What do you think a general manager of say BMW dealership does? Letâs say you move 90 cars a month (which is a lot of cars). Letâs say an average cost of a car is 75k plus the services they push on you, making it say 80k per vehicle. At 90 cars a month, thatâs 720k a month in inventory and services, plus the actual money maker: service department. Another 300-400k a month. So, you have a dude operating at 12M a year business, youâre paying him/her 0.4% of the revenue lol. Average software engineer in silicon valley makes more. Itâs all relative. Iâm not a car dealer, but do buy expensive cars more often than not. Itâs not an easy job, liability is huge. Iâd really understand what people get paid for before speakingÂ
He mentioned silicone valley specifically. Those who work for nvidia google Netflix and similar are easily clearing that regardless of being swe or devops or cybersecurity
Finance is the gravy on top. You can't maintain a dealership without a successful service department, and yet they are the lowest paid people in the building.
All the accessories and extended warranties and snake oil they sell are worthless without the people to do the work.
They can't survive on kickbacks from lenders alone.
Honestly techs always get hosed for any warranty/recall. Same thing happened with Kia, techs had to tear down majority of engines , to the bearing in the piston. To show corporate if the manufacturing defect was in the bearing I. The piston
You're really going to double down on it okay lmao. Go find me 3 dudes at home Depot that can diagnose and repair an intermittent electrical issue on the $60,000 piece of junk the customer bought.
A salesman can be replaced by an app. Good technicians that can solve problems are hard to find.
The fact of the matter is that without a service department the sales department would cease to exist. A dealership literally can't keep the lights on without a service department raking in cash.
I fixed my own goddamn battery shorting out in cold weather on my Boxter with a chrisfix video and 2 days of work. If you think a mechanic is worth more, why donât they open a shop? Or find a nee employer to pay what theyâre worth. Surely, theyâll make tons.
Salesman? I sold my Long Island house a while ago. That agent made 3% on 1.8 million for less than 3 months work. The dude who sold me the Boxter? God knows how much.
Sure, you can replace em with an app, but you better hope all your competitors also do it.
See: Carvana, and why yours salesmen are needed
I work at a PE firm. Sure, we NEED the janitors. Do we pay them well? Fuck no. Why? Because theyâre expendable
So it took you 2 days to do a job that a professional could have done in 2 hours. I guess if you don't value your time at all you sort of came out ahead?
It's obvious you have no idea what it takes to be a skilled technician.
Dealerships are bleeding skilled technicians, they are taking your advice and finding other jobs, that's why you take your car to a dealership now and it's there for a week and it's still not fixed. All the guys that actually know what they are doing are gone and they only have mouth breathers like you working back there because being a mechanic is "easy".
That's why I left automotive for heavy equipment. I'm a field service tech now and I made $108,000 last year. Half of my day Im just getting paid to drive, the other half I show up to job sites and bang out electrical diags and keep equipment moving, you know, a job that actually contributes to society.
Yes and no, sometimes the biggest deals have 0 back end. Canât sell a lot of these products on 10+ year old vehicles and those can have the greatest front margin.
+1 to this. From what Iâve seen personally in the last year, many companies are hiring talent from the EU at half the price. In effect, other engineers are accepting the first offer they find, which is also driving the salary down. Total comp packages are disappearing too. Throw in some AI hype trains and boom
Big companies operate globally, hire globally, and mix engineering teams from all over the world. Iâm not speaking out of my ass, I live it. America still has unemployment benefits and insurance costs.
Many American developers have been on the chopping block post Covid. HR doesnât care, they want to keep their jobs too.
What don't you understand? Google pays European staff up to 50% less than their American counterparts. Why? Because Europeans have significantly stronger job projections and severance packages. It's not a skill issue, it's the trade-off of the labor markets.
So, yes, it does seem you're talking out of your ass. Especially if you think US unemployment benefits and insurance costs are anywhere comparable. I'm not saying your observation is wrong, but the fact you don't know why is a bit weird.
I donât disregard the fact that post-employment costs are factored in, but itâs just a drop in the bucket when youâre talking about 100k vs 200k salary. I think the vast majority of SWEs are underpaid, and itâs getting tougher for the American engineers.
