Why you'd go to the effort of doing all these estimates and just make up nonsensical multipliers is beyond me. Off-shift work is a little over 1.5x (this is non-overtime work that's not between 8 and 5), overtime is 2x. Weekend is 2x. Every overtime hour gets you a D stamp that is not insignificant in value.
All that information is public. I'm a little suspicious of a $500k crane engineer myself, but you managed to get everything wrong. If you missed half the stuff, and the half that was available in the article and in a two-minute Google, god knows what you're leaving out. I literally had the top result in my first search showing the wage card and here you're busy making up nonsensical numbers.
OK, so let's run the numbers for overtime as double time.
An 8-hour weekday shift with 2 hours not behind the crane is:
(75.91 * 6) + (73.91 * 2) = 603.28
A five-day week at that rate is 3,016.40.
52 weeks of that is $156,852.80. Add $60k insurance (and it's questionable to bundle that as "pay", but whatever), and we're at $218,652.80. Add $18k for max 401(k) contribution and it's $234,852.80.
From there we need to find $265,147.20 in overtime to get to $500k. If the overtime rate is double time, and if literally every overtime hour worked is behind the crane, our engineer needs 1,747 hours of overtime in a year in order to hit $500,000.
Working at 8-hour shift every weekend day can eat up 832 hours of that, leaving 915 hours we still need to find somewhere else. That's 17.6 hours of overtime per week. If they're only worked on weekdays, the crane operator needs to work an 11.5 hour shift every weekday and an 8 hour shift every Saturday and Sunday, year-round, to hit $500,000.
I don't think you're measuring this accurately. You keep leaving out too much. Fortunately, since $235k is far above the threshold to make my point, I'm not going to press it.
It's only $235k if you estimate health insurance at $60k + a maxed-out 401(k) contribution and add both of them to the dollar amount of what the engineer makes in wages.
Without, if they work 52 40-hour weeks, it's $156k. Which is good money, but a far, far cry from the "many make half a million" claim.
And since a little bit of "let's actually run the numbers you just presented" reduced the initially claimed amount by nearly 70%, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the initial claim was not rooted in reality, and probably the real amount is lower yet.
All that information is public. I'm a little suspicious of a $500k crane engineer myself, but you managed to get everything wrong. If you missed half the stuff, and the half that was available in the article and in a two-minute Google, god knows what you're leaving out. I literally had the top result in my first search showing the wage card and here you're busy making up nonsensical numbers.