In some of my classes, the students are presented with a pretty appealing proposition. Can you make $40,000 per day? While students usually react with some incredulity, some will naturally express interest in the offer. The follow-up question is a little tougher – can you be worth $40,000 per day? Most everyone would be willing to receive that much, but justifying that value honestly, well that can be more of a challenge. Let’s illustrate how that magnitude is something we need to assess and appreciate.

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Life would be all roses and rabbits on $40k a day (Goya’s Spring)

First let’s break down the modest salary of a Jane Lunchbox engineer in the U.S. or Europe, making $50,000 a year (Euro not too far off, given the current near parity). For 250 working days a year, that’s $200 a day in your gross paycheck. That’s enough for a pretty decent lifestyle, played right. You (should) bill out to clients at some multiple of that. Let’s say $1000 a day, rough numbers.

You hop in a plane, get into a Mitsubishi Montero with a local driver that finds the sidewalks the fastest lane, and go take a look at an installation in the developing world. Perhaps you are checking up on some equipment you’ve sold to a refinery or factory. Maybe it’s a new power plant you are commissioning or troubleshooting. You are young and enjoy traveling to new places. You photograph strange animals, chauffeur knows the route, AC is on, windows are rolled up.

So let’s shift your perspective. You are a worker in Kenya, or Bangladesh, or the Philippines, making a minimum wage (if that) around $5 per day. You are crushing your body out in the hot sun, doing dangerous work, and not knocking off in a mere 8 hours, but the person that just breezed by you in the Montero is getting paid (billing anyway) 200x per day what you make. They bill in a day about what you might make in a year? Why, to frame that disparity to the developed world white collar worker, that’s like someone in your engineering office (your boss or coworker perhaps) making $40,000 per day. Sounds ridiculous, right?

As you the laborer and you the engineer lock eyes during the drive by, each of you has to be thinking – can anyone be worth that much more?

This is not a lecture on income inequality and the Gini coefficient. All of us should want wages to rise in the developing world, and the economic fortunes of folks everywhere to improve. Yes, agreed. Rather, this is to stress that when you are that engineer behind the glass receiving that scrutiny, you need to recognize that it’s not a question of what you think you deserve to make because you have a certain degree from a certain school, or need to keep up your lifestyle. Instead, you must demonstrate that you can continually deliver value to clients at a rate that merits that sort of compensation. If you don’t, and are just riding on a piece of paper and gaming the system, then the laborer might as well just drag you out of the car and switch places (under the best case scenario).

If you are talented, then you can contribute in ways that do justify a high level of compensation, relative or absolute. Your value is proportional to the number of people you benefit, nothing more. Let’s go back to the reality, that someone thought you needed to come out to site to help troubleshoot a critical piece of equipment that is keeping this power plant from running. Perhaps you are a control system designer, or a pump mechanical seal specialist, or a turbine engineer. Perhaps you are doing it over the phone in the middle of the night from across the world, through the magic of Teams or Zoom.

Say your 25 MW power plant is selling power to the grid at $100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), or 25 x 24 x 100 = $60,000 per day. If your equipment is contributing to trips and the plant is shut down waiting on you, that’s lost revenue for the client. Diagnose the problem, tune the system, and are you worth $1000 a day? You could be.

Say it’s a 25 MW plant that is running a little rough, underperforming by 1% (250 kW). You do your magic, explain to the operators what to look for next time. The effect of your improvements result in an improvement in generation and revenue of (0.25 MW)(8760 hours/yr)($100/MWh)(we’ll ignore capacity factor) = $219,000 per year. Significant added revenue to the client. Even if it took you a week to diagnose, the client’s investment in you may well be worth it.

Consider the broader impacts of what you can contribute with your skills. Say the 25 MW plant is in a country with 6 million people. Perhaps that developing nation has 500 MW of power plant capacity, stretched to the limit, and your little steam engine that couldn’t for the time being is 5% of that. Essentially, there are 300,000 people whose schools, industries, hospitals etc. are waiting on you to do your job. Yes, you should feel pressure.

Bottom line is, constantly bear yourself with some noblesse oblige. If you are fortunate enough to have obtained a great education and can achieve some mastery in your field, don’t first ask the question “what can I make?” Rather, ask yourself continually “how much can I contribute?” For your own peace of mind, find tangible examples where you can be confident you are doing just that, generating value for others at the pace of $200, $1000, $40,000+ per day. Think about those tens of thousands of people sitting in the dark, waiting for you to work your technical wizardry to get the plant on line a day sooner, turn those lights and fans and sewing machines back on. Time to shine.