RANT - Underpaid hardware guys
Hardware folks (Mechanical/Electrical/Supply Chain etc) - Can I rant about how underpaid we are?? we build physical tangible goods.. and yet companies are not willing to give us a fraction of what software people make. For gods sake STOP UNDERSELLING YOURSELF. Software people have done a phenomenal job in hacking the term "engineering" and using it to get s**t tonnes of money. and hats off to them for doing this! Try outsourcing mechanical/quality/supply chain work and see how well that works out for you. And yet we undercut oursleves by selling oursleves short and accept a 100K salary as if it were a blessing where as a S/W guy makes 2-3 times that with same YOE. Recruiters end the conversation if you ask for what you are truly worth because there is some HW guy who will suck up and accept the position for less. You are the very core of any company that makes physical goods. ACT LIKE IT. Stand up for yourself and ask for what you are worth because lord knows everybody else does.
I feel you, that's why I switched to all software now.
Ditto
fuck yeah!
Pbm is the whole Silicon Valley culture.
Just leetcode and switch to software then.
And do something I don't like? Nope.
For 2-3x salary, why not?
It wasn’t always like this. Somewhere within the past 8-10 years it shifted. HW folks used to get paid pretty well. Not sure what happened.
cloud?
All HW vendors were brought down by commodity, free software (least common denominator?) and similar thinking for HW. Other than for graphics processors, all HW research seems to have stalled. Consumers have invested in huge volumes of cheap HW, making it harder to go back to proprietary HW.
I have much respect for hardware folks. Keep doing what you love and do some cool stuff.
Hardware has too much capital costs which forces companies to pay us less. Software the people are their capital costs so they just spend all the money there
I have posted about this in the past. I feel the pain and I switched from doing HW/Systems to FW and then SW. Finally making some decent numbers. The prime reasons : 1) HW is risky in terms of success and requires expensive lab equipment/space. The HR+Finance factor it in when considering overall Cost of hiring an Engr 2) Too many veterans in HW domain. There are folks with 20+ YOE with their homes paid for, their kids off to college and basically need a fun place to hang out and tell their stories of times when Woz used to hang out at some Irish bar in Sunnyvale. They would work for 100k coz for them it is FU money 3) Ground up HW engineering is outsourced way too often to China, Taiwan, S Korea. In US they only need folks who can integrate shit together 4) Nothing much new happening in HW land. Chip design , mask layout, verification is all incremental. On SW land, they roll out a new version of JS every third month and call it a revolution. 5) there is hope still. DARPA is pumping 1.5 bill this year. XCOM is formed. Quantum computing is picking up. Real Systems/HW work will come back, nevertheless not in SF bay area - rather in Austin, Boulder areas TLDR: gloom and doom and cool kids stole our shrooms, however we are gonna bounce back (see pics)
Sorry to digress, but what hardware companies are in Boulder?
Lockheed Martin, Microsemi, Qualcomm
Once upon a time every chip company has to build its own fab and semiconductor equipment companies make all the money. Eventually it cost too much to build fab and the industry evolve into a foundry model. All these equipment companies consolidated and now not much gone on. Then the profit is at fabless chip companies and they hire verlog guys. They had a good decade until it too face the high risk and low margin problem of equipment companies. It didn't really happened until everything is commoditised and integrated. Then virtualization happen and most of the wasted capacity are utilized, sales dropped, few survived as everyone is good enough. Then cloud computing started and everyone decided to migrate, result in a shortage of software guys but surplus of hardware guys. Also not helping is the biggest cost in hardware being development risk than chip die size. So most new hardware companies are just building arm core plus accelerator (some not even that) and IO, then make everything software defined. They can afford to make half of what Cisco and Juniper charge with a quarter of the risk and cost, while still being a great bargain for customers. Two decades ago HW guys were paid like 20% more than software, and losers who won't cut it for EE end up switching to CS as a semi drop out.
Agree