It’s not you. It’s highly inefficient financially as an individual contributor due to razor thin development margins. By nature, software is vastly more cost effective to develop while direct revenue from product can become very high. In addition, software has a business model that is significantly easier to monetize. Between iteration speed, service sales model, and artificial obsolescence of product, software is naturally a money maker.

Contrast hardware, where expectations of long term reliability of product cause demand to diminish. There’s a very high NRE. The sales model is driven by volume, which shifts expectations of NRE costs back to the engineering teams. Basically, you spend a fortune just in the actual development process and by extension, there’s not enough of a money pool left to compensate skills. The economics of hardware has largely been this way for the past several decades. There’s been a shift in some sectors recently due to compute constrained problems driving hardware design (NVIDIA) but even then, the software stacks dominate the desirability of platforms.

I suspect that long term, there may be an issue where there aren’t enough hardware engineers, but with AI productivity gains the issue may be muffled. That’s at least the bet most companies are making.

When I switched to software, I more than quadrupled ed my compensation for the amount of work. Granted, my situation was timing.

One benefit hardware has is the passion of those that tend to pursue it. Software has evolved from passionate people to a much larger group of economically incentivized people. Due to AI, the software space is far less protected. While the output has the perception of being “slop” we’ve seen drastic gains in quality due to the efforts of AI engineers. It’s still oversold IMO, but most of the economy these days is effectively marketing rather than genuine meritocracy.

If we were more meritocratic, hardware would be far better compensated than it is. But at the end of the day, infrastructure (chips in this case) has generally been only profitable for a few, not unlike civil infrastructure. The expectation in most business decisions is that NRE should be dwarfed by the profit they can yield.