I worked in the semiconductor industry, and at least in our niche of the semiconductor industry, FAEs were some of the worst paid people, a long with production test for some reason.
FAEs were seen as the lowest level support who were a stop-gap for our application engineers (non-field). If a big customer had a problem, we would send an AE out to show that we were taking it seriously. No idea if it's the same in other industries though. Application engineers weren't that we'll paid either.
Technical marketing and sales were paid well, but maybe this is a just a title thing (what you called FAE is what we called sales/marketing). Their salaries were predominantly sale/deal based bonuses though.
For people that actually developed the chips, analogue designers were the highest paid followed by digital designers. Then digital verification engineers, with verification engineer salary increasing very quickly. The salaries were shit compared to software though.
But now, talking to my friends still in the sector(doing design), competition is absolutely fierce and their salaries are increasing rapidly along with getting a lot more shares. There was a point where a senior analogue engineer could move to a graduate software position and make more money. Those days are gone now, and salaries are pretty close.
A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.
>A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.
Which probably explains why Apple is the only, or one of the rare few, consumer electronics companies with products most people actually want to buy and love to own.
People keep pointing out how shitty products form Apple's competitors are (Samsung, Dell, etc.), but when you look how little they pay for talent in comparison to Apple, it becomes obvious why their products are so inferior.
Engineering great devices is expensive, and since the West offshored everything to China, and went for cutting costs as much as possible including on engineering wages, how can they expect to deliver quality?
FAEs were seen as the lowest level support who were a stop-gap for our application engineers (non-field). If a big customer had a problem, we would send an AE out to show that we were taking it seriously. No idea if it's the same in other industries though. Application engineers weren't that we'll paid either.
Technical marketing and sales were paid well, but maybe this is a just a title thing (what you called FAE is what we called sales/marketing). Their salaries were predominantly sale/deal based bonuses though.
For people that actually developed the chips, analogue designers were the highest paid followed by digital designers. Then digital verification engineers, with verification engineer salary increasing very quickly. The salaries were shit compared to software though.
But now, talking to my friends still in the sector(doing design), competition is absolutely fierce and their salaries are increasing rapidly along with getting a lot more shares. There was a point where a senior analogue engineer could move to a graduate software position and make more money. Those days are gone now, and salaries are pretty close.
A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.