Its a gold-rush to write mediocre software to get millions in funding and eventually be acquired. Rinse and repeat.
Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#12How large is your sample to draw those conclusions? But I'd say it's because the hw eng that belong to unions are all retiring/dying.
Its REALLY easy to hate unions, because they seem like money-grubbing fools on TV. However, as a young engineer at a Major DoD contractor back in the day, I shook my head in wonder at what the unions had clearly done for us in beating our path to more money (never been a union member, btw). Our culture today despises unions to our detriment. Bargaining power isn't inherently evil! BUT, I would argue by anecdotal obse…
To have any bargaining power you need either unions or open salary information.
We have neither. That's why it was so easy for someone without scrupulous like jobs to drive salaries to wherever he wanted.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#13Don't forget that many large-company positions - HW or SW - are being filled in design centers in India, China, E.Europe and elsewhere. Yes, there is an income difference. But their economies are pumping out hundreds of thousands of engineering grads. And HW design in the U.S. is definitely seen as less glamorous.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#14Aside from the business cycle reasons - Being a young chip designer, I'm severely disappointed in the hardware engineering culture. It is too hard to get ideas through anyone who is over 35 years old. Everyone thinks Perl is really great and Verilog is good enough. Even though both suck. Basically, the older generation has killed the industry. Much like they did to aerospace. The HW engineering firms should be levera…
As an ex-program manager on major chip projects, I would be astonished if open-source alternatives exist for major design tools. GMs can complain all they want about seat license costs, but they will stick with a proven tool until somebody proves they can meet the same quality metrics.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#15The culture of hardware engineering stayed stuck in the bottomless pit of proprietary design and secrecy. Engineers come into bloom between 15 and 22, and if they don't have open access to information, it just won't happen. I have a feeling we will see a resurgence in hardware soon though, with things like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino setting teen hardware junkies' brains alight...
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#16There are simply less jobs. Hardware companies generally were founded in the 80s and before - and are virtually spinning the same product today. Rather than taking a brilliant new idea, they tweak a legacy product. This doesn't require attracting that many good engineers. You just need a few, and the rest get shuttled into support positions. It's not all their fault though - in software you can hope for a hit on a yo…
Another way to interpret this comment is that NRE is high so no one innovates. And NRE is high because no one innovates in making NRE not high. Sounds like space flight to me.
NRE?
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another way to interpret this comment is that NRE is high so no one innovates. And NRE is high because no one innovates in making NRE not high. Sounds like space flight to me.
NRE?
Non-Recurring Engineering (cost). It's a common acronym for manaufacturing, meaning any upfront design costs. Often a fee attached to a custom product.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#18Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#19Aside from the business cycle reasons - Being a young chip designer, I'm severely disappointed in the hardware engineering culture. It is too hard to get ideas through anyone who is over 35 years old. Everyone thinks Perl is really great and Verilog is good enough. Even though both suck. Basically, the older generation has killed the industry. Much like they did to aerospace. The HW engineering firms should be levera…
As an ex-program manager on major chip projects, I would be astonished if open-source alternatives exist for major design tools. GMs can complain all they want about seat license costs, but they will stick with a proven tool until somebody proves they can meet the same quality metrics.
That is what I'm complaining about. HW engineers are excellent at hardware concepts. Terrible at other trends.
Why did IBM give the operating system business to Microsoft? An attitude problem. Why is HW consistently a shrinking industry? An Attitude problem. Open source nothing. Keep using the same technology as 1980.
"Oh, what the hell, our salaries are going down?" "We can't keep up with project schedule because we're using the same concepts as we did on exponentially less complex chips 20 years ago? It's not our fault."
It's an attitude problem. HW isn't the big brother it used to be. It's the little brother. It needs to look at what big brother software is doing to be so successful. And copy it. Open source tools/languages. Leverage existing software projects instead of inventing our own everything. Companies need to sponsor these tools/give-back to these projects.
Stuck with (System) Verilog? Fine. What would software do. Create a framework on top of old technology (HTML/Verilog) to make it less painful (like Rails). Create a language that interacts well with the old language (Java/JVM/Scala/Closure).
Down vote me all you want for my surliness. It's true.