Why are embedded salaries lower than pure software salaries? Below, I will share my personal experience.
I remember back in 1999 when I left a large state-owned enterprise to work in a small workshop, doing embedded development, software development, and hardware design, with a monthly salary of 4000 yuan. For me at that time, living in a fourth-tier city, this felt like a high income.
However, due to some reasons, I later switched to a pure software development company, where my salary was only 1000 yuan, plus a bonus of 1000 yuan. At that time, I felt that, “the income from software development is much lower than that from embedded development“.
Coming from a small city, I had no concrete concept of the income comparison between these two industries or the different languages used in software development; I only drew conclusions from my personal experience.
Since I was doing dispatch work, the choice of programming language was decided by the client. At the beginning of the company, there was no time to train employees, and everyone had to learn on their own. Gradually, I felt that engaging in pure software development requires constant learning; otherwise, it is difficult to maintain development capabilities in new languages, new databases, and new development architectures.
When I was involved in embedded development, there were not many types of MCUs at that time; we primarily used the 51 series microcontrollers. I had learned about the 51 microcontroller in university, so I could maintain the same development approach for several years. PCB design initially used Tango, then switched to Protel, and the development language was consistently assembly language, while the computer always used DOS 6.22.In fact, during that time, I also used dBase, Turbo C, Visual Basic 2.0 for software development, and studied Pascal and Fortran in university. Fortran is more suited for engineering calculations and is not commonly used.
Comparing these experiences, I feel that the effort required to learn pure software development is much greater than that for hardware. Moreover, the types and directions of pure software development are also more diverse than hardware development. Therefore, from a cost perspective, it makes no sense for pure software development salaries to be lower than hardware development salaries.
However, in fact, before 2005, my salary from pure software development was never higher than my salary from embedded development in 1999. It wasn’t until I went to Japan that this situation changed. I think, on one hand, Japan is a developed country with generally higher incomes; on the other hand, as a person from a fourth-tier city in the north, no matter how hard I tried, my income could not be too high.
At that time, I had an older colleague who moved to Shenzhen to do hardware development in power supply, and he was already earning 9000 yuan (around 1999, I can’t remember the exact year). I estimate that the income level for hardware developers in Shenzhen at that time was definitely not low, which also reflects the north-south disparity.
During my time in software, I didn’t have time to pay attention to embedded development information, so I was completely unaware of the salary situation in embedded development. Around 2013, due to my child’s schooling, I completely left my job and returned to China, becoming a freelancer. Of course, I do both software and hardware out of interest and do not want to give up.
At that time, I took on several freelance jobs, both software and hardware. In comparison, for me personally, I still earn more from pure software. The reasons may include the following:
First, software has been developed for 20-30 years, and the unit price for commercial software development is relatively high;
Second, most hardware development companies do not want to invest too much in R&D, so the income of developers is objectively limited;
Third, in hardware development, although MCUs are constantly evolving, they are relatively stable for hardware developers. Once you learn a development system, transitioning to another system is not too difficult. In contrast, for pure software, the development directions and language types are very diverse, leading to higher learning costs.
From my personal understanding, the high learning costs have a certain impact on salary. This is similar to hiring, where the income of high school graduates, ordinary university graduates, key university graduates, master’s students, and doctoral students is definitely different. Therefore, it is quite normal for pure software development to have higher income than embedded development. For pure software development, the income differences caused by different programming languages may also relate to learning costs.
Although there is generally a salary disparity between software and hardware development, one thing will never change: that is, those with high technical skills, regardless of software or hardware, programming languages, chips, or architectures, will definitely have the highest income. Embedded engineers with annual salaries in the hundreds of thousands are not unusual in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. As long as you are willing to work hard and improve your knowledge, whether in software or hardware, you will achieve a desirable salary.
That’s all for my personal insights on embedded and software development. I hope these views can help everyone in their work and studies. As for this topic, I spoke off the cuff without much structure, I hope my colleagues won’t mind too much.
Finally, what different opinions do you have regarding salary? Feel free to leave comments for discussion!
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