[ChrisGammell]

EEs are pretty far away from the money. That really impacts earning potential. Most EEs who went the traditional route and want to keep doing electronics in some form but make money become Field Application Engineers (FAEs) to get closer to the sale and show their value to the company. The crustiest old engineers are buried deep within a corporation and it's hard to show value on the bottom line.

Similarly, the FAANG/MANGA folks of the world are beneficiaries of being closer to the end customer, at least in terms of always being able to track customer usage of products. And hey, some of the highest paid ones are doing some hyper scale stuff that touches billions of users. Then there's just the general markete conditions of having much more need than talent available, especially at the upper eschelons.

Credentials: 20 year EE, have the largest podcast about designing electronics (The Amp Hour, check us out)

[doix]

I worked in the semiconductor industry, and at least in our niche of the semiconductor industry, FAEs were some of the worst paid people, a long with production test for some reason.

FAEs were seen as the lowest level support who were a stop-gap for our application engineers (non-field). If a big customer had a problem, we would send an AE out to show that we were taking it seriously. No idea if it's the same in other industries though. Application engineers weren't that we'll paid either.

Technical marketing and sales were paid well, but maybe this is a just a title thing (what you called FAE is what we called sales/marketing). Their salaries were predominantly sale/deal based bonuses though.

For people that actually developed the chips, analogue designers were the highest paid followed by digital designers. Then digital verification engineers, with verification engineer salary increasing very quickly. The salaries were shit compared to software though.

But now, talking to my friends still in the sector(doing design), competition is absolutely fierce and their salaries are increasing rapidly along with getting a lot more shares. There was a point where a senior analogue engineer could move to a graduate software position and make more money. Those days are gone now, and salaries are pretty close.

A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.

[ChuckNorris89]

>A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.

Which probably explains why Apple is the only, or one of the rare few, consumer electronics companies with products most people actually want to buy and love to own.

People keep pointing out how shitty products form Apple's competitors are (Samsung, Dell, etc.), but when you look how little they pay for talent in comparison to Apple, it becomes obvious why their products are so inferior.

Engineering great devices is expensive, and since the West offshored everything to China, and went for cutting costs as much as possible including on engineering wages, how can they expect to deliver quality?

[t3pfaff]

You clearly have never seen Louis Rossman's critiques of Apple's repeatedly poor hardware designs.

[sheepybloke]

Ahhh love the podcast! You guys and Embedded helped me learn a lot as an EE going into embedded. Thanks for putting on a great and informative show!