Sounds like space flight to me.
But I'd say it's because the hw eng that belong to unions are all retiring/dying.
Our culture today despises unions to our detriment. Bargaining power isn't inherently evil! BUT, I would argue by anecdotal observation that it turns out that the more that said bargaining power concentrates wealth, the more evil it actually is.
We have neither. That's why it was so easy for someone without scrupulous like jobs to drive salaries to wherever he wanted.
Basically, the older generation has killed the industry. Much like they did to aerospace.
The HW engineering firms should be leveraging SW open source projects and adapt them as needed. For example, why have an in-house Perl scripting framework on top of Verilog. Use Django or something similar instead.
The industry is too risk averse and overall poised.
Why did IBM give the operating system business to Microsoft? An attitude problem. Why is HW consistently a shrinking industry? An Attitude problem. Open source nothing. Keep using the same technology as 1980.
"Oh, what the hell, our salaries are going down?" "We can't keep up with project schedule because we're using the same concepts as we did on exponentially less complex chips 20 years ago? It's not our fault."
It's an attitude problem. HW isn't the big brother it used to be. It's the little brother. It needs to look at what big brother software is doing to be so successful. And copy it. Open source tools/languages. Leverage existing software projects instead of inventing our own everything. Companies need to sponsor these tools/give-back to these projects.
Stuck with (System) Verilog? Fine. What would software do. Create a framework on top of old technology (HTML/Verilog) to make it less painful (like Rails). Create a language that interacts well with the old language (Java/JVM/Scala/Closure).
Down vote me all you want for my surliness. It's true.
That leaves a smaller slice of the pie to be directly shared with us and the general population, and it also means that less money is circulating through the economy. Less money, less Slurpies consumed, less Slurpies sold, fewer jobs and smaller salaries, less demand for everything. I think.
Modern OSes are a layer of abstractions, and each layer reduces the cost of implementation of software.
