[fpgamlirfanboy]

> Until the "industry" values hardware

industries don't value things, markets value things. RTL work doesn't pay well because the products don't sell into markets that scale like software. with the exception of NVIDIA and whatever you call Apple's teams that actually do/tweak hardware, no hardware product has the margins and scale of software. that's not culture, that's physics.

> who know plenty about compiler theory and/or have contributed significantly to it

also maybe some RTL people know about compiler stuff (phi nodes/dataflow analysis/reg alloc/etc) but most definitely do not know anything except verilog/vhdl and perl/python.

[vrinsd]

I won't get into a debate about semantics, but even your employer is a prime example -- Xilinx profit margin per device is staggering by semiconductor standards but they won't pay what they could. The market doesn't always make that dictation, the company does.

And that's an example but there are other "high-margin" hardware organizations (besides Apple) who still pay HW/EEs lower than SW/SREs.

And if you've been in engineering long enough you'll meet some pretty brilliant people, but their names might not be household or widely known. Lumping engineering into "RTL people" is pretty dismissive.

Claude Shannon, father of information theory, is less widely known for his MS work on 'Shannon Decomposition' which FPGA companies used for a long time to break combinitorial logic functions to multiplexor (MUX) based implementation. That's not "compiler theory" but that's a building block of a type of logic synthesis which compilers used. Shannon isn't a "compiler guy", just a smart dude who's intelligence wasn't bounded by one domain or discipline.