I'm still in university and I've always liked hardware and low level related stuff but I've heard bad things about software in hardware companies like Qualcomm.
Almost every part of semi industry is very bad on effort to salary ratio, and players like Intel, or Qualcomm are far from the worst, they actually do very well on salary front, and attracting talent. It's Asian companies who score the worst on that.
TSMC process development job is 100:1 lottery win + 20 years of your life for $50k a year salary. Know people with first hand experience of that.
In many other places software is an afterthought to the hardware, and it shows.