Case in question : see attached email from a recruiter trying to hire a Mixed Signal CMOS designer, for those who don’t know - it’s a Integrated Circuit Chip designer. This is not your average Hardware engineer, definitely not a technician. The Salary however caps at 120k, in friggin’ San Francisco. Point: Why are folks with actual design, abilities to build stuff you can touch and feel, paid less and less? Even a Mobile App QA engineer with no formal BS level edu, fetches more than this CMOS Designer. Is it simply because of some belief that Hardware is easy and already done? If this Salary scape is not a deterrence to aspiring Engineers to choose Software Engg over Hardware, I dunno what is. This to me explains our problems in taking up infra projects, building new Cars, which were the sort of projects previous generations delivered on
The salaries are unfortunately not decided by the skill and education needed for the role. The determining factors are profit margins, supply and demand of engineers for the roles. You are right, even QA engineers without much education are getting paid more than hardware engineers in SV.
Bro.. Try big companies and you will certainly make more..
Well I agree although I had to become a Software Engineer as the pay even in bigger cos is not great. Apple perhaps the only one
SW folks get much more than us HW paupers even at Apple
👆What he said
In capitalism, salary is not a reward for skills. It is a reward for demand vs supply. Unfortunately in our schools we are taught being smart and working hard is rewarded, but that is not true. Well to supply a demand you might need to work hard and smart, but again the demand is what giving reward there. And I personally don’t think this is wrong. Currently, demand is more for software than for infra projects or hardware, so software engineers are rewarded more.
Why do you believe things are fair in life? Get real. Don't be a cry baby
You don’t know who I am. Don’t troll me
1. Showing you a mirror is NOT trolling. 2. I am THE ONE WHO KNOCKS.
There's larger demand for software skills. Building a website and app to make money is easier than building hardware to make money. That's is still incredibly low for SF. Would assume Apple and Samsung pays more.
In my country they call software eng: killing enemies with bare hands. All u need is a laptop.
Russia?
Because salary is determined by how much competition is there for your skills. If there is only one company for your specialized skill, they wouldn't pay you as much because they know you have nowhere else to go.
I think one comment was right here seems like margin in sw companies are so high they can pay more
Hardware companies have much higher overhead. Prototyping physical products and setting up for production is a very expensive investment that software companies don’t need to worry about. Hardware companies also need to sell an actual product to customers so they have to optimize their margins to drive towards a competitive price. And given enough competition, margins typically get smaller and smaller. All the money software companies save by not manufacturing, storing, and shipping products to customers can potentially go towards employee salaries. The whole business model is just a lot more efficient and low cost. I also think there’s a ton of investor funding that’s messing with software salaries but that’s it’s own problem
Physicians/Lawyers don’t make thing you can touch either, and still get paid decent amount, why?
Because they heavily regulate their job market to create artificial demand. SDE don't really have control of the market. For some reason FANG has convinced themselves that they need these devs and have slef created a demand. The whole situation is just weird.