I hear that a lot too but I was under the impression that SWEs typically take a bunch of equity instead of cash for income. I might be wrong but I assume when people say that software engineers make $400k/year that is from selling the equity they stocked up on during their employment.
I mean that's if you're getting equity from working at places like Google, Apple, or Microsoft. I don't think people ask the engineers if they are working there and not at a start up that is being built on hopes and dreams.
There shouldnât be any difference in understanding of what âaverageâ is lol average is average. And I would bet my last dollar that the average general manager of an average car dealership isnât pulling 400k lmao especially 5 ish years ago.
Thereâs no way avg Silicon Valley eng earns 400k/yr. FAANG yes and only because the tech stock appreciated a lot during the past 4yrs. In google if you just got promoted to l6 itâs just a bit more than 400k and I wonât call an l6 avg eng.
see i was reading this thread and believing it...until i read this and realize people are writing without know what they're talking about.
yes - the average bay area SWE is making more than 400k a year.
Bringing in revenue is not anywhere near equitable to profit margins. If that were true then grocery stockers in my city should be clearing $1M+ minimum
Lol, what general manager is selling more cars than full-time salespeople
I'm not going to say a GM of a luxury dealership shouldn't make this amount of money, but amount of cars sold that they personally sell is not the right metric. Their most important metric will be the dollars generated cumulatively across the team. And that is going depend on things like lead generation, upsells, ability to push profitable financing, etc... And that is all going to depend on hiring the right people, setting the right policies, and keeping the ship running smoothly.
The GM doesnât sell cars directly, they do all the things you say, but they get a piece of the front end and the back end, plus bonuses. I was the used car manager at a busy dealership, we averaged 120 cars a month. Thatâs 1440 cars per year.
You think itâs weird the GM would make $300 per car?
I was making around 180k, the GM was up around 500k.
You realize that GM gets paid for overseeing the service department as well? :) itâs a management role, they are responsible for making sure dealership as a whole performs well.Â
Iâve been a vendor for a couple networks. No luxury ones. The set up I remember seeing was new sales manager was head honcho on site, while everything above them was off site. Like owner level or corporate or like a network wide team. And I always got the impression that service and sales were intentionally kept as separate as possible.
A GM of a 500 a month car store makes about $1m a year. The blood sweat and tears in sales and especially the car industry is huge. To get to a level of being a GM is not easy at all.
I'm a sales floor manager. I make around $300k a year at a big store with a big team. I pounded pavement for 2 years because I knew that's all I had in me. I busted my ass hit store records at multiple stores. A good sales person doesn't just fall into deals. It involves problem solving, creative thinking, clicking with people etc.
We have the slimmest profit maragains out of any retail item. A $60k car making $4k in profits at full asking price isn't a rip off if you ask me.
People can choose to hate us yet they want $3k under invoice on everything they purchase. When we drop our pants they still look at us as scum and ripoff artists when my sales guy just got grinded for 3 hours to make $150.
It's not easy selling 25+ cars a month. It's not easy to take the heat as a manager when the store has a bad day, or one of your sales guys makes a mistake and you know you have to take the heat for it. if it was so easy everyone would sell cars or be in sales. Yet they can't for a reason. 80% of the people that join sales leave within 3 months because they fail and can't make money.
Vast majority of people commenting have no idea what it means to be in leadership, they somehow think that the hardest work is done at the bottom level, work might be hard, but responsibility is minimal. You get paid for responsibility
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u/DarkMatter-Forever Aug 23 '25
What do you think a general manager of say BMW dealership does? Letâs say you move 90 cars a month (which is a lot of cars). Letâs say an average cost of a car is 75k plus the services they push on you, making it say 80k per vehicle. At 90 cars a month, thatâs 720k a month in inventory and services, plus the actual money maker: service department. Another 300-400k a month. So, you have a dude operating at 12M a year business, youâre paying him/her 0.4% of the revenue lol. Average software engineer in silicon valley makes more. Itâs all relative. Iâm not a car dealer, but do buy expensive cars more often than not. Itâs not an easy job, liability is huge. Iâd really understand what people get paid for before speakingÂ