[0wis]

I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.

I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.

My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.

I am based in Europe by the way

[mmarian]

Agree job-wise somewhat. With the caveat that you're discounting that you're good at IT, which is why you find it easier; your classmates wouldn't.

On entrepreneurship - the low execution cost and huge capital inflows in software startups actually makes it very hard to succeed in that space because it leads to intense competition. The success stories are the tip of the iceberg.

This makes hardware startups relatively easier to build, believe it or not.