Do you think the many embedded engineers working at Apple, TI, AMD, Intel, etc are paid significantly worse than their higher level software counterparts?
I do, in fact. The reason is that most embedded people are recruited from the ranks of EEs. At least around here (Europe), 1.5-2x more EEs graduate each year compared to CS people, and EEs doing EE stuff are paid even worse than embedded, it's a step up for them. They don't and likely can't ask for more. Surely, some EEs learn CS stuff on their own and start working dev jobs, but they're the exception.
I've worked with a lot of EEs, and their general programming knowledge (especially knowledge of best practices, tooling, software architecture) is way worse than CS people, in general, across companies and countries. Every time, the best devs were CS, even when it was 100% embedded or even FPGAs (which are not taught to any CS students, yet are taught to every EE student). I personally know maybe a couple of EEs that are great devs (through their own effort and interest), compared to at least a dozen of CS people. However, CS people generally know almost nothing about analog design and at hundreds of MHz (table stakes for serious stuff since 2010) things start getting pretty analog whether you like it or not, so you have to hire EEs anyway.
I interviewed for Amazon for an embedded/mixed role because that was my forte at the time, and the compensation offered was nothing special, worse than even a mediocre finance sector offer, much better than automotive or general embedded (medical, industry / robots). Could never get an Apple interview (they passed on me twice), though, and I never even thought about the rest (that would require relocation to to places I don't care about).
But since I never actually worked for those companies or have any concrete data I could be completely mistaken. I only have friends working in FANGs in non-embedded roles and embedded friends only working for shit-paying companies, plus some of them are not willing to discuss salaries (suckers). Also, I get the feeling that AMD / Intel / Nvidia operate a bit different than the rest.
cue_the_strings|3 years ago
I interviewed for Amazon for an embedded/mixed role because that was my forte at the time, and the compensation offered was nothing special, worse than even a mediocre finance sector offer, much better than automotive or general embedded (medical, industry / robots). Could never get an Apple interview (they passed on me twice), though, and I never even thought about the rest (that would require relocation to to places I don't care about).
But since I never actually worked for those companies or have any concrete data I could be completely mistaken. I only have friends working in FANGs in non-embedded roles and embedded friends only working for shit-paying companies, plus some of them are not willing to discuss salaries (suckers). Also, I get the feeling that AMD / Intel / Nvidia operate a bit different than the rest.
netheril96|3 years ago
Do you know the reason for that? EE is significantly harder to learn than CS, so it baffles me why more people are choosing EE.