For the second year in a row, inflation outpaced growth in U.S. engineering salaries, according to the IEEE-USA 2023 Salary and Benefits Survey. That’s the first multiyear dip in real income since the 2000s.

In current dollars, the median income of U.S. engineers and other tech professionals who were IEEE members grew 6 percent from US $160,097 in 2021 to $169,000 in 2022, excluding overtime pay, profit sharing, and other supplemental earnings, the just-released report indicated. But with inflation taking off during the survey period, average salaries in real (2022) dollars dropped $3,585, after a drop of $3,723 the previous year. To calculate the median, IEEE-USA considered only respondents who were tech professionals working full-time in their primary area of technical competence, a sample of 3,992 people for the latest survey.

Who is the typical IEEE member? He (and I use that pronoun intentionally) is 50-year-old white male with 25 years of work experi