I won't get into a debate about semantics, but even your employer is a prime example -- Xilinx profit margin per device is staggering by semiconductor standards but they won't pay what they could. The market doesn't always make that dictation, the company does.

And that's an example but there are other "high-margin" hardware organizations (besides Apple) who still pay HW/EEs lower than SW/SREs.

And if you've been in engineering long enough you'll meet some pretty brilliant people, but their names might not be household or widely known. Lumping engineering into "RTL people" is pretty dismissive.

Claude Shannon, father of information theory, is less widely known for his MS work on 'Shannon Decomposition' which FPGA companies used for a long time to break combinitorial logic functions to multiplexor (MUX) based implementation. That's not "compiler theory" but that's a building block of a type of logic synthesis which compilers used. Shannon isn't a "compiler guy", just a smart dude who's intelligence wasn't bounded by one domain or discipline.