Hardware engineering total comps suck!
Or perhaps it’s just my company. 10+ yrs of experience on top of PhD and MS, above average rating, yearly TC base ~ 140k, bonus ~ 15-20%, RSU ~ 5k on a “good” year. And no, there’s no typo in RSU! Location Bay Area, level senior staff, one level short of director. Equiv. L/E6 at FANG!? And NO I’m not alone, as I know the TC for several outstanding colleagues as well. All similar...what gives? I should’ve studied CS! So all you SWE folks, next time you look at your 400-600k (100-150k yearly) RSUs, be grateful!
This is a really tough question to answer. Demands and supplies can explain partially why there are SWE 400k offers, but I think hype is what’s really pushing the salary scale. I have never worked in any hardware companies, but the way I see it is, first, the industry is very small. A bunch of giants and that’s about it. While one hardware company can make tens of billions a year, engineers don’t have much choice picking next employers who will pay well, so employment is like a revolving door.
Are you still at Seagate? My friends who work there all have below average comp. I have a base of 175k and paper money worth $300k/year at a hardware startup. Which is close to comp for SWE at unicorn startups. Yes, it’s not liquid, but neither was Dropbox until a few days ago :)
I have 5 years work experience btw.
Yep still there but working to get out. Ideally, I’d want to work as a data scientist at FB/Goog/Amzn
Very few SWE earn > 200k if you examine the whole population of American SWEs
Similar story at Chipzilla. The best paying HW jobs are at Apple or some custom AI ASIC job at Google (HWE still get less RSUs than SWE there). Next level down is Nvidia. Your salary is basically new CS grad salary at F & G, taking into account their RSUs. So L3-L4 at Goog, LOL. Note that Netflix doesn't really hire new grads save for a few exceptions. New grads at Amazon and Apple probably aren't paid as much but probably only 20k off your TC. But even that at 22 yo is awesome compared to what I started out with 10+ years ago. Not too late to change though. I know some PhDs who got out of the HW game and switched to FANG in the last few years. Data science then SWE. HW is dead. All the big consolidations in the past few years combined with cheap Indian and Chinese design houses commoditized the HWE profession. What is Seagate up to in the big old ex-Solyndra building anyway?
From what I’ve seen, the hardware firms don’t pay very well and the longer you have been there the wider the disparity. As an example, I don’t have a tech background but made about $70k more than my significant other in a tech role who has been at a hardware firm for 10 years.
Solyndra building has been turned into a really nice facility and a huge portion of our business is still disk drives. At this facility we’re developing media for heat assisted magnetic recording, which is the future of conventional disk drives and it should increase capacity significantly. I love a lot of things about my work but lack of growth and dismal pay are ruining everything else for me.
There are many autonomous car AI companies out there who need hw engs and have no idea how to get them, and they pay well.
Problem is when you get more experienced you get more specialized, and those specialties are not as transferrable as SWE skills
I thought those companies would need sw and ml engs not hw
Not all hardware engineering comps suck :)