What are programmer/machinist making in your part of the world?

Just curious.
I'm sure it's dependent on geographics or demographics but what are really good programmer/machinist making where you are?

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

I'll just go ahead and tell you, guys like that make $22-25 per hr here.

There's 2080 work hours in a year so I guess that's 52K tops.

$22 - $25 an hour for doing all that?

Jeez am I glad I never moved over that side of the pond 8 yrs ago

I make $22.30 or so for being a complete pita*

Boris

* I also do CNC 4 axis mill programming/setting, fixturing, ordering tooling, grinding(various) manual machining and cutting up bar stock when I want to hide from the management

Laid off around here.


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Like the pine trees linin the winding road, I gots a name...
Ox

It's not all that "bad" on this side of the pond Boris.

Geography is a funny thing. You have your country averages, state averages, county averages, city averages, which side of town averages... right down to the most micro level. You could be in one shop doing it for $25 an hour, and the go next door for $30... or across town for $31.50..... or go somewhere close to home for $23.45.... Demographics is out to lunch.....

Around my area.... it could be 22-35 an hour. However, many can average out to well over $70-85k a year with some OT. But, I can tell you that there are some of us well over $100k and even approaching $200k plus. Salary pay is becoming popular in many regions too....

exkenna said:

Just curious.
I'm sure it's dependent on geographics or demographics but what are really good programmer/machinist making where you are?

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

I'll just go ahead and tell you, guys like that make $22-25 per hr here.

There's 2080 work hours in a year so I guess that's 52K tops.

Click to expand...

If I could find someone like that I'd pay that plus some. Unfortunately I have yet to find someone to just "setup and run parts". Okay let me rephase that I can't seem to find someone who can setup (without taking all day and asking a million questions then breaking tools and inserts ) and run good parts.

Well that's about what I thought.
When I was at IMTS last time I was sitting at the hotel watering hole and the guy next to me owned a job shop in Minnesota. He couldn't believe our low wages (or low cost of living).
Said he would pay $40/hr for a guy that talented but couldn't find one.

Now wait a minute! There's a shop just up the road that will pay up to $17 an hour for that kind of skill!!!!! I'm not kidding......cheap bastards.

Don't know about other shops in the area, but the last place I worked before starting my shop was paying in the mid $20's hr.

Supply and Demand of required skills versus possessed skills. And actual versus claimed.

There's also "cost of living" - hesstool - what's cost of living in your part of WA compared with Auburn or Seattle? Any $400K closets being sold as houses there?

So the *real* question (which is a fair one) - what do people with *truly* comparable skills make on a local-cost adjusted basis?

Two years ago I worked in a shop in Queens (NYC) at $27 plus benefits and overtime. Since I left I've had 2 jobs offered at around $30. a month ago I ran into one of my former coworkers (different Department) and he told me that they were still looking for someone to fill my position and they had upped the the pay offer to $35/hr, still no one. 4 axis contour and 3D surfacing programming, and setup. Not rocket science but very fast paced. I was also the only guy there that could also do the programming for the lathes as well (again different department).

bryan_machine said:

Supply and Demand of required skills versus possessed skills. And actual versus claimed.

There's also "cost of living" - hesstool - what's cost of living in your part of WA compared with Auburn or Seattle? Any $400K closets being sold as houses there?

So the *real* question (which is a fair one) - what do people with *truly* comparable skills make on a local-cost adjusted basis?

Click to expand...

closets on my block are in the $800K-$1.4M range. People who make <$65K are just making ends meet. My bed room looks into the living room of a $3.5M apartment across the street.

exkenna said:

Just curious.
I'm sure it's dependent on geographics or demographics but what are really good programmer/machinist making where you are?

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

I'll just go ahead and tell you, guys like that make $22-25 per hr here.

There's 2080 work hours in a year so I guess that's 52K tops.

Click to expand...

I don't know what that job would pay around here but it sounds like a "competitor in training" to me.

I don't want to sound like a cheap bastard. I own a shop in california and we do mainly aluminum extrusion overflow, production welding, punching, some cnc work, yada,yada.yada. My highest paid employee is making $13.00 an hour and thats high for him. I would pay my guys more if they knew more. I do everything here. Program, setup, ordering, quoting, dealing with customers, repair guy,welder,saw operator. Some of my guys have been here over 2 years and I constanly have to show them how to do the same job we did 2 months ago. I haven't had a vacation in 4 years. I went home early one day and the whole shop went to hell. I try sending these guys to school to learn the trade, they go for a few weeks then find some reason to stop going. I had one guy that was always late in the morning, then he came back from lunch an hour late then asked me for a raise!!! It's ridiculous. I have 8 employees and only 2 of them I hired for a specific job(welding). I'm trying to get more into the machining end of it and more customers on our welding side. If I continue to grow I'm gonna need to hire somebody that knows what he's doing. Just my 2 cents.

bryan_machine said:

There's also "cost of living" - hesstool - what's cost of living in your part of WA compared with Auburn or Seattle? Any $400K closets being sold as houses there?

Click to expand...

The shop I made an example of can truly be considered tight wads. It's a business that was thriving when it was located in the Seattle metro area, but since it's been moved over here, a series of bad owners have made it into kind of a laughing stock. No doubt it cost less to live where I do, but $17 hr is a joke.

EX stated:

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

Click to expand...

I would think that would pretty much describe a supervisor or manager of some capacity and around my area $60k base salary would seem fair to more than fair.

Just for fun, I checked the website "Sperling's BestPlaces" to compare the Seattle metro are with my "metro" area. Here's what I found in regards to income vs. home prices:

_____________________Seattle/Tacoma _____Pasco/Kennewick/Richland
Median home price: ____$495,800 ___________$187,000

Median houshold income: $57,431 ____________$53,000

Now, the Government salaries in my area pump the income numbers way up. Without the nuke reservation in our back yard, we're just an agricultural based community and any manufacturing would be nearly nonexistant.

exkenna said:

Just curious.
I'm sure it's dependent on geographics or demographics but what are really good programmer/machinist making where you are?

