Maybe not the hardest part, but the most consistently annoying is that you are dealing with really low level issues, and you can't take anything for granted. M

Maybe not the hardest part, but the most consistently annoying is that you are dealing with really low level issues, and you can't take anything for granted. Memory allocation, compilers, threading, libraries etc. - you have to be careful at each and every step. You're probably going to end up working with C or C++ - which is fine, and they are common enough, but you don't get a lot of nice 'VM-ish' things along with them. You end up often having to know specific things about chipsets etc.. It's great because you 'learn a lot' and will come out a better Engineer - but sometimes that knowledge can be arcane. You'll spend a lot of time doing things that 'everyone else' in software takes for granted and it can make it feel like you're moving slowly.