Culture. It permeates a company. The CEO of a hardware company has often risen there from being a junior HW engineer or researcher. Same story for managers 1-2

Culture. It permeates a company. The CEO of a hardware company has often risen there from being a junior HW engineer or researcher. Same story for managers 1-2 steps down. They are often not competent to hire competent software people on their own. So how could they begin to change their company, even if they wanted to? I think it's asymmetric though: 1. Software people realize and accept that hardware construction is complex. 2. Many hardware people actually do seem to think that software construction is trivial in comparison to the what they do themselves. Especially in SV I also sense a sort of resentment from HW engineers that SW people nowadays often get paid a lot better. ("For creating dating apps.") (One difference between software and hardware is that hardware people often have much "higher" academic credentials - quite a lot of them have PhD's. Great software people often don't even graduate from university. I could see how this could make the hardware people think less of the software people.)