Ask HN: Who Are the FEA, CAD, etc. SWE's?

I'm a mechanical engineer who mostly lurks here. Much of the shop talk is over my head, but I figure I would occasionally come across folks who work on finite element analysis (ANSYS, Abaqus, etc.), CAD (Solidworks, Creo, Inventor/AutoCAD, etc.), CMM (Faro, Zeiss, etc) or other design, manufacturing, or inspection software/hardware packages.

I'd love to see how these tools are developed, and how such developers manage expertise in both software and the field in which the tool is being used. I suppose that last point is true of software to be used in any domain.