It's not really about quick cash. The truth is just that additional SWEs are right now more useful than additional fab engineers, in the US. It sucks to hear but it's true. There just aren't that many fab engineers necessary. Even TSMC employs a large part of SWE and IC designers, probably close to or more than process engineers.
Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.
This seems obviously true. It only seems unjust because we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more. That isn't how supply and demand work. If you need twice as many typists as are graduating, but only need a quarter of the radiologists that complete residency, well then typists will be paid far more than radiologists. We have an excess of people who want to work hardware, specifically because it is challenging, and that draws interest. So the interesting work is part of the compensation. We accept this as true for game development, it shouldn't surprise us for hardware, or embedded software. It doesn't matter that what you are doing is "harder", we need more bodies slinging fullstack generic buisiness logic than we can possibly educate it seems, so that is what will pay best. As for why we need that many people? I don't have any clue. It really seems like low-code should eventually replace the need for most SWE and drive down wages, but that has been a dream for decades and it hasn't happened yet.
> we have this idea that tasks that are more intellectually challenging should pay more
Why do you have this idea ? I'm not sure it sounds more "just" than saying, for example, that tasks that are physically more challenging should pay more, or humanly more challenging should pay more, etc..
I was constraining the statement to tech work. It does feel to me like roofers in southern summers should get paid like C levels in the valley. But that isn't how the world works and writing a new physics engine for an indie game, while difficult, is not going to pay as much as much as modifying a payment portal ui to get 0.3% more transactions completed. Because of of those things is in far more demand.
I think its somewhere more in the middle - software bloat is getting to legendary proportions (why do I need 16+ gigs of RAM and a modern cpu+gpu to run a calculator that I could buy for 50 cents 20 years ago?), and the software bloat drives the hardware bloat.
The truth is we don't need fab engineers because the applications we need to build require already "solved" hardware problems which are mostly supplied en-masse by a the few, large companies.
But, the deeper truth is that we don't need any of it... I have been recently and somewhat pleasantly surprised by how little I truly need. E.g., a 200$ chrome-book satisfies most of my needs. I have much, much beefier computers, hundreds of gigs of ram and multi-core processor, etc...all a waste. (I work as a software engineer and regularly find myself maxing my cores for things I don't really need).
If I could build my own hardware and have it actually do things, man, that would _useful_. Unlike this giant rickety tower of babel we have built...
I'm all for sarcasm but please show me a calculator that needs 16GB of RAM. Your input detracts from the original argument and doesn't progress the discussion at all.
Fab engineers in the US are fairly disposable because their existence isn't based on market needs but really as a hedge by the US to be independent. That's going to suck for you because TSMC isn't going to value you that much because you're not really business critical, you're just there to get government subsidies. In Taiwan it's another story and it's almost competitive with good SWE jobs.