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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that hardware just plain sucks compared to software. More punishing to produce and less profitable to do so. Nobody with money really wants to back hardware over software, at least right now.

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In other words in the US economic system it pays better to sell ads than to try to produce an actual tangible product.

That says more about the economic system than it does about Intel.

It's more like it pays better to be on a small team that can create software that is easily scaled to millions of users, running on hardware that is very difficult to produce but done using 2nd world and 3rd world manufacturing and supply chains.

Software effectively has zero marginal production cost.

Hardware will never be able to compete with that.

Consequently, it's really hard to make more profit selling a million units of hardware than of software.

The only conclusion from this is I think taxing the ever living daylights out of huge software companies.

Google/MSFT/Amazon all need to be looked at. We shouldn't be subsidizing them with our free shopping information data, nor the text we write in our content now with LLMs.

What do you think it says about the economic system? Software inherently has better economies of scale than hardware. That will be true regardless of the economic system. I don't love advertising but it's a small fraction of the entire software industry.

Ya it’s simple economics unfortunately (I’m a hardware engineer). Software can pay more because the cost to produce is lower and so the margins are higher. Hardware has abysmal margins - design, r&d, failure, debugging, schedule push back, component cost, supply chain logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, etc… the list goes on there’s a million things eating into the bottom line.

Presumably, the end state of the US is one single software company producing nothing but ads. Because it pays the most, no other jobs are important.

Is it? Hardware engineers at Apple, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Amazon are paid much better than at Intel.

Using those examples when comparing software and hardware engineering _in general_ gives a skewed perception of things. Three of those companies are only interested in hardware as a way to optimize their (incredibly profitable) software business, and Apple/NVIDIA are two of the three largest companies on earth. That's a teeny tiny slice of the job market.

I'd bet that if you averaged out compensation from the top 100 paying companies for both hardware and software engineering rather than the top 5, the software number would be nearly double the hardware number. Once you start look at "normal" companies, the difference in margins between software and hardware and its effect on pay becomes very clear.

Check out the stats on apples margins on hardware vs their services and software ;)

And arguably most of these companies (minus Apple and nvidia) have software and services as their bread and butter, not hardware.

Fwiw the low wages of Intel are in comparison of hardware engineering roles directly.

So yes hardware engineering pays less but hardware engineering at Intel is another very large step lower than other hardware engineering jobs.

It took me several years to figure this out. And then several more years to do enough software side projects to build a full software résumé and get hired as a software engineer. The work is definitely less fun, but I almost tripled my TC overnight.

You can be in a good spot with a mix of knowledge, since it's so rare.

Somehow Nvidia scrapes by...

You can argue that they are actually selling the CUDA libraries, and the GPUs are just a very expensive "dongle" to enable them.

The main reason Nvidia (the company) is worth Nvidia money is they decided it'd be smarter to be a platform company than a hardware company.

AMD's graphics division still hasn't figured that out.

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