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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they had a "hardware guy" with little software training or experience write the code?

I've done a lot of both hardware and software, and I've seen a lot more bad software done by hardware engineers than I've seen bad hardware done by software engineers. The software guys usually know that they're out of their bailiwick when it comes to hardware design.

E.g. one of the worst in my experience was a 30,000 line shell script, few if any functions, used as part of our production flow. A simple refactoring could have cut it down at least 90%. Even worse, it was totally unsupported because the guy who wrote it was reassigned.

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I think this is probably the essence of it. Hardware people see software as just hardware that can be easily reconfigured. That was a reasonable model back in the 8048 days, when one only had 1kB of ROM and 256B of RAM to work in. But these programs are obviously far larger, with orders of magnitude more data paths and astronomically more possible states. Different techniques are required. Someone from a hardware background isn't going to understand that.

"Hardware people see software as just hardware that can be easily reconfigured"

Not really, not if you have a realistic view of software. When I was an EE student, about half of my classmates loved software, the other half didn't like it and weren't good at it. And in silicon valley, a lot of EEs ended up doing software at all levels. I've always been jealous of how creative software could be, and didn't have the same limitations as hardware. Lots of hardware is usually programmed at low levels by EEs, which essentially ends up being drivers, and other board support software. They also realize that their training and education is not at the same level as software engineers in software.

BTW, it used to be that if you couldn't cut it in engineering, EE/ME/ChemE, and you wanted to pursue a technical degree, most people would go into computer science. I realize it's not like that today, but that's how it was back in the day.

That's interesting. I graduated in 2005 from an engineering college and none of the engineers went into Comp Sci if they couldn't cut it in EE/ME/AE/ChemE. They went into "Engineering and Management" instead, which was basically a business degree for engineers.

The only engineering management program at our school is a graduate degree for engineers with undergrad engineering degrees already. One of the attractions of Comp Sci was the availability of jobs, which was why they tried to complete a traditional engineering program in the first place. It was kind of hilarious to see a frustrated student complaining about one of the simpler classes, but then explain that he was enduring the pain because of a job at the end of the tunnel.

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