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

I'll just go ahead and tell you, guys like that make $22-25 per hr here.

There's 2080 work hours in a year so I guess that's 52K tops.

Click to expand...

Glad you later mentioned overtime as my normal year is at least 500 hours more than that number. Worked about 650 more than that last year. Use to be more, but I've slowed down a bit in my old age. Course for the first 15-1/2 years here I worked all that overtime for free. No raise in last 7 years. Me and several others that been here quite awhile and are all in the same boat. Guess we've reached top rate.

I don't bid, but have done the rest. Only program for lathes tho I would love to learn mills. Do C-axis, but no Y-axis lathes in our shop. Or Swiss lathes either, so maybe I'm getting paid all I'm worth. Like jprobst, when I'm out it doesn't take long for them to miss me.

Like SIM and jprobst said, hard to find anyone with skills. I was programming for, and helping on set-ups, for 21 lathes for about a 6 month period. Couldn't keep up. Plant 100 yards up the hill went out of business, and we finally were able to get a good progammer/set-up guy to help me. You wouldn't believe the skills of the people who had been applying for the programming job. Well...maybe you would.

Got a guy here with 36 years experience (first 20 some on mills) that keeps locking the left-hand rough profiling insert the wrong way. Then asks me why there is a burr on the O.D. Doesnt even see that the faces aren't being cleaned up by the finish tool.

Had one operator running a job with 3 boring bars and a threading bar. The foreman told him to change the threading insert. His question was "Which one is the threading tool?" Then there are the ones that you have to call an interpeter for cause they don't speak or understand English. Course they don't understand machining either.

Yup, I understand telling the same thing to the same person time after time. No sense to get upset. That is just the way things are.

Oh, yeah. I commute a 100 miles a day to New Jersey because I couldn't survive on the wages I'd make here in Pennsy. Anyone want to comment on gas prices?

"You wouldn't believe the skills of the people who had been applying for the programming job. Well...maybe you would"

Trust me, from amazing good to stupifying bad, I would believe you....

gcodeguy said:

Yup, I understand telling the same thing to the same person time after time. No sense to get upset. That is just the way things are.

Click to expand...

You should never have to explain something to anyone more than 3 times, period. Anything more than that you're wasting your time trying to explain something that will never be understood. They should be taking notes the second time around.

exkenna said:

Just curious.
I'm sure it's dependent on geographics or demographics but what are really good programmer/machinist making where you are?

I'm talking about someone you could trust to bid, program, supervise, set up, and run parts.

I'll just go ahead and tell you, guys like that make $22-25 per hr here.

There's 2080 work hours in a year so I guess that's 52K tops.

Click to expand...

I'm currently raking in $11.11/hour and have to drive 40km's each way to get it.
There is a whopping 2 shops within a couple of hours drive, both on the same stretch of road.

I had 2 and a half years of experience as a button pusher before getting laid off and taking the Machinist/CNC course at the local college. Finished first with honors and got my first job in the trade at the job shop that I did my work term at. I started at $9.00/hour over 2 years ago. I do all the CNC (lathe and mill) programming/work at the shop solo as well a great deal of manual machining. Job shops are great for expierence, you see a little bit of everything. It's about 80% manual and the 20% CNC machining for me. It is the largest and most well equipped shop in the area and the only shop with CNC machines within 3 hours. Most job postings that seem to come up in my province (Nova Scotia) seem to pay between $17-22 for a experienced machinist CNC or not. As a reference our minimum wage is now $8.10/hour and will be $9.65 by 2010. I believe the experienced manual machinists (25+years in the trade) are making somewhere between $16-19/hour, but that's just a guess. No wonder why every tradesperson around here goes to Alberta. I made more ($12.50) as a button pusher without any real skills. I'll end up having to move this year as this is not sustainable for me.

All relative to area of the country, like many have said. Cleveland, OH the guys are in the mid $20's/hr. I moved 3 hours south of Cleveland 'bout 1-1/2 yrs ago for less money. Now I live on 24 acres of wooded land, private pond, across the road from a lake. I can live better here than I could in the city, and the wife does not have to work. Like I said, it's all relative.

bryan_machine said:

"You wouldn't believe the skills of the people who had been applying for the programming job. Well...maybe you would"

Trust me, from amazing good to stupifying bad, I would believe you....

Click to expand...

The Engineering school I went to had an open admission agreement with the city. This meant that they would take any high school grad who applied. Freshmen year was a mixture of oversimplified courses and classes designed to wash out the under educated. Those that washed out were placed in the mechanical engineering technology department which was the machine shop. When taking cnc classes I was amazed at the number of kids who were approaching their associates degree and were panicking because they hadn't fulfilled the math requirement which was only to complete through algebra 2. Many of these kids couldn't add 2 fractions if their life depended on it.

I'm not doing bidding, so i don't know if i should post here, but i'll do it anyway. I'm 18 now, just graduating from school in few weeks. I've been working in a small job shop for six months now (we have these periods at school, when we go to work to learn better)

At this moment i'm doing programming, setups, fixturing and optimizing processes for live tooled lathes, and VMC's. I can do almost all the complex parts we are making (except molds), i also do some short-run assembly and supervise of the new guys that they do their jobs right, keep tolerances and don't break machines..

They have been paying around 10eur/hour (15.5USD), and after i graduate, they will pay 13eur/hour (20USD)

Btw, great forum you have here! i have been reading this for some months now and find especially the new machine topics interesting. I hope my roughish english doesn't matter