[nicholas73]

There are simply less jobs. Hardware companies generally were founded in the 80s and before - and are virtually spinning the same product today. Rather than taking a brilliant new idea, they tweak a legacy product. This doesn't require attracting that many good engineers. You just need a few, and the rest get shuttled into support positions. It's not all their fault though - in software you can hope for a hit on a young engineers energy and hipness. In hardware you get to pay for an enormous investment and experience matters. Innovation doesn't pay off as much, because of the cost and the prevalence of fast-follower low cost copy cats. Whereas in software being first pays off to capture the users. For a hardware product a consumer considers price first.

[boot]

Another way to interpret this comment is that NRE is high so no one innovates. And NRE is high because no one innovates in making NRE not high.

Sounds like space flight to me.

[mathattack]

NRE?

[nicholas73]

Non-Recurring Engineering (cost). It's a common acronym for manaufacturing, meaning any upfront design costs. Often a fee attached to a custom product.

[mathattack]

Thanks! I should have been able to infer that.