alt Hacker News> The fact that there are comments misunderstanding the article, that are talking about PCB Design rather than (Silicon) Chip Design, speaks to the problem facing the chip industry. Total lack of wider awareness and many misunderstandings.
No, there is no misunderstanding. Even the US companies mentioned _in the very article_ that have both software and "chip design" roles (however you call it) will pay more to their software engineers. I have almost never heard of anyone moving from software to the design side, but rather most people move from design side to software which seems like the more natural path.
You've taken two separate points I made and rolled them into one, resulting in you arguing against a point I didn't make.
The "misunderstandings and lack of awareness" I was referring to is in regards to many people outside the semiconductor industry. These aspects are hurting our industry, by putting people off joining it. I was not referring to people inside the industry, nor the SemiEngineering article.
As for salaries: See my other comments. In addition, I think it's worth acknowledging that neither hardware nor software salaries are a flat hierarchy. Senior people in different branches of software or hardware are paid vastly different amounts (e.g. foundational AI models versus programming language runtimes...). For someone looking at whether to go into software or hardware roles, I would advise them that there's plenty of money to be made in either, so pursue the one which is more interesting to them. If people are purely money-motivated, they should disappear off into the finance sector - they'll make far more money there.
As for movement from software into hardware: I've primarily seen this with people moving into hardware verification - successfully so, and in line with what the article says too. The transfer of skills is effective, and verification roles at the kind of processor companies I've been in or adjacent to, pay well and such engineers are in high-demand. I'm speaking from a UK perspective. Other territories, well, I hear EU countries and the US are in a similar situation but I don't have that data.
Do more hardware engineers transition into software than the other way around? Yeah, for sure, but that's not the point I think anyone is arguing over. It's not "do people do this transition" (some do, most don't), rather it's:
"We would like more people to be making this transition from SW into HW. How do we achieve that?"
And to that I say: Let's dispel a few myths, have a data-driven conversation about compensation, and figure out what's really going to motivate people to shift. If it only came down to salary, everyone would go into finance/fintech (and an awful lot of engineering grads do...) but clearly there's more to the decision than just salary, and more to it than just market demand.