I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
The purging has really picked up pace in the last couple of years, and I think a major highlight will be the upcoming cleansing of Place de la Concorde.
Taxis in Australia, like many other places, used to abuse their customers. Uber truly made a difference; these days, Uber may represent questionable value in Australia, but at the very minimum they managed to change the behaviour of an entire industry, which is a huge positive.
Have worked at both, Airbus pays worse but has a much better engineering culture. Also arguably, because of the location(s) the quality of the engineers is quite high despite the pay as they can afford a pretty good lifestyle.
Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.
Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.
Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.
A propos the likeness point, a question to get people's opinions. What is the difference between your skills today which lead to earning potential and an actor's likeness which gives the actor more rights to a continued income stream?
Same reason why the car industry encountered chip shortages, despite there being plenty of chips. They don't want to have to go through the time and expense of re-certifying everything due to all of the red tape. As a result, you end up with the system "that always worked fine".