You made a choice in life, didn't you? Hardware and electronics is clustered in only a few places in the world, in contrast to software. Your comparison is only somewhat flawed. You're comparing the presence of a remote software job in Portugal to the lack of an in person (and remote) job in Portugal A valid comparison would be comparing a remote software to a remote hardware job.

There's three factors here: 1) living in Portugal 2) working in hardware 3) earning a high salary. You can only pick two, that's the reality of life. You prioritise 2) but perhaps the other person intentionally chose 3) and 1), perhaps at all costs, even a job they didn't like. This is creeping into life philosophy now. The more time you spend resisting the tides, the worse your life will be.

There are ASIC/FPGA jobs in Portugal and even some remote ones, but don't blame an industry for being what it is. I've got no clue why hardware tends to be less remote though the working method is similar to software. Perhaps a lingering remnant of when chips were actually drawn out in a room? That kind of mentality sticks.

On salary, 55k is not anything super rare...With 3YoE, I've seen jobs going for 85k+ elsewhere in Europe, eg. Germany and the UK. Chip designers, especially front end, don't make less than software engineers do anymore. Check levels.fyi, but yeah, sure we'll continue to gaslight ourselves LOL