Comment by drtz
13 hours ago
I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least.
Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge.
It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company.
The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team.
It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team.
At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection systems that increased our compile times from 10 seconds to over 600.... And we STRUGGLED to get our issue escalated because "it was a software problem" and the hardware team didnt really care about anything other than hardware issues.
Like imagine grinding an entire division to a halt, and not even raising that concern. Thats a Tier1 issue. It took over a month to get a workaround in place. IT wasnt ever really fixed. We were just told "youre not important enough so youre gonna have to deal with 3x compile times. tough"
I've observed this as well, that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen. The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this.
But software in general - well, in America - got pulled up into the stratosphere by FAANG money. I feel that should have had more of an effect than it did on non-software orgs.
> that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen
I noticed that with mainframes and banks.
IBM makes some really amazing hardware at the very top of the market, but the companies who own those machines don't seem to think any competitive advantage can come from them - they are the cost of doing business. Because of that, the mainframe teams are often neglected.
I would even be happy to write code on the least sexy language ever invented, COBOL, just so it could run on the sexiest hardware ever built.
> The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this.
I’m still so dumbfounded by this. It’s almost 20 years since NVidia introduced CUDA. Developer tooling / experience appears to be something AMD does not understand, for some reason.
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> despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge
RF engineering, in particular, is punishing. The subject is viciously hard (you think shared mutable state is hard? Ha!) and, as people pointed out, for most companies, hardware engineering is considered a cost sink, not a revenue driver, something to be avoided if possible. The only parts where it's not is where companies do vertical integration instead of external suppliers.