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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

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Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.

You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.

I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.

The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times.

To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.

The government heavily revised and reinterpreted patent law many times in favor of software companies starting in the 80s. Otherwise hardware companies would have the only real moat since, as you say, software is relatively cheap and fast to produce.

There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.

That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?

They do heavily outsource to India, though. At least for their electronic control units..

Last time I head of them, Bosch was planning to cut 13000 jobs in Germany.

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