Based on my own calculations, the starting salary for ChE's is about 17% higher than when I started; I accounted for inflation. What makes these kids so useful? For every job I ever looked at in the past 10 years, my rejection letter had age discrimination written all over it! One guy, a VP at Hersey, sat there during the interview, never looked up, babbled questions to keep me busy while he counted my age up on my resume; I should have walked out then and there rather than enduring a 12-hour harrowing ride back to Grand Rapids, Michigan. With an experienced engineer a company gets someone with a track record who knows how to solve real world problems. The last kid we hired earned the name Duggie Houser. He did absolutely nothing he was not told to do and was only interested in work programming the control system. That left the hard work, the field work, for us old-timers.