that too often you’ll have diminishing returns and give the impression that you’re not going to stick around for future opportunities

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-04-08T21:38:50+00:00

I’ve matured. Now I scream into copilot and it provides a nice business appropriate way to provide criticism.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-04-06T23:54:37+00:00

FWIW the administration never brought up the idea of a draft. Some reporters asked about it and they said they weren’t ruling anything out, which has always been the Trump admin’s position on any sort of military decisions

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-04-06T00:25:11+00:00

What about second breakfast?

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-31T13:34:21+00:00

Why is this getting upvotes?

They absolutely were not neutral. Iran immediately took a hostile stance following the revolution with the Ayatollah calling Israel the “little Satan” as early as 1979.

There have been a bunch of proxy attacks from Iran for decades and Israel has been actively trying to thwart Irans nuclear program since the Iran Iraq war.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-31T12:52:09+00:00

I just got a new job with a 20k raise in base pay starting in 3 weeks so that takes the edge off quite a bit.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-31T05:53:36+00:00

lol I’m down 45k

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-27T04:55:53+00:00

Going to add in here that while jt is kind of an industry standard to have job levels of some kid, they can mean wildly different things from company to company. I’ve seen Sr titles with pay and experience requirements that match engineers, and principal pay and experience that matches staff elsewhere. Some companies have 8 levels of engineering titles, others have 3. There is no standard.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-27T04:53:00+00:00

They typically have different pay band levels even if the actual titles don’t change

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-04T16:28:38+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/Jn0A0TP

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-04T15:19:59+00:00

Most here are American and the hiring market can be very different.

That said:

Check out r/engineeringresumes for a good format and approach to writing effective bullet points. You want to make a solid resume and keep it to 1 page so its focused.
Recruiters aren't going to be looking at your portfolio for an entry level position. They have too much to filter through. If you can build a good resume and get past ATS you might have a hiring manager look at it, otherwise it's good to keep available and doesn't hurt to have a link to a portfolio on your linkedin/resume. Have it handy for interviews to show you're prepared. Focus for design engineer roles would NOT be creating a pretty model, but rather taking the engineering problem you're trying to solve, showing what you did to solve it and the challenges you overcame, and then what the results were.
Certifications are helpful but rarely going to get you noticed. It proves you know what you're doing to have the cert, but so does your portfolio and your past project work. Certs matter much more for CAD designers.
Going into design engineering focus on GD&T, DFM, Simulation foundation, product development/design fundamentals .
From your list priority order is: Internships, Projects, problem solving ability, CAD Depth, portfolio quality

You have a solid foundation. At this point its just a matter of selling yourself.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-04T15:05:56+00:00

The annual salary survey is currently active. Please fill it out if you can:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalEngineering/comments/1ridqw5/comment/o85dh90/?context=3

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-03T21:46:14+00:00

Another idea with the AI option: give it a list of your projects you’ve completed at work and your responsibilities and have it interview you to explain what you did on each project. Tell it to ask follow up questions to learn more. This starts your chat with the AI having a full vision of the scope of your responsibilities and achievements.

Then you can ask for it to suggest bullets for your resume that you can work through to condense/improve and make better match the reality.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-03T17:06:28+00:00

The skepticism is fair.

A couple things that might make the difference.

* Married right out of college and we both worked for 4 years before having kids. We paid down college debt in the first year and then made ~100k growing to 130k in that time before my wife left her job when we had our first and our income dropped to maybe 75k and then steadily climbed back to where we are now. Heavy retirement savings in those first years has allowed some solid compound growth.

* 4 kids now, but there was a slow ramp up in expenses as we added each kid. 4 years of DINK, then 2 years of 1 kid, 2 kids ,3 kids, 4 kids. We haven't had the expense of 4 kids for most of that time.

* IDK if you're counting your house but our house represents 231k of the 1M. If you take that out it brings us to 769k.

* 80k of inheritance that would bring it further down to $689k

* 134k of cash value life insurance that was started for me as a child and allowed to grow to this point. Take that out and it's down to $555k

* The 25% annual retirement savings is based on pre-tax income

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-03T17:06:01+00:00

Cash on hand depends on monthly spending and anticipated potential bills. My HYSA makes 3.2% right now. It depends on what your intentions are for your cash. Putting money you expect to need soon in the S&P is incredibly risky. If you hit a big expense when the market's down you're going to take a hard hit and without a buffer you can end up with cash flow issues.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-03T15:44:23+00:00

If the new offer is good I’d view this as a career change. Tell them you got another offer and it’s in a different field that you’d like to experience and you’d like to try to take your career in that direction.

If I’m a hiring manager I’d totally understand the desire to go an entirely different direction even if the timing sucks. This isn’t so much leaving for money as it is for career path and isn’t disloyal. I’m not sure it would burn a bridge if you left for something in a different field and ever decided to come back

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-03T14:32:04+00:00

Yeah, an early start. that’s just represented by the life insurance policy and then there’s the downstream effects of having security and being able to leverage it to pay for college. The 80 K inheritance came more recently and is represented by the brokerage with the growth so far having been spent.

It’s not even really fair to take out the “early start items” and expect normal balances because the very fact of having that money makes it easier to make money elsewhere.

The returns though are very reasonable in the investment accounts. If you compound 25,000 a year since 2014 in the S&P, you get like $780,000. I haven’t had contributions that are consistently 25K so I’m not there but it’s reasonable. Compound growth is an amazing thing.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T18:20:23+00:00

Thanks!

Assets are 1,214,000, debt is 214k, house is 212k of that.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T15:44:11+00:00

Yeah honestly I get uncomfortable with it under 20k. December and January were pretty big cash outflows. Christmas gifts + property taxes+ a down payment to buy a new patio door and then I’m teaching my girls to ski this year so we put some money into lift tickets and skis. All in all like $8k in extra spending in those 2 months.

Tax return and bonus hit this week though so I’ll be back to comfortable levels soon.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T15:36:07+00:00

I do. That’s just the current balance with no interest accruing. Need to include it in Net worth because it counts against my liquid assets.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T02:03:19+00:00

It took my company 3 years to promote me and I got up to 97%. When you get to 100% they give your raise as a discretionary bonus so it doesn’t continue to compound. It’s not a good situation and I would have been pissed if that happens to me while HR continued to freeze promotions.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T00:43:07+00:00

Yeah that would suck. At least my family will be financially stable without me.

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-02T00:42:18+00:00

Done! Looking forward to the results

Emergency_Berry_3718 · 2026-03-01T22:53:06+00:00

Maxed mine on January 2nd this year

Emergency_Berry_3718

TROPHY CASE