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Comment by cozzyd | Hacker News Reader

Given that software engineers tend to be paid more than hardware engineers, things being dependent on software isn't a very good argument.

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Software scales. Hardware does not. That's the reason why JavaScript developers are paid more than embedded C developers.

This is a sick burn tbh. There should be a parity between software and hardware engineers but it isn't.

At a place like SpaceX, software engineers working on internal corporate software make far more than the mechanical engineers in propulsion doing things that have never been done before. It's just a function of the market. You'd never be able to hire any software engineers if you paid them the same.

Well, but design a great widget and a manufacturer can scale production as high as necessary.

As an embedded C developer that just moved to JavaScript, this is very true.

Markets work differently for the two. There hasn't been much development in hardware because it is hard to get a good profit from it. You make something and it is very easy for someone else to directly copy that physical device. The "source code" is all there for you (especially if you send it to a country that doesn't respect IP to manufacture that product for you). And once you sell the piece of hardware, your sale is done.

On the other hand, that's harder to copy software, especially since many modern tools rely on having data. In addition to this, your sale can be reoccurring and you have a clear and more predictable revenue stream. This is a much safer business.

I'm not saying that things should be this way, but that's definitely the way that they are. Given that it makes sense to pay these people differently. If you resolved these issues I think it would be easier to argue for higher pay (not that they don't deserve it in the first place)

Honestly, that makes me wonder whether IP law is either too strong for software and/or too weak for hardware. I don't see an obvious public benefit to software being better protected than hardware.

We can probably answer the hardware one by determining the answer to this question. Do you think it should be possible to invent a robot dog, sold for $75k, but your manufacturer sells the same robot dog for $2.5k? The practice is technically illegal but effectively nothing happens. Should this be allowed?

I think the problem in your logic is that you're treating it like a zero sum game. You're ranking these against one another instead of scoring them compared to a stable moral base. It is highly possible that software is protected adequately and hardware is not. This does not mean you need to bring the protection of software down to bring that of hardware up. This would be either zero sum or negative sum. But these things are not tightly coupled. We can absolutely just increase the protection of hardware while the protection of software is unmoving (or even increases).

Hardware engineers are absolutely necessary. However, they make tools, not solutions. No question, their tools are incredibly complex, and their job is important. However, it doesn't scale in the way that a software need does.

And the thing is, as even absurd but amazing Minecraft examples have shown, software engineers can develop hardware, if inefficiently. True we don't know anything about 5nm lithography or whatever, but that's more a chemistry/physics/manufacturing domain.

Finally, even the hardware depends on software. It requires software internally to do its job, and the development of said hardware absolutely depends on software. Chances are, hardware engineers informed software engineers about their need for doing better hardware work, and the software engineers built better software to enable that.

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