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Hardware companies, and even some legacy software companies, have very different cultures than recent software companies. The 'recent' upstarts like Google, Fa

Hardware companies, and even some legacy software companies, have very different cultures than recent software companies. The 'recent' upstarts like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are either powered by massive profit engines or endless VC/investment money. Those places can set standards that aren't achievable by older companies that have lower margins and need to actually show profits. There is also a cultural difference between hardware engineers, who are usually more 'serious engineers' who actually engineer things vs software engineers who are often less rigorous in their architecture and design. HW folks deal with long lead times and can't usually fix errors after production, so that creates a vastly different culture.

hweng-suckat-sw 6y ago
Hardware engineers may think they are more serious, but how many hardware engineers take the time to verify the numerics of the finite element, finite difference, or spectral method codes they rely upon for computational electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, quantum or classical mechanics modeling that they often are fully reliant upon to do their jobs. As someone who has spent a career writing tools for internal teams at hardware shops, or at software companies that cater to hardware engineers, I have seen far more rigor in my technical computing software colleagues than I have seen from my hardware engineering colleagues. Most of my hardware engineering colleagues have had no idea what version control is, don’t know or care how floating point calculations can wreak havoc on their models, and can’t craft anything more complex than a straight line Matlab script. Software written by hardware engineers is often atrociously bad, has no tests, and can only run on the machine where it was written. I know I can’t even consider ever asking most of my hardware design engineering colleagues to touch a C compiler or validate the numerics of their models. They just as often prefer to rely upon their magical point and click GUIs or back of the envelope spherical cow based scripts and spreadsheets.

hweng-suckat-sw 6y ago

Hardware engineers may think they are more serious, but how many hardware engineers take the time to verify the numerics of the finite element, finite difference, or spectral method codes they rely upon for computational electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, quantum or classical mechanics modeling that they often are fully reliant upon to do their jobs. As someone who has spent a career writing tools for internal teams at hardware shops, or at software companies that cater to hardware engineers, I have seen far more rigor in my technical computing software colleagues than I have seen from my hardware engineering colleagues. Most of my hardware engineering colleagues have had no idea what version control is, don’t know or care how floating point calculations can wreak havoc on their models, and can’t craft anything more complex than a straight line Matlab script. Software written by hardware engineers is often atrociously bad, has no tests, and can only run on the machine where it was written. I know I can’t even consider ever asking most of my hardware design engineering colleagues to touch a C compiler or validate the numerics of their models. They just as often prefer to rely upon their magical point and click GUIs or back of the envelope spherical cow based scripts and spreadsheets.