I'm an EE, and yeah, I don't get why the pay in the field is so bad. The stakes are higher too. If I mess something up I blow a very very costly PCB or even worse - an ASIC. If a software dev messes up it can cause millions of dollars of damage, but for the most part you can ship half-baked projects and patch them up as you go. You just can't do that in EE.
>I'm an EE, and yeah, I don't get why the pay in the field is so bad.
Also EE here. Because in EE you need to invest a lot of funds into equipment, prototyping, manufacturing, RMA, shipping, logistics, customer support, etc. only to make pennies in profit when you actually sell your finished products, while it's the opposite for SW dev work, developing it and selling it costs you next to nothing, you just need a laptop and an internet connection, and once you sunk the cost of developing it you can scale it virtually infinitely and sell it across the globe with low costs and high margins.
Long story short, it's a lot more profitable to make apps where you get consumers to click on ads, buy stuff, or invest their savings into meme stocks or crypto, than to build and sell physical products to them (unless you're Apple).
R&D is more expensive, fixing errors is more expensive. It doesn't scale like software does. You want to produce 100x more product? You'll need a big organisation compared to a software company.
