Different sub-professions. Digital design vs mixed signal vs device physics & such.

Last time I had close contact with the industry, digital design indeed was a bit more competitive and correspondingly it was the only one considered to have good career prospects -- but the offers were still between shabby and embarrassing next to entry level SWE, even outside the bay area.

This could have changed.

I don't think everyone's designing a chip. They might be putting together chips to create boards, but chip design is something else altogether, right down in the architecture of memory and transistors etc.

My partner designed chips (for printers..) It takes a lot of money to design and fab a chip (her company was fabless). They synopsys or Magma software they used for design/layout was crazy expensive. (if you can't find a price....)

https://www.synopsys.com

Then you have to manufacture. There is a significant cost for custom chips. Though once you get going the per chip cost is pretty low, thus the business lends itself to a few large players.