I think your salary observation is more of a firmware vs. hardware, rather then "soft" vs "hard" engineering.
Further to that, it's often informative to figure out what makes a company money. The highest paid software development roles tend to be doing things that are closer to revenue, on average. If you are a software developer at a hardware company (or an insurance company, or whatever), you aren't that close. Even worse if you are viewed as a cost center.
>Further to that, it's often informative to figure out what makes a company money. The highest paid software development roles tend to be doing things that are closer to revenue, on average.
yeah. Who are those trillion dollar businesses and what do they rely on?
- Apple: Probably the better example here since they focus a lot on user-facing value. But I'm sure they have their own deals, B2B market in certain industries, R&D, and ads to take into account
- Microsoft: a dominant software house in nearly every aspect of the industry. But I wager most of their money comes not from users but other businesses. Virtually every other companies uses Windows, Word, and those that don't may still use Azure for servers.
- Alphabet: ads. Need I say more? Users aren't the audience, they are the selling point to other companies.
- Amazon: a big user facing market, but again similar to Microsoft. The real money is b2b servers.
- Nvidia: Again, user facing products but the real selling point is to companies that need their hardware. In this case, a good 80% of general computing manufacturers.
- Meta: Ads ans selling user data once again
- Tesla: CEO politics aside, it's probably the 2nd best example. Split bewteen a user facing product that disrupted an industry and becoming a standard for fuel in the industry they disrupted. There's also some tangential products that shouldn't be underestimated, but overall a lot of value seems to come from serving the user.
General lesson here is that b2b and ads are the real money makers. if you're one level removed that financial value drops immensely (but not necessarily to infeasible levels, far from it).
1. The ECU ("hard" engineering)
2. The infotainment system ("soft" engineering)
Now, an interesting thing I have noticed is that "soft" software engineering pays more. Often substantially more.