Maybe, but this post is about hardware engineers.

I graduated ~15 years ago with a degree from a decent UK university, and the job situation for an electronics engineer who could program and was willing to move anywhere in the country was essentially:

* Electronics graduate job, salary £25,000

* Programming graduate job, salary £40,000

Programming jobs think their competition is London fintech companies and Google with its free food.

Jobs designing switch mode power supplies think their competition is Chinese OEMs who pay experienced engineers £15k

So a lot of the electronic engineering graduates get diverted into software. They'd like to be able to own a house some day, after all.

SWE comp will remain elevated as long as there are marginal returns to software development. The capital structure of turing machine programming allows most of revenue to be spent on salaries. The pay is higher because the marginal cost of a new software customer is essentially zero. It's not because programming is way higher skilled than hardware engineering.

You deserve the wages you can command in the market. If the labor pool is limited companies will have to pay more. Maybe AI will change the dynamics. But otherwise hardware will always struggle to compete on pay.

Outside of finance, I generally find UK software and hardware comp to be abysmal. Especially when contrasted to the US, and even Germany.

For reference, I hold a doctorate in Engineering and a Class 1 MEng both at Oxford. I was offered £40k to work as an engineer in my niche (photonics). My lab partner who went to Germany sits on a ~€90k salary doing similar to what I would have done.

Due to the limitations of hardware career options in London, I opted for software engineering post-DPhil, but I ended up earning £42k. After two years of work, I am sitting on £52k. I don't regard myself as an "under achiever", I own a significant proportion of the product I work on and am a top contributor.

I don't think that level of comp is appropriate given the amount of work I put myself through / how much I contribute, and I think it's reflective of the UK as a whole.

> on an unjustified 125k.

Irrespective of your self perception of value, I am not sure you are fully grasping the disconnect between the growth in cost of living and the (lack of) growth in wages of the past 50 years for the average human in western economies.

By many standards we actually need that 125k just to live what we would consider a middle class life in the 1980's.

No.

UK's pay is extremely low. And you know that it is VERY difficult to earn beyond £80k/yr as a SWE outside of top foreign employers in the UK like Google or Citadel. More likely, you'll stagnate at £50-60k.

And when factoring the UK's CoL being comparable to some of the more expensive American cities (SF, NYC, Boston) yet salaries being a fraction of those available there, it makes sense why engineering isn't well regarded, and plenty of people either switch to finance or immigrates to the States, Australia, or Canada.

It's skilled, but skilled wages are low in the UK.

The SWE that you do may indeed be unskilled, but that says more about you than about the field as a whole.

This is such a poor take. What is your justification that SWE is not a skilled job?

The majority of the gains in the S&P 500 come from tech companies, with a large part of their value being embedded in their software assets.

Insane Stockholm syndrome on display here. "My unnecessarily degraded conditions are actually a good thing"