[dmoy]

It's not that EE *needs" to fall back on software for stable employment, it's that software pays more, and ridiculously more at big tech companies.

I have both EE and CS degrees, but I make literally more than double in CS-type jobs than I would back in EE. Even though back in the day, I was definitely better at EE stuff than CS stuff.

This was true very early career, and for now at least continues to be true.

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I'm still of the opinion that software will eventually revert to the mean, comparable to other engineering compensation... some year. It probably won't happen until there's significant regulatory and liability burden that doesn't really exist in software yet. Like some in software complain about GDPR or DMA or whatever, but crank that up orders of magnitude and then add career-and-company-ending lawsuit threats on top, and then you have real engineering. Then it becomes much more expensive to do things, profit margins go way down, and pay does as well.

Who knows when that'll actually happen. For now, software is bonkers profitable.

(When software engineering becomes real engineering, I posit that it will also cease to be as highly paid)

[graphe]

I love hardware and EE, but most of my friends that do it hate it and work on power lines only. I wish hardware was as good, but it's not as in demand and it's harder too!