Why can't we demand more? If it's just as challenging and complicated, shouldn't we be paid similarly?
Whatever you can innovate in HW can be cloned in China in 6 months.
As someone who switched from hardware to software, I think it's just economics. Software has almost zero marginal cost. If a software engineer builds a great thing, it can be scaled to millions of people with relatively small amounts of capital as long as the infrastructure is good, can be improved incrementally, and customers anywhere in the world can get it instantly without me really having to do anything extra for them. If a hardware guy builds a great thing, I now need to figure out if I can manufacture it, and how to source all of the parts, and then I need to pull that all together into a supply chain that feeds into a factory that's tooled for my goods, and then I need to get it to all of the people across the world that want it. As demand scales I need to keep rethinking things, and I can't push incremental improvements to the product without starting a whole bunch of stuff over. And I'm probably using a chinese contract manufacturer who might flip a switch and start competing with me, and they can pretty much by definition undercut me on price. It's just easier to make a lot of money off software, and you're paid in some proportion to how much money you cause the business to make.
You couldn’t have said it better. I wish I had accepted this a few years back, would have been in a much better place now.
I would actually say that because of what you commented, HW folks should have higher TC. HW is expensive, if there's a bug in SW, you patch it and move on. If you have a design flaw in HW, that could cost millions to fix. There's alot of stress on that fact, when you design, test, and validate and release to production. You need skilled engineers that know what they are doing. It can make or break a company having shit HW. There's only so much "magic" SW can do to work around HW design flaws.
The expected value generated by a talented software engineer is far greater than those generated by a talented hardware engineer. Another way to put it is, there's a lot of terrible software and hardware engineers. It's easier to have a single talented software engineer by themselves in a startup generate outsized value. It's difficult to have a single talented hardware engineer by themselves in a startup generate outsized value.
All of the above and lack of competition in the job market (employers). Its all consolidated, not like in was in the 90s.
Has anybody got a feel for what the difference is. Is there a rough factor? Is there a HW equivalent to levels.fyi?
Market supply and demand.
The further you are from the money, the less you make, thats why HW jobs pay lower. Software differentiates products more than hardware for consumers these days, so unless you create and patent some sort of really wanted device that no one can replicate, then you can ask for more money.