Craig, I agree, it is more important to be happy at what you are doing than the size of the compensation (we are talking about the same neighborhood for either). Richard brings up a point which I find accurate: a hardware engineer doing software can add a capacitor, which "pure" software engineer can?. I think that in the PC world you may be able to find happiness without any hardware knowledge, I have my doubts whwther you can in the embedded world. Craig, nothing personal, I am generalizing. I believe that doing both HW and SW is the most satisfying job in embedded, if you are going to do that I think EE is the best door.