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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did.

You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical.

The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings.

Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.

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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.

> 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.

It might be related to patent portfolios. AMD might be reluctant to pursue something that can step on Nvidia's minefield. OTOH, you mention developer experience, and it'd be wonderful to have something less developer hostile than CUDA.

I remember my feelings when I learned how to use the Cell's SPUs and how much I didn't want to touch it with a barge pole after that.

If that is the only issue, any initial CUDA patents will be expiring now

Parents can be amended to extend their lifetimes, and I’m sure Nvidia uses all the tools they can to better enforce their moat.

20 years ago is also the time frame for when AMD acquired ATi (who IIRC were 99% on gaming graphics), and AMD was floundering in the following decade. They made the choice to prioritize the CPU side of the business, but on the GPU graphics/compute side it's hard to see that they've got much vision for how they want to steer the future to go and the ability to make that happen with their partners.

> 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.

> 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.

My experience is firmware to software instead of hardware to software. However, I had the opposite experience.

The big difference to me was that when I was working as a firmware engineer, I was treated like an engineer. For example, if I brought a design concern to my boss it would be seriously considered. In software engineering, on the other hand, I'm basically treated like a bluecollar worker.

I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.

I also started in embedded development at a company where there was a significant RF component (essentially, we were doing wireless networking in 1986 - like wifi about 10 years early). All of the digital & software folks were youngish - 20s, 30s. But the RF guys were all in their 50s or older.

> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."

At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me...

More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying to: I miss doing firmware engineering. Gosh that is so much fun.

I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.

Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up.

The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there.

But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.

i’m sure all auditing and qa reasons for human in the loop firmware development will magically go poof soon as well

Quite so. There's literally no moat that can withstand a prospect of 10x cost cut.

> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!".

For personal stuff? Sure.

But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.

Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.

Electrical engineers don't really pull wires ....

Electricians might be temporarily safe from AI but EEs are knowledge workers too.

Idk, I'd like to see AI design a schematic and lay out a board. Even the occasional "Show HN" that combines AI+PCB stuff is about analysis and checks. It doesn't seem like anybody is even near any kind of ECAD using AI. People still complain about autorouters. Even frontier models need architecting and guard rails in software to avoid spaghetti, it seems like an even harder problem to get them to choose the correct parts, create accurate footprints and symbols, and wire those all up together.

"This is wrong, fix it" + recompile, can happen twenty times in ten minutes, but "we discovered the layout is wrong, fix it" is precluded by the cost and time of a new board spin.

AI + text (code) seems like a good match but (E)CAD seems a lot harder to interface AI with. If I'm wrong, I'd like to share that with the EEs on my team, though.

Its just a data problem, there's nothing special about the task. It just happens that there's a lot of data about programming already.

PCB routing is still a murderously-hard NP problem, AI or no AI. Not least because a fully-automated schematic-to-PCB flow has to be driven by component placement, which in turn is driven (or at least influenced heavily) by requirements further up the chain.

I'm sure it'll happen -- if you can defeat the world Go champion you can certainly route traces -- but so far it seems to be an exception to the bitter lesson, where proprietary hand-tuned algorithms are still on top. Given the lack of large quantities of PCB CAD files that can be appropriated for training, it might be one of those things that has to be self-learned by the AI, again reminiscent of how Alpha Zero worked.

Everything is an exception to the bitter lesson until you get enough data.

> Idk, I'd like to see AI design a schematic and lay out a board.

It's being worked on, and as the other commenter said, it's a data problem not a fundamental limitation. That's what's scary to me.

That said the SOTA tools in this space still suck, so it's not here yet :)

> I miss doing firmware engineering.

I remember my Apple II days (different platform, similarly constrained environment) where every game had a hard real-time multitasking core under all the code. In the Apple II it was particularly critical, because you didn't have programmable sound generators - you had to programmatically change the voltage of the speaker. If you were really crazy, you could do PWM and expect the electronics of the board would coerce your output square wave into something pleasant.

It never worked well, but it was still super cool.

I'm the other way around, I've been shocked to learn how many computer scientists consider programming to be the core of their work. I had always understood programming as simply an end to a means in order to implement a design/algorithm. But man! Design and algorithms! That's where the real soul is!

And then there’s those of us that loved writing software and loathe what AI has reduced it to.

I think you’re kidding yourself if you think the majority of software engineers are in it for anything other than the money.

I could say the same, ee graduate who majored in telecom/RF but there was no work in it (or rather nobody wanted to hire a graduate). I did get hired into power electronics, but the work they needed was in software. Since then it has been redundancies every few years, through automotive application development, some audio visual, and even dev-ops.

The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.

> how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession

There will always be people who work to pay the bills, not to answer some inner call. I am happy - don't tell my boss, but I would do my work for free, including meeting users and extracting requirements (some colleagues say I'd be a master interrogator in another universe).

I think it could just be that they like different things about the profession? Personally, I got into it because of a love of algorithms and computer science. To me, actually writing code is just the drudgery I have to do to implement my work.

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.

That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?

Last time I head of them, Bosch was planning to cut 13000 jobs in Germany.

They do heavily outsource to India, though. At least for their electronic control units..

Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.

You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.

I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.

The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times.

To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.

The government heavily revised and reinterpreted patent law many times in favor of software companies starting in the 80s. Otherwise hardware companies would have the only real moat since, as you say, software is relatively cheap and fast to produce.

It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I applied before for a radar engineer and while interviewing it turned out they just procure radars, not building and designing), or a hardware role but requires a deep expertise in a very specific area that hard to acquire unless you are in the industry like some roles in AMD or Intel. But I always loved hardware more than software, and way before AI or even neo-tools like github and git existed, maybe because software is basically writing and I am not fan of writing in general, while hardware it’s more of component based logical thinking, who knows, but if I managed to get into the hardware I would definitely do.

There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.

I kinda want to join such a company as a software guy, but I really can’t take a 50% pay cut. This is really sad! Have always wanted to work at places that can grow very solid engineering cultures.

A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.

everyone retiring doesn't mean pay or culture is actually going to improve

> I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.

I cannot disagree more.

Actually the synergy of software and hardware (primarily due to the increasing popularity of electromagnetics EM spectrums sensing like Radar/LIDAR/mmWave/THz/etc compared to sound) will create unprecedented beyond human perception and intelligence embodied and enhanced by physical AI. Heck the EXG sensings including ECG/EMG/EEG/etc that are technically part of EM, are now generating hundreds of papers/patents/articles everyday in which this product/patent/paper by Meta and its subsidiary CTRL-labs is only the tip of the iceberg [1],[2].

Please check my other comments for more contexts.

[1] A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction (Nature article):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w

[2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306

Not to mention the various manufacturing nationalisation initiatives by the USA, EU, etc. And while it's a scant hope after Covid, maybe American investment culture will calm down and software engineering ceases to be so overvalued.

Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.

And now we're actively making this worse by not hiring juniors to learn from us while we're still able to take on apprentices. What could go wrong?

A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff).

China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".

What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?

I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....

If this was the US (and depending on how long ago) there is a federal requirement to have all the relevant MSDS printed out in binders on a shelf somewhere accessible to the rank and file. Those list PPE requirements and safe exposure limits among other things. Not that anyone ever bothers to read them.

Oh, yeah, a board house is a dark Satanic mill if there ever was one. But it's not a place where RF engineers are going to clock in and out on a daily basis.

on the other hand you produce stuff in the real world and not some hidden UX button nobody ever uses so theres that

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