Help me understand this. I am working on cutting edge technology at Apple now, work on silicon and pushing the technology envelope. Hold a masters from top 5 and 10+ patents, my TC is 330 at Apple. I see people pushing 400-500k with the same experience in UI/UX groups at Apple. What is the disconnect here? I am working on really high tech and I dont think UI/UX is in the same league? Why is HW TC so poop baggy? Commoditized market and all I understand but seems like a total waste of talent if I can make almost double the TC putting boxes( little oversimplified but dont know much about UI/UX) on a webpage.
India
Yesterday
737
Who are these retards asking for dictatorship in India?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
2038
Quitting this Slave life
Today I Learned
5h
375
How many books do you usually read in a year?
India
Yesterday
683
Modi is a legend, will be remembered for centuries to come
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1619
The end of Backdoor Roth?!
Pure supply and demand.
Do UI engineers code? I dont see it based on job descriptions. If they dont, there is apparent low bar to the entry.
Why is it called engineers if they don’t code? 😂 Yes, there’s a lot of demand, because you need to hire a UI engineer for all your products. Hiring managers also don’t usually know what level they’re looking for, so expertise level varies greatly from person to person with no real way to showcase it either.
Fix your attitude, your tc may improve.
Lol @ jack shit. I understand your frustration at not understanding Semiconductors. It is not about attitude, I want to understand the disparity with very little knowledge in UI that I have. Try to get into top 5 in semiconductors and on top of that having complex tech patents. Then well talk. Edit: you deleted the earlier part. Be firm dude/dudette, dont be like VMware UI
if you want to complain about VMware UI then you and I can be best friends
OP: dont know much about UI/UX Also OP: UI/UX too easy to deserve high TC
From a laymen’s perspective I understand UI as polygon pushing. Please educate.
UX is everything that happened before and after ui is pressed by the user.
If you come there from intel, you will get peanuts TC from apple
Engineering is more structured. Most engineering disciplines require little creativity most of the time (unless you’re a researcher inventing the next big thing, like in some niche subdomain of AI). It’s more like accumulated knowledge and experience — requires a lot effort but is doable by most. UI on the other hand requires more creativity and is harder to find top talent for. There’s a weaker correlation between time spent in the industry to the skills gained. Holding 10+ patents is impressive, but to be honest it doesn’t require that much ingenuity to hold a patent. As for top school, yea schools don’t matter much for our industry. I also graduated from top university and doesn’t mean anything now. It only matters if it’s your first job, but even then it doesn’t matter much.
Didn’t Apple tried to patent UI but didn’t go very well? 🤔
Thanks for the reply, from an engineers point of view i disagree on creativity part. It requires creativity even for engineering. Patent and top school is just a data point but engineering prowess and TC scaling has been lost with the skill scaling between two jobs.The point for this post was to understand what is so specialized about UI that pays so high TC. Few of my patents improves display power by 3% which is of tangible value. I am not claiming to be the best but looking at SWE/UI to HWE number of people ratio, statistically and realistically its even harder to find a good HW engineer.
Life isn't always fair. I feel your pain but you have to accept it if you can't change it.
Or become part of it
Seems like being part of it will serve me well. Here I come leetcode. Now please tell me SWE backend is more lucrative or front end /UI/UX? Would I have job satisfaction in front end or back end?
Money correlates poorly with work merit. It is as simple as that.
Most of the huge TCs you see here are due to stock appreciation. The UI folks probably had TCs lower than yours when they joined. If Apple's market cap continues to grow, your TC will be a good deal higher in a few years too.
For the moment it keeps falling like a stone
Personally, maybe a decade ago, I'd have the same reaction of wtf if purely UI developers made the same TC as backend. However, the complexity of the UI-side of things has dramatically increased with frameworks like reactjs, AngularJS, extjs, etc. It used to be where all the complexity was forced on the backend, but now, some of the responsibilities of the backend has moved up to the frontend. In other words, it's not simply rendering and making things pretty anymore. More complex stuff like data modeling, event handling, and various business logic is now commonplace on the frontend. This depends on the product and org, though. For example, my current team has the vast majority of the complexity shoved to the backend and the frontend simply does what it's told to do via config from the backend :(
IME the main difficulty with FE work is dealing with non-technical stakeholders. Frameworks like React and browser improvements have made the technical aspects of FE dev a lot easier over the past decade.
You don't miss having to support IE6-9?! :P
It’s why you don’t hear people complaining about Apple UI App Store and the Apple store are both Web UI. Think on the scaled impact of how much money these bring in.
I dont see people complaining about Apple processors as well! In that case, processor is backbone and whole lotta relevant to Apple ecosystem. I am trying to see the technical side of it. Feels like I am wasting my time here. Thanks for the info though. Makes me wanna jump ship to SWE
I don’t see a lot of HW to UI switch, like..never 🤔 So the statistics aren’t really on your side. A lot of trained SWE goes from backend to full stack, then decided CSS is too hard for them and went back to backend 😂 It’s going to be hard to explain until you actually dive in to one of the production apps and see the real complexity, not one of your toy apps. Not many people stay in the field, most thinks it’s easy in the beginning only to transition out in a few years.