As a software engineer hardware always looked hardware. And for years the salaries of HW engIneers was higher. Now it seems that not only is HWE salaries are declining but also that SWEearn more. Is there a smart explanation for that?
Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
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Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#2Hardware is getting commoditized and software is taking over the world.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#3Speculation: we're part of the general economy. Corporations and wealthy individuals are getting better at keeping more of the money they make, partly by hiring less of the general population, partly by government tax breaks, and partly by offshoring their cash.
That leaves a smaller slice of the pie to be directly shared with us and the general population, and it also means that less money is circulating through the economy. Less money, less Slurpies consumed, less Slurpies sold, fewer jobs and smaller salaries, less demand for everything. I think.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#4Hardware gets more and more "exchangeable", abstracted and virtualized. It doesn't matter as much as in earlier years if your platform is a Intel x86 with AMD GPU or a AMD x86 with NVIDIA GPU, where you needed HW-near experience for development.
Modern OSes are a layer of abstractions, and each layer reduces the cost of implementation of software.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#5How 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.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#6Aside 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 leveraging SW open source projects and adapt them as needed. For example, why have an in-house Perl scripting framework on top of Verilog. Use Django or something similar instead.
The industry is too risk averse and overall poised.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#7How 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 observation that it turns out that the more that said bargaining power concentrates wealth, the more evil it actually is.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#8Speculation: we're part of the general economy. Corporations and wealthy individuals are getting better at keeping more of the money they make, partly by hiring less of the general population, partly by government tax breaks, and partly by offshoring their cash. That leaves a smaller slice of the pie to be directly shared with us and the general population, and it also means that less money is circulating through the…
Spot on.
Outsource everything, pay less, keep more.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#9There 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 young engineers energy and hipness. In hardware you get to pay for an enormous investment and experience matters. Innovation doesn't pay off as much, because of the cost and the prevalence of fast-follower low cost copy cats. Whereas in software being first pays off to capture the users. For a hardware product a consumer considers price first.
Re: Ask HN: How come hardware engineer's salary is declining?
#10There 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.