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> 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.

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.

> Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office

Not it isn't. I haven't dug ditches, but I've done other physical labor. At the end of the day your body is exhausted, but your mind is still sharp and ready for more. By contrast when programming all day your mind is exhausted, but your body is ready for more. Different types of hard, but both are very hard in their own way.

Actually most ditch digging these days is done with a machine. I don't know how hard that is, but I assume it moves more to the repetitive mental work side.

I have dug ditches, I've also written software. Digging ditches is harder. I also explicitly was referring to doing it manually, not with a machine. There's some philosophical conversation to be had here with the satisfaction of work with tangible outcomes vs intangible outcomes, but that wasn't the point of my comment, it was about supply/demand. You can get unskilled day laborers to dig ditches, you cannot get unskilled day laborers to write software.

I see your point, but it's worth being clear about the meaning of "hard" here.

There's hard as in effortful, which certainly you could make the argument that many jobs eclipse software or other technical positions.

And there's hard as in difficult, or technical, or complicated, etc. This is more difficult to describe since what's complex or impossible to one person is trivial for another.

The second bucket is how most technical jobs play out. It's easy to write off the "get skilled" requirement of these jobs, but that's usually a difficult endeavour itself, usually involving a few years of higher education (in the normal case)

> 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.

> 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).

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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).