[jbernsteiniv]

It's not just the people designing the hardware but also those maintaining it. I work in an "Infrastructure Engineer" position (I hate that since it also correlates with construction but mine is strictly expensive servers in data centers) and I make less money than the people running the virtual infrastructure even though that all runs on top of the machines I manage, lol.

I once had an internal customer open an on call event to ask why one of their machines was running so slowly. I said "it's because one of the DIMMs has thrown about 30,000 correctable errors within the past month". I was able to correlate that by mapping the EDAC label for the DIMM recorded in /var/log/messages and some gzipped archives of the aforementioned log file.

Of course I deal with CPU, memory, motherboards, GPUs, add-on NICs (OCP or PCIe), storage controllers (HBAs mostly, some RAID controllers), BMCs, and of course I also have to evaluate the link width of PCIe bridges interconnecting all the PCIe devices.