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The tooling is not very good because nobody pays for software tools. When the electrical engineers pick the ecosystem they are not stupid enough to just use wha

by Veserv 6y ago

The tooling is not very good because nobody pays for software tools. When the electrical engineers pick the ecosystem they are not stupid enough to just use whatever tooling comes with the ecosystem for free, they spend $50k/year per engineer(!) to buy adequate tools to make their engineers productive. In contrast, software engineers and their engineering organizations are happy to waste equally valuable engineers just to save a couple bucks; it is insanity. In what other industry is a $10k expenditure an instant deal-breaker when investing in the productivity of an employee who costs more than $100k/yr? Companies invest more in the productivity of their truck drivers and admins than they do in software engineers. We are extremely valuable employees and we should demand that our companies invest reasonable amounts into actually making us productive instead of just tossing us the scraps since they are harming their own profitability by doing so. I mean, think of all the awesome tools that would make our jobs easier and more productive if our productivity were valued even half as much as the average electrical engineer.

avhon1 6y ago
Having used paid software development tools, I really don't think this is the case. In particular, I'm thinking of Xilinx Vivado, a popular FPGA IDE that starts at $3000/seat and is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to use. FPGA developers aren't cheap; I shudder to think of the amount of money paid for time spent dealing with issues and bugs in this program.
- Veserv 6y ago
  I am not really talking about the purchase of specific tools at this time, obviously you can buy expensive garbage and the most expensive stuff is not necessarily the best. I am talking about a systemic failure to properly invest in tooling and productivity that results in tooling being undervalued. Put another way, if I gave you $1k/yr to freely spend do you think you could improve your productivity by 1%? If I gave you $10k/yr to spend could you improve your productivity by 10%? If the scale is not high enough, if I gave 100 engineers $1M/yr to spend do you think you could improve the aggregate productivity of all of them by 10%? One more way to put it is that the fully-burdened cost of a standard software engineer is something like $200k/yr. At $3k/seat Xilinx Vivado probably cost less than 1.5% of your yearly cost to your company. If your company paid you $30k/seat, or 15% of the cost of each engineer using it, do you think you could make a system that makes you (and probably everybody else in your company using it) 30% more productive than using bare Xilinx Vivado (either a different product, making your own, configuring or working around problems in Vivado)? If so, that would clearly be an economically sound investment for your company even ignoring the much more significant second-order benefits of increased productivity. Do you think anybody even seriously considered the idea of spending $30k/seat to make you more productive since everybody I have ever talked to would consider that an absolutely ludicrous throw-you-out-of-the-room amount to spend on a software engineer even though it is in fact a mere 15% cost increase and would thus only require a similarly modest productivity increase to be economically sound. Given the way people normally talk about such a thing you would think it is increasing costs by 10x so would need to result in a 10x productivity increase to make economic sense, but that is just plainly not the case.
- bsder 6y ago
  While I agree with you about FPGA tools, that's a function of the fact that Xilinx and Altera won't disclose the bitstream so nobody can build an alternative. In the embedded space, people like Green Hills Software charge lots of money for tools that they claim are worth it.

by Veserv 6y ago

avhon1 6y ago

Having used paid software development tools, I really don't think this is the case. In particular, I'm thinking of Xilinx Vivado, a popular FPGA IDE that starts at $3000/seat and is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had to use. FPGA developers aren't cheap; I shudder to think of the amount of money paid for time spent dealing with issues and bugs in this program.

Veserv 6y ago
I am not really talking about the purchase of specific tools at this time, obviously you can buy expensive garbage and the most expensive stuff is not necessarily the best. I am talking about a systemic failure to properly invest in tooling and productivity that results in tooling being undervalued. Put another way, if I gave you $1k/yr to freely spend do you think you could improve your productivity by 1%? If I gave you $10k/yr to spend could you improve your productivity by 10%? If the scale is not high enough, if I gave 100 engineers $1M/yr to spend do you think you could improve the aggregate productivity of all of them by 10%? One more way to put it is that the fully-burdened cost of a standard software engineer is something like $200k/yr. At $3k/seat Xilinx Vivado probably cost less than 1.5% of your yearly cost to your company. If your company paid you $30k/seat, or 15% of the cost of each engineer using it, do you think you could make a system that makes you (and probably everybody else in your company using it) 30% more productive than using bare Xilinx Vivado (either a different product, making your own, configuring or working around problems in Vivado)? If so, that would clearly be an economically sound investment for your company even ignoring the much more significant second-order benefits of increased productivity. Do you think anybody even seriously considered the idea of spending $30k/seat to make you more productive since everybody I have ever talked to would consider that an absolutely ludicrous throw-you-out-of-the-room amount to spend on a software engineer even though it is in fact a mere 15% cost increase and would thus only require a similarly modest productivity increase to be economically sound. Given the way people normally talk about such a thing you would think it is increasing costs by 10x so would need to result in a 10x productivity increase to make economic sense, but that is just plainly not the case.
bsder 6y ago
While I agree with you about FPGA tools, that's a function of the fact that Xilinx and Altera won't disclose the bitstream so nobody can build an alternative. In the embedded space, people like Green Hills Software charge lots of money for tools that they claim are worth it.