It's almost like companies value their employee's time and don't want them dealing with non-profitable sales to hobbyists or buying small quantities to poke around and copy IP.
Overhead is typically 40-50% for this kind of corporation. So not really enough.
However the calculation has nothing to do with what guessing a reasonable hourly rate.
The issue is whether someone with the expertise to do this would benefit the company and their own career more doing something other than a tech support role.
> Overhead is typically 40-50% for this kind of corporation. So not really enough.
Even assuming 50% overhead something just short of 200k remains. I agree, for the US it may be on the lower end of the scale (given the ridiculous costs of housing and healthcare), but Europe or Asia? Way more than enough.
> The issue is whether someone with the expertise to do this would benefit the company and their own career more doing something other than a tech support role.
At least in my experience it is definitely good for people to spend time directly with customers. I agree it may not be worthwile for a chip developer or a documentation writer to spend their full time on doing support - but a set amount of time, say four or eight hours a week? That's direct, unfiltered input from the customers where the documentation is either missing, unclear or buggy.
Generic questions ("which combination of chips to choose if I have an USB-C female receptacle and want to provide bidirectional PD, bidirectional DisplayPort and USB3.2 over it") / 1:1 tutoring like "how do I best route a PCI-E differential lane pair", "how to properly calculate trace widths for said lanes given fab house X's stack specifications" can be directed to less specialist / sales staff or to a partner PCB design house.
“At least in my experience it is definitely good for people to spend time directly with customers. I agree it may not be worthwile for a chip developer or a documentation writer to spend their full time on doing support - but a set amount of time, say four or eight hours a week? That's direct, unfiltered input from the customers where the documentation is either missing, unclear or buggy.”
I agree that direct experience with customers is good for many engineers. It is definitely not good for all engineers.
However there is a huge difference between professional customers and hobbyists.
You are now taking about a multi-tiered support organization.
You personally may be willing to spend 200 euros per hour for access to such an organization.
The question is, are there enough customers like you to justify millions of Euros in investment to build such an organization.
Starting from the hourly rate you personally think engineers should be paid gives exactly zero information about the demand, and therefore zero information about whether such a rate is meaningful.
