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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

In fact I'll go further - in my experience people with a software background make much better hardware designers than people with an EE background because they are aware of modern software best practices. Many hardware designers are happy to hack whatever together with duck tape and glue. As a result most of the hardware industry is decades behind the software industry in many ways, e.g. still relying on hacky Perl and TCL scripts to cobble things together.

The notable exceptions are:

* Formal verification, which is very widely used in hardware and barely used in software (not software's fault really - there are good reasons for it).

* What the software guys now call "deterministic system testing", which is just called "testing" in the hardware world because that's how it has always been done.

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> in my experience people with a software background make much better hardware designers than people with an EE background because they are aware of modern software best practices.

I know them. Especially older folks. Ramming all parts on one huge sheet instead of separation by function. Refusing to use buses. Refusing to insert part numbers into schematics so they can just export BoM directly and writing BoM by hand instead.

Watching these guys is like watching lowest office worker inserting values from Excel into calculator so he can then write the result into same Excel table.

Age has an effect, no matter if it's software or electronics. These types learned their trade once, some decades ago, and keep driving like that.

If you want old dogs to learn new tricks, teach them. No company has the money to spend nor the inclination to even suggest education to their workers. Companies usually consider that a waste of time and money. I don't know why. Probably because "investing" in your work force is considered stupid because they'll fire you the moment a quarterly earnings call looks less than stellar.

> If you want old dogs to learn new tricks, teach them.

That's not really how our industry works - or even how it should work IMO.

If old dogs want to keep their jobs they should teach themselves new tricks.

> If you want old dogs to learn new tricks, teach them

These guys are epitome of arrogance. I have been doing this for N years, you have nothing to teach me! Then the same guy will be staring for several hours straight on a prototype board which is hard shorted because he accidentally created a junction in his schematic. ERC (electrical rules checker) would catch it, if guy would bother to run it...

>* Formal verification, which is very widely used in hardware and barely used in software (not software's fault really - there are good reasons for it).

When developing with C, model checking or at least fuzzing is practically mandatory, otherwise it is negligent.

Side note: Formal theorem proving is even more rare than formal model checking..!

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