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.