Following the lead of everyone else... But if you like I could compare chip design to a selected narrow niche of software that helps me make my point? It doesn't matter. The point is that "hardware doesn't pay" isn't universally true, in the same way "software pays well" is also an untrue universal statement. See my other comments for more nuance or dive into salary guides. One of my comments listed some starting points.
> How many hardware jobs are in the finance/fintech sector?
Quite a few in absolute terms. Not many in relative terms. Pick the view that matches what you wanted to hear.
High Frequency Trading uses FPGAs and custom-ASICs extensively. They're even building their own fully custom data centres (from the soil testing to the chips to the software - in some cases, all done in-house). It's a secretive industry though, by nature, so you'd have to go digging to find out what Jump Trading, XTX Markets, Optiver, etc. are up to -- in London, Bristol, Cambridge, Amsterdam - to name but a few cities with these jobs. I know because I have friends doing them :-).
> Or [...] advise students
Yeah I would love that! But it hasn't really been working as a mechanism for a long time now. Most such people I come across have no awareness of semiconductors. At UK universities, we don't have department-specific expert career advice services, so they're useless. Parents are rarely familiar with the field (as per the general population). Professionals have minimal to no contact with students, especially anyone under 18. Professors/advisors are the best bet but that's really only going to capture students that were _already_ showing an interest.
To be honest, I think having a few more popular US/UK/EU YouTube channels doing any kind of FPGA-based or silicon-based hardware design (i.e. not just RPi or PCB stuff) would help hugely. I've not worked out how a content strategy in this space that I think will work - yet!
