Does hardware development always result in bad WLB?

Any Amazon thread on hardware always has warnings about WLB at Amazon Lab126, but are other hardware divisions any better? What's the advantage of being an SDE on a hardware team or org, or building an embedded career? There's always tight manufacturing deadlines that cannot be missed, always cycles that cannot be avoided, always people stepping on the toes of one another because so many interdependencies that are tightly coupled. All for what? Lower career opportunities because not every company is big enough to do their own hardware, lower salary because it's more difficult to get as many high paying offers all competing for you and many hardware companies pay well below the market rates for SDEs, lower career opportunities because everyone is doing all this groundbreaking work on the team already but only so many people can be promoted (especially at Amazon), and bad WLB that runs around the hardware development patterns and cycles where some production milestone that cannot be missed without a huge setback is always around the corner. #hardware #semiconductor #sde #wlb