Hot take, apparently: VHDL/Verilog developers should make 5x what JavaScript developers make, and not the other way around.
However, the tools suck more than the English language has good words to describe, so it's hard for an engineer to be productive. And the products are complex, so you need a lot of engineers. And you're manufacturing physical products, so most of that huge dollar amount in the industry is trapped in manufacturing, not design. So even if you were the cream of the crop engineer, it's hard to extract much of that value for yourself.
On the other hand, webdev has extremely low capital overhead, and improvements in tools can go directly into developer productivity, which can immediately be realized as value (which gives you resources to improve even more).
So even if Verilog developers made the same money as JS developers today, in ten years, I'd expect the JS developers to make more.
One lesson here is that if you want your designs to improve rapidly, decouple them from the manufacturing business as much as you can. And you'll probably be able to pay better and attract better talent in the proces, which is a not insignificant benefit. Perhaps the rise of fabless semiconductor companies is understood even better in this light?
In my country there are probably 2? 3? serious semico companies
And shitton of JS-using companies
Maybe this explains why embedded/hardware/firmware devs are underpaid?
If the pay is so low, it’s kind of curious that the supply doesn’t drop.