[bradfa]

I know of a bunch of people, some who only have high school degrees, who are entirely self-taught and are doing tinytapeout (https://tinytapeout.com/) chip designs. Yeah, that's not nearly at the skill or scale of designing CPUs for Intel/AMD/NVIDIA/Apple/Marvell/etc but it's still chip design!

Your concerns about horribly long hours and lower than IT/software pay are the most concerning part to me. But, if there's really a shortage of engineers who know how to do chip design, hopefully the market will take care of that via supply/demand at least once things get really out of whack.