My formal education and majority of background is hardware (EE undergrad and grad). I also work full time doing hardware design and firmware mostly. The problem

My formal education and majority of background is hardware (EE undergrad and grad). I also work full time doing hardware design and firmware mostly. The problem with a lot of hardware is the initial investment and that things take longer. If you are just hacking some simple hareware together like a microcontroller and nothing special its easy to proto, but if you get into things that need to be prototyped on PCBs the cost and time goes up, especially the time factor. I tend to enjoy software more these days simply because I can compile things and test them right away. It can get onerous when you spend days laying out circuit boards, a week or two to spin them, then 2 weeks to get them built, while you just spent about 10k for 50 prototypes.