> Especially given how many STEM-brains get attracted to software instead, nowadays…

It's just common sense. You won't earn decent money at semiconductor company and given the niche, you will be sentenced to whims of one or two (if you are lucky) companies operating in your region. If you find that your employer doesn't treat you well, you cannot exactly leave and bootstrap your own chip making business.

Software is more democratised and you have much better chances to grow wealth of your family in that area. Although corrupt regulators are doing their best to pull as many ladders as they can to limit ways workers can go their own way (like changed IR35 legislation in the UK that massively limits how small service based business can operate).

It is simple. If the Govt wants to support the semiconductor industry provide proper worker protections. It should know that the a few companies would have cartel like power and exploit their employees.

Its rare that nuanced problems have simple solutions. The problem is not that evil employers are oppressing helpless employees, at least not entirely. The problem is that making physical things requires physical infrastructure and investment at a massive scale. Things move slowly and barrier to entry is high. Conditions like that are going to cause a slower, less transferrable skill set just because few entities are willing to take the capital risk to develop that infrustructure so fewer entities exist.

Contrast that with software where you and I could go start a business now and potentially unseat a major player somewhere with enough talent and dedication.

Its obvious which one is going to have more mobile employees.

It's not worker protections that will help. They will just end up incentivising industry to move elsewhere. The problem is it's too hard to set up competitors. Competitors are what raise employees' standards of living, far higher than vote-winning legislation.

This is right. The flip side is that having many talented software engineers renders each one slightly more dispensable. You want to find the right Goldilocks niche. Not too rare that mobility is limited, but not too prevalent that compensation suffers.

As a hiring manager, I can confidently say that we are nowhere close to saturated with talented software engineers.

so the niche is in training ? :D

Yes, I earn 3x more doing training than myself or any of my senior SWE colleagues/friends. Think 1500 EUR daily rate instead of 500 (in Central Europe).

* talented very experienced software engineers under 35, who are willing to work on-site full-time (which often means move to the company) and are allowed to work in the US?

Or am I being too synical?

Software is the easiest thing in the world to outsource. There's no reason we can't play Chinese-made games or use Indian-made chat apps

Market forces (more demand than supply) are what push coding salaries into the stratosphere

Okay. Sounds like your demand exceeds your supply. This bodes well for your candidates, whose skills are in demand. But you are also not paying infinity dollars for them, right? I was just stating that, all else being equal, if there are more suitable candidates per given position, you could end up paying less, because of the higher competition. Once you get into highly specialized domains, both competition and mobility decrease. Ideally, one might seek specialist-level salary for otherwise-generalizable work.

I agree that the market has shifted in a way that we’re all individually making the rational decision by going into software, but it still seems like a shame.

Yep! When I was in school and learning about semiconductors I was so interested that I went to the library for further reading and dropped by the physics department to ask questions, purely for my own edification. But I chose to pivot towards software due to the career prospects.

Won't earn decent money? Have you ever worked for a big semi company? I have and that is simply not true. Niche, maybe... But, they did not skimp high performers regarding wage. Believe it or not, there are plenty of good software positions in semiconductors too..

In the UK the wages are piss poor for engineers. You can often make more money doing menial jobs that don't need education.

> you will be sentenced to whims of one or two (if you are lucky) companies operating in your region.

Or you work at a foundry-less IP house. There are many of those.

Just wait until they scale it up and commercialize it; the nightmare will return.

The sad fact is that nasty and exotic chemicals provide ways to make many manufacturing processes cheaper and run large batches. When you're pushing the limits of everything and the stakes are high, you can't really take them off the table.