4 ms·

TIL VHDL was commisioned by the DoD. Also random note, but wouldn't most engineers familiar with HDL's be electronic engineers rather than software developers?

opencl 7y ago
A lot of people trained as EEs seem to end up in software dev jobs these days.
- magduf 7y ago
  Yep. You don't find many EEs left in the US these days, unless they work at a military contractor. All the electronic hardware design work went to Taiwan and China, because that's where all the manufacturing for it is. What's left is government-related (military) stuff that obviously can't be outsourced to Asia, and some commercial stuff that they keep in-house for various reasons. Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer. Its because software engineers get paid much better in addition to more options. As a firmware engineer I straddled both sides. So many of my EE colleagues lamented they should have done more on the software side. A few of the brilliant ones moved to places like Google, Amazon which need them for specialist roles. I remember a decade back I was visiting a customer in Taiwan to help debug our product and saw a legion of Chinese engineers helping out some project. I knew eventually Taiwan would lose some of their R&D to China.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
There are a decent chunk of EEs/CpEs doing work that bridges hardware and software. For example, they might be writing VHDL or Verilog for an FPGA and also writing C/C++ for the microcontroller that interfaces with it. Also, there are lots of professional software developers who studied Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering in college. Many schools historically had all their CS classes and faculty within their EE department.
jecxjo 7y ago
Really just depends on what you wanted to specialize in. My degree is basically the VLSI portion of an Electrical Engineer and Operating Systems portion of a CS degree. There were many students in my HDL classes that were purely CS but had an interest in software based processors. Not as many EE's taking classes on Big-O notation.

opencl 7y ago

A lot of people trained as EEs seem to end up in software dev jobs these days.

magduf 7y ago
Yep. You don't find many EEs left in the US these days, unless they work at a military contractor. All the electronic hardware design work went to Taiwan and China, because that's where all the manufacturing for it is. What's left is government-related (military) stuff that obviously can't be outsourced to Asia, and some commercial stuff that they keep in-house for various reasons. Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer.
- pkaye 7y ago
  > Basically, the US is a really bad place to be an electrical engineer specializing in electronic hardware, but it's a great place to be a software engineer or developer. Its because software engineers get paid much better in addition to more options. As a firmware engineer I straddled both sides. So many of my EE colleagues lamented they should have done more on the software side. A few of the brilliant ones moved to places like Google, Amazon which need them for specialist roles. I remember a decade back I was visiting a customer in Taiwan to help debug our product and saw a legion of Chinese engineers helping out some project. I knew eventually Taiwan would lose some of their R&D to China.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

There are a decent chunk of EEs/CpEs doing work that bridges hardware and software. For example, they might be writing VHDL or Verilog for an FPGA and also writing C/C++ for the microcontroller that interfaces with it. Also, there are lots of professional software developers who studied Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering in college. Many schools historically had all their CS classes and faculty within their EE department.

jecxjo 7y ago

Really just depends on what you wanted to specialize in. My degree is basically the VLSI portion of an Electrical Engineer and Operating Systems portion of a CS degree. There were many students in my HDL classes that were purely CS but had an interest in software based processors. Not as many EE's taking classes on Big-O notation.