Are low-level/HW engineer have higher average TC?
I mean engineers who are in nVidia AMD Intel Apple etc doing HW/low-level stuff. It's a genuine question, I feel their job harder and require much more preparation. I know many ppl who can do app/web/API but don't know anyone who can write a firmware, driver, OS level code TC 155
I worked at a HW company and ironically HW engineers (those writing OS or FW) made less that ppl working with cloud/apps.
Agreed. HW engineering requires way more skills than LCing. Although they are paid lesser
Any idea why is that?
That’s because profit margins are lesser in hardware. Hardware requires a lot of investment as compared to software and is risky business in general. Although, with FAANGs entering into Hardware, things have began to change.
Unfortunately HW engineers are paid less than SWE. But in Apple and few other companies the HW engineers are paid slightly more than other places but still less than SWE. For FW engineers, it’s like they are paid more than HWE but less than SWE. On the flip side in this current market the demand for FW Engineers are still high. I am a Firmware Engineer who worked at 2 FAANGs are some legacy HW companies so talking from experience.
Meta, ironically made it very attractive for the best hardware firmware engineers to switch (before the big layoff trend) and Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, etc had to revise up pay to catch up.
"before the big layoff trend" 🤣
Unfortunately there is no relationship between difficulty/skill and pay...
How about offer and demand? It's easier to find a SWE than FW/HW engineer. You cannot become HWE doing boot camp lol
It’s not any easier to find a GOOD one, though.
HW doesn’t pay as well as SW. SW might change and add more value in variety of ways while the underlying HW platform remains static. Same mobile phone, but can do music, video recording, finance transaction, email. Essentially the trend keeps changing and what’s hot today is not hot any more after a few years. It was HW for a while, then came OS/networking/Java etc, then we moved into mobile apps, now cloud and AI. If you were lucky enough to ride the right trends and the trends last long enough, you make money. This reflected in the fact that there were lots of semiconductor centers around the world. That has kept shrinking steadily. Increasing consolidation has literally left it down to 4-5 big players. Whatever happened to that hiring Collusion case that Apple was involved in ?
They lost it, and the payout was in the hundreds of millions for all the cartel members combined. Essentially half a day of Apple‘s profits, to make sure that no one else will ever sue because the payoff is virtually inexistent.
Two reasons. 1. Margins are higher in software 2. Supply and demand. HW engineers have much fewer companies to switch to. But a guy writing backend, front end, or cloud code has literally 100s of options
But isn't HW is actually considered what "high tech" is? For example how you guys can keep leading in GPU industry when someone can get same TC with less learning curve thing? The hw eng pool would shrink
There are some sales peeps that pull in 600/700k in TC. While it may not be right to call their job easy, it just goes to show pay may not be related to how hard your work is.
HWE are generally paid less than SWE. But even half-decent HWE become extremely valuable with experience and there's a lot less grinding (i.e., LC-ing type of stuff) needed for interviews. On average, HWE compensation and WLB are a lot more stable/predictable over the career lifetime vs. SWE. No excess hiring followed by firing cycles, for instance.
Low-level SWE > SWE > HWE
Low level swe, like embedded systems?
Like the operating system engineers