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Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult t

Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me (I'm in Colorado, so they're legally obligated to provide a salary range) about a job that required a very specialized skillset at a senior level that I happen to have (although it's nothing to do with what I do /now/), and the top of the salary range was $20k/yr less than what I was making doing that same work in 2014, almost a decade ago and more than $100k/yr less than I make now. There's a HUGE disconnect between management at most companies, especially in HR roles, and the actual market for specialized technical labor. At least in the US, I attribute this to HR roles treating Department of Labor stats like the gospel, when job categories in DoL aren't modernized and therefore cover such a broad range of subjobs that they are diluted and meaningless, while at the same time average salary is heavily skewed by the fact that largest employer in the US across almost all job categories is the federal government, which has a notoriously low payscale for skilled labor (which attracts exactly the sort of toads on a log you'd expect). I am not currently in the market for a new job, but I switched roles at the beginning of 2022 and I made it a point of starting my conversations with recruiters by telling them rather directly "I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?" The company I eventually accepted a position at had to go through a lot of internal bureaucracy to make my offer, but only put me through one round of interviewing before they did the legwork to make sure they could make it worth my while before running me through their entire process. I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).

hashtag-til 3y ago
> I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023 I think this has an angle of the artificially created "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick a few people into lower paid jobs. > I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth? That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).
EatingWithForks 3y ago
> I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen). I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.
- tristor 3y ago
  My comment wasn't saying that HR wasn't important or that their job was easy, it's saying that it doesn't require skills which are hard to acquire in the labor market. If we use credentials as a corollary for skills (which, ironically, is understating my case), then there are a vastly higher number of available persons in the labor market with the necessary credentials/skills to be in an HR role than to be in a technical knowledge worker role like software development, operations, or even product management. The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs. Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch. Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> I don't fully understand the reasons It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and supply & demand takes care of the rest.
johnvanommen 3y ago
> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60% In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was wildly unstable in the 90s.
tetrep 3y ago
> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.
idkyall 3y ago
> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $ to go around.
IshKebab 3y ago
Hasn't been my experience. I switched from software (C++ compiler & profiler development) to silicon verification and got a decent pay rise (in the UK).
microbass 3y ago
I love your HR comment. It's HR's literal job to interview / hire people. It's not the job of the candidate to interview for a position. Deluded, self-important lunatics.

hashtag-til 3y ago

> I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023 I think this has an angle of the artificially created "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick a few people into lower paid jobs. > I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth? That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).

EatingWithForks 3y ago

> I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen). I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.

tristor 3y ago
My comment wasn't saying that HR wasn't important or that their job was easy, it's saying that it doesn't require skills which are hard to acquire in the labor market. If we use credentials as a corollary for skills (which, ironically, is understating my case), then there are a vastly higher number of available persons in the labor market with the necessary credentials/skills to be in an HR role than to be in a technical knowledge worker role like software development, operations, or even product management. The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs. Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch. Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago

> I don't fully understand the reasons It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and supply & demand takes care of the rest.

johnvanommen 3y ago

> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60% In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was wildly unstable in the 90s.

tetrep 3y ago

> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.

idkyall 3y ago

> Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $ to go around.

IshKebab 3y ago

Hasn't been my experience. I switched from software (C++ compiler & profiler development) to silicon verification and got a decent pay rise (in the UK).

microbass 3y ago

I love your HR comment. It's HR's literal job to interview / hire people. It's not the job of the candidate to interview for a position. Deluded, self-important lunatics.