No. The pay is mostly ok, the project management is shit. Basically in the automotive industry, you get important in your company when what you produce is a big part of the BOM of the car. Software is $0 in the BOM, so you are treated like shit.
Source: I've worked for the automotive industry for ~20 years, on and off.
no, it's just unintuitive but also it makes sense.
first, the software is traditionally up-front cost, development cost, and as such it's not accounted for in the production cost aka BOM of an individual vehicle.
but even if you'd jump the accounting hoop of spreading the software costs to the vehicles it's neclegible compared to other cost factors.
VW group builds 10mio cars a year. the core ECUs board computers are shared across all models and makes. a major revision happens every 3-4 years. that's 30-40 mio units you spread the software creation costs to.
the major cost (as in 90% of that) is going to be silicon, PCB, housing, the physical part. and share of ECU costs in the overall vehicle costs likewise is in the low 2 digit percentage, should it even reach that.
No. The marginal cost of the software in a car is zero. There is a development cost, sure -- just as there are other design costs. But in terms of what the company has to spend to build one more car, the software costs nothing, unlike the steel, wire, tires, glass, etc.
No, it's that SW is the component on the BOM that's the easiest to offshore so it's subject to the strictest race-to-the-bottom account engineering possible.
All these big auto companies like VW, GM, etc. used to do in terms of SW dev is write the spec and requirements and then contract out the dev work to the lowest bidder (Continental, Bosch, Valeo, Denso, etc.)
This makes sense how Tesla markets FSD in terms of traditional accounting. While not a part of official BOM, $15k for self driving is a big chunk of the final price for those who select it.
Then you heard wrong. I left European automotive SW because they paid peanuts. Sure, maybe there's some requirements engineers at Porsche or some niche freelance consultants in safety who makes bank, but everyone else makes peanuts. IC pay tops out at 80k per ear and that's in an expensive city like Stuttgart or Munich.
I didn’t hear anything “wrong” at all. I know people personally which make a lot more than that. If you did R&D for 80k in a senior role you got robbed.
