The margins really aren’t that much different, the overhead between infrastructure/etc. between the hardware and moving parts between the two aren’t that much different in my experience.

Software positions (at least the ones I’m familiar with) revolve around products. If you are a software engineer at Cisco you either work in sustaining/maintaining/troubleshooting products for customers, or you work on developing the product itself. You are “ahead of the curve” I would say with regards to contracts or procurement. In other engineering fields, the only difference is that a company is contracted to do XYZ, but based on work and engineering hours and deliverables as opposed to being product based. This essentially creates a bunch of middlemen between money received and work being done, where companies are paying realistic amounts (or getting paid) for work, but that money is cut tenfold before getting to the people doing the work.

Creating a similar example, you could be testing a spacecraft assembly at a company like Rockwell or a smaller company, who is then contracted by Lockheed for a spacecraft or hosted payload, who was originally contracted by NOAA or NASA or whoever. Your actual work has the same value as a software engineer, you’re just getting bent over because many companies are trying to get their dirty hands on the pie.

I think it’s more so that software compensation is more commensurate with the value provided to the company. Sure, plenty of Space Engineering positions pay 100-200k, but they are managing the work for 50-500 million dollar programs over a 2-10 year span.

I know plenty of very well paid software engineers, and I wouldn’t consider them more intelligent or efficient or getting more done than engineers in aerospace or anything, but software has become so important and with not enough people to do it that they can’t ask much closer to the going rate.

I read an article/study of NASA approved contractors (which many businesses have to go through to work in the public sector), and over half of those companies up charge their engineering hours up to 10x what they are actually paying the worker. The money has always been there, it’s just an inefficient system. In my personal experience most Aerospace grads or professionals are sometimes doing just as much software dev work as the actual software engineers, particularly in the areas of test or any sort of ground system work.