I work for a software company on natural language search. My job involves optimizing results by configuring a dictionary that houses an ontology and rules which recognize natural language patterns.

I got my PhD focusing on theoretical syntax and semantics, and I'd say that even though I don't draw on a lot of the specific things I learned, the general process of learning how to "do" linguistics was vital. The pay range for my job is probably $75K - $125K depending how long you've been doing it. My salary has actually gone down since I started working for my first company in 2000, just because I started at the top of the dot com peak, and I'm on my third company now.

I like my career choice, and I find the work interesting. I'm glad I had another option besides academics, which I always found boring because you don't see any immediate practical benefits from your work. I'd say the biggest drawback is that I'm limited in the number of positions open in my field at any given time; I was unemployed for over a year, and that was tough.

I got a temporary job right out of college, optimizing a large lexicon for a product with Phoneme-to-Speech synthesis technology, at a healthy $18/hr. They were specifically looking for people with Linguistics background for the project (I have a BA), but it really only used my linguistics skills in a peripheral way--my experience with phonetic alphabets was helpful, and I think some of my phonetics background was helpful. Other than that, though, I think there was a bit of a misconception about what linguists are actually good for--as "Linguists", we supposedly would be able to determine the Right Pronunciation of all these words, but in fact our training in avoiding prescriptivist attitudes made that part of the job a lot harder!

There seem to be a fair number of linguistics jobs involving things like natural speech recognition, and search technology. I wish I had studied more computer science. :-( Now I'm unemployed.