Hardware companies have 10x the overhead of a software house. You can't have $200K+ prima donnas calling all the shots when you need a whole cadre of additional labor to handle development, compliance, production, test, packaging, and distribution processes.
Software companies have focused on efficiency, which is why the cost of building software has steadily decreased over the last 30-40 years.
From my perspective a lot of that is because the tooling and mindset for hardware is stuck in 1980s/90s. Compared to modern software development, there is very little to no automation in hardware design.
Things like CI for hardware designs and even automated version control are just starting to become a thing in the embedded space. Automation like building Bill of Materials, build pdfs, gerbers are not in any way optimized.
Scaling embedded stuff (design, manufacture, etc.) is very much a linear thing today, which is why salaries are low.
Hardware development has gotten much more efficient in the last 20 years across the board - both electronics and mechanics - but salaries haven't kept up.
On the electronics side, better modules like RPi's compute module, open source footprint libraries, and reference designs have significantly sped up development since I started twenty years ago. What used to take weeks or months in Altium can now be measured in days, especially if companies publish their reference designs in the application format instead of PDF. The turn around time and cost on PCBs have also dropped precipitously, to speak nothing of the turn key assembly that the fabs offer. Pretty much the only thing that has stayed the same is that MetCal induction soldering irons are still the best.
On the mechanics side, it's hard to appreciate just how much better vendors' CAD libraries have become, to the point where you can drag and drop Misumi/Mcmaster/etc parts from a Solidworks extension onto your assembly like it was Gary's Mod. 3D printing alone has made everything more efficient during development and has enabled many interesting production designs from rocket nozzles to turbojet engines.
> You can't have $200K+ prima donnas calling all the shots
Prima donnas? What a twit.
I wrote nothing about having software "calling the shots" (I assume that's who you mean as "prima donnas"), but when software is essential to your system, you should have that team at the table in your planning and budgeting efforts. If not, you'll get poor quality because it's low priority. And you'll get poor quality if you reliably underpay people, the good ones leave.
>> but when software is essential to your system, you should have that team at the table in your planning and budgeting efforts.
I like to tell them that software should be on the BoM even though the marginal cost in $0.00. Having it noted as a component helps get people on board with proper versioning, and also raises visibility for something otherwise unseen.
