Oh man, engineers can make just gross money. I grew up down the street from a guy that was a specialized engineer in the operations divison of company that produces drills / diamond drill bits for mining all over the world. He operated out of their headquarters in my hometown, but if I said that he was home for 2 months per year in all the years I knew him, I think I'd be lying to you. He use to pay me to cut his grass, shovel his snow and even walk his dog when I was a kid, so his wife (who was always at home by herself with their young boys) didn't have too.
Essentially, the guy had maintenance crews subcontracted around the world to respond when one of these multi-million dollar drills went down and an untold thousands of dollars per hour was being lost for every hour that went by that it wasn't operational.
Unfortunately, far too often the subcontracted crews could not deal with the problems being presented and this guy would be forced to fly from wherever he was, to wherever he had to be, and get there as soon as possible. The guy would leave in the middle of the night with no notice, drive to Toronto and fly out of Pearson to places like Brazil, Chile, The Congo, The Philipenes, South Africa, The Czech Republic and Russia, so that he could personally oversee the repairs and the restoration of operations.
Companies would pay ridiculous amounts of money do get their drills back on line. When the guy was at home (we use to swim in his pool) his phone was glued to his face. He was constantly talking to somebody from somewhere in the world... He use to put his phone on speaker phone and people would literally be yelling and pleading with him to get his ass to God knows where around the world because they were losing unfathomable amounts of money. We would listen to the conversations and just laugh at the desperation. I've heard the phrase "I don't care what it will cost (in numerous accents) more times than I can count.
That guy partially retired in his mid 40's and he and his wife bought a 7 or 8 million dollar home on the lake in The Muskokas, which is Toronto's cottage country where all the professional athletes, and business people spend their summers at their "cottages".
Some engineers can make bananas money, I know that. If invested properly... The sky is the limit.
