To the best of my knowledge, such a salary spread in engineering would span different jobs with different job titles.
I've lived the 50K-100K salary spread for the same programming job. Also, at my last "real" job Amazon stole away one of our interns. He was offered a job for $86K whereas the other intern was offered almost the same position for $67K. She was the better of the two developers. I'd like to believe there wasn't any gender discrimination going on with that situation, but I don't.
Anyway, there's definitely huge spreads for the same work in software. Sometimes, even in the same company! In my experience, salaries are completely arbitrary for software engineering. I've gotten paid the most for the easiest work I've done. The only constant I've seen is that salaries are higher across the board when the economy is good.
I've lived the 50K-100K salary spread for the same programming job. Also, at my last "real" job Amazon stole away one of our interns. He was offered a job for $86K whereas the other intern was offered almost the same position for $67K. She was the better of the two developers. I'd like to believe there wasn't any gender discrimination going on with that situation, but I don't.
Anyway, there's definitely huge spreads for the same work in software. Sometimes, even in the same company! In my experience, salaries are completely arbitrary for software engineering. I've gotten paid the most for the easiest work I've done. The only constant I've seen is that salaries are higher across the board when the economy is good.