Some perspectives on the hardware industry
Supply and demand mismatch
Our education fosters a less-than-correct way of thinking that the hard things are worth more. Actually this is not the case in reality. The price of a thing is mainly determined by supply and demand. If the supply exceeds the demand, the price will rise, and if the supply exceeds the demand, the price will fall.
The salary of a position does not depend on the technical difficulty of the position, but on the market value of the position. The market value is determined by market demand.
Whether a person’s skill is valuable or not has nothing to do with the difficulty of the skill, it only has to do with market demand. If 100,000 skilled front-ends are needed on the market, but only 5,000 skilled front-ends can be cultivated, the salary of these people is of course high. Conversely, if only 20 software engineers working as compilers are needed in China every year, but 30 doctoral students working as compilers graduate every year. Those undergraduates have no chance at all. No matter how difficult and profound theories you have learned in four years of college, you don’t even have the opportunity to do free internships. Others think you are wasting electricity.
As an infrastructure hardware industry, its own development needs to rely on real basic science and engineering technology, and it is not closely related to business, so the speed of its replacement is not so fast, which also limits the needs of practitioners. growth of. Therefore, even if the threshold for some hardware projects is high, there are not enough people who need it.
Low expansion marginal benefit, high trial and error cost, long product development cycle
For the physical manufacturing industry, every doubling of expansion means that the corresponding other costs (including labor costs, machine costs, land costs, etc.) must at least double. Considering the factor of efficiency, the margin of expansion Costs are even increasing. And this process takes a lot of time to prepare.
Chip device integration becomes higher
The ecology and reference designs of chip manufacturers are becoming more and more mature, and the threshold for application development is getting lower and lower.
The board-level hardware is now only copied and copied, and look at the chip manual. The chip manual even tells you about the peripheral circuits for you. Only an advanced assembler is required.
As for why the demand is so small, as mentioned earlier, board-level hardware technology has developed for so many years, and many things have been integrated and modularized, and there is no stage for hardware engineers to create and create. many. Especially driven by the turnkey solution created by MediaTek, almost all chip manufacturers will provide a complete set of reference designs, that is, you can copy the homework, and you can even ask the chip manufacturer to check the work. Once the work is completed, the hardware engineer’s work is left with daily chores, failure analysis, production line troubleshooting, and software debugging software, etc., and there is no room for design and creation. If a product needs continuous hardware design improvement, it means that the hardware design of this product is a piece of shit from the beginning. This kind of thing is absolutely not allowed to happen. For software, no matter what stage, continuous improvement and innovation can be achieved. Maybe, it can lead to some new problems. The big deal is that a follow-up OTA upgrade and repair is enough, but these tasks need people to do it, and software to do it.
Career Development Options
Although the salary of hardware engineers is low, the gap between companies is also very large. The treatment is divided according to the supply chain, European and American chip factory > domestic chip factory (including Taiwan Province) > OEM&ODM terminal factory > solution company. Therefore, when changing jobs, try to jump from right to left, and the salary and technical competitiveness will get better and better. There are exceptions to everything. The hardware treatment of terminal factories like OPPO/VIVO has long crushed the original chip factory, but I still recommend that a hardware engineer have at least a period of work experience in the original chip factory to consolidate technology, enrich experience, and expand horizons. This can only be given to you by the original factory, not by the terminal factory. And then being condescending and condescending to the world and marrying into a wealthy terminal factory is a perfect ending.
Based on the above viewpoints, the conclusion we can draw is: if you haven’t entered the industry, run away quickly and flee to the field of embedded software or pure software; if you have already entered the industry, go upstream, go to the original factory, and go to the field of hardware The most important place seeks development.
Reference and Acknowledgments
- What are the development directions and specific development prospects of hardware engineers?
- Hardware is obviously more difficult than software, and domestic hardware technology is not as good as software. Why is the salary of hardware engineers not as good as software?
This article is reprinted from: https://wiki-power.com/blog/2022/06/27/%E7%A1%AC%E4%BB%B6%E8%A1%8C%E4%B8%9A%E8%B6% 8B%E5%8A%BF%E4%B8%8E%E4%B8%AA%E4%BA%BA%E7%9A%84%E9%80%89%E6%8B%A9
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