6 ms·

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical. The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings. Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.

uejfiweun 6mo ago
These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.
- high_priest 6mo ago
  There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?
    - fisf 6mo ago
      Last time I head of them, Bosch was planning to cut 13000 jobs in Germany.
    - dranudin 6mo ago
      They do heavily outsource to India, though. At least for their electronic control units..
- 0xffff2 6mo ago
  Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.
  - sleepycat801 6mo ago
    You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.
- dublinstats 6mo ago
  I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.
  - WarmWash 6mo ago
    The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times. To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
    - dublinstats 6mo ago
      The government heavily revised and reinterpreted patent law many times in favor of software companies starting in the 80s. Otherwise hardware companies would have the only real moat since, as you say, software is relatively cheap and fast to produce.
markus_zhang 6mo ago
I kinda want to join such a company as a software guy, but I really can’t take a 50% pay cut. This is really sad! Have always wanted to work at places that can grow very solid engineering cultures.
scruple 6mo ago
I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.
- UncleOxidant 6mo ago
  I also started in embedded development at a company where there was a significant RF component (essentially, we were doing wireless networking in 1986 - like wifi about 10 years early). All of the digital & software folks were youngish - 20s, 30s. But the RF guys were all in their 50s or older.
GrumpyYoungMan 6mo ago
> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..." At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.
- girvo 6mo ago
  > The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying to: I miss doing firmware engineering. Gosh that is so much fun.
  - qazxcvbnmlp 6mo ago
    I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.
    - girvo 6mo ago
      Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up. The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there. But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.
      - sitzkrieg 6mo ago
        i’m sure all auditing and qa reasons for human in the loop firmware development will magically go poof soon as well
amelius 6mo ago
Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.
- mikestorrent 6mo ago
  And now we're actively making this worse by not hiring juniors to learn from us while we're still able to take on apprentices. What could go wrong?
- sleepycat801 6mo ago
  A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff). China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".
chromacity 6mo ago
There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.
drtz 6mo ago
I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least. Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge.
- superxpro12 6mo ago
  It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company. The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team. It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team. At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection systems that increased our compile times from 10 seconds to over 600.... And we STRUGGLED to get our issue escalated because "it was a software problem" and the hardware team didnt really care about anything other than hardware issues. Like imagine grinding an entire division to a halt, and not even raising that concern. Thats a Tier1 issue. It took over a month to get a workaround in place. IT wasnt ever really fixed. We were just told "youre not important enough so youre gonna have to deal with 3x compile times. tough"
  - pjc50 6mo ago
    I've observed this as well, that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen. The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this. But software in general - well, in America - got pulled up into the stratosphere by FAANG money. I feel that should have had more of an effect than it did on non-software orgs.
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      > The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this. I’m still so dumbfounded by this. It’s almost 20 years since NVidia introduced CUDA. Developer tooling / experience appears to be something AMD does not understand, for some reason.
CamperBob2 6mo ago
What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?
- mikestorrent 6mo ago
  I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    If this was the US (and depending on how long ago) there is a federal requirement to have all the relevant MSDS printed out in binders on a shelf somewhere accessible to the rank and file. Those list PPE requirements and safe exposure limits among other things. Not that anyone ever bothers to read them.
  - CamperBob2 6mo ago
    Oh, yeah, a board house is a dark Satanic mill if there ever was one. But it's not a place where RF engineers are going to clock in and out on a daily basis.
teleforce 6mo ago
> I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback. I cannot disagree more. Actually the synergy of software and hardware (primarily due to the increasing popularity of electromagnetics EM spectrums sensing like Radar/LIDAR/mmWave/THz/etc compared to sound) will create unprecedented beyond human perception and intelligence embodied and enhanced by physical AI. Heck the EXG sensings including ECG/EMG/EEG/etc that are technically part of EM, are now generating hundreds of papers/patents/articles everyday in which this product/patent/paper by Meta and its subsidiary CTRL-labs is only the tip of the iceberg [1],[2]. Please check my other comments for more contexts. [1] A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction (Nature article): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w [2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306
- Pay08 6mo ago
  Not to mention the various manufacturing nationalisation initiatives by the USA, EU, etc. And while it's a scant hope after Covid, maybe American investment culture will calm down and software engineering ceases to be so overvalued.
TheBog 6mo ago
A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  everyone retiring doesn't mean pay or culture is actually going to improve
tamimio 6mo ago
It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I applied before for a radar engineer and while interviewing it turned out they just procure radars, not building and designing), or a hardware role but requires a deep expertise in a very specific area that hard to acquire unless you are in the industry like some roles in AMD or Intel. But I always loved hardware more than software, and way before AI or even neo-tools like github and git existed, maybe because software is basically writing and I am not fan of writing in general, while hardware it’s more of component based logical thinking, who knows, but if I managed to get into the hardware I would definitely do.
- guzfip 6mo ago
  [dead]
saargrin 6mo ago
on the other hand you produce stuff in the real world and not some hidden UX button nobody ever uses so theres that

uejfiweun 6mo ago

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

high_priest 6mo ago
There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.
- Pay08 6mo ago
  That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?
  - fisf 6mo ago
    Last time I head of them, Bosch was planning to cut 13000 jobs in Germany.
  - dranudin 6mo ago
    They do heavily outsource to India, though. At least for their electronic control units..
0xffff2 6mo ago
Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.
- sleepycat801 6mo ago
  You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.
dublinstats 6mo ago
I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times. To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
  - dublinstats 6mo ago
    The government heavily revised and reinterpreted patent law many times in favor of software companies starting in the 80s. Otherwise hardware companies would have the only real moat since, as you say, software is relatively cheap and fast to produce.

markus_zhang 6mo ago

I kinda want to join such a company as a software guy, but I really can’t take a 50% pay cut. This is really sad! Have always wanted to work at places that can grow very solid engineering cultures.

scruple 6mo ago

I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.

UncleOxidant 6mo ago
I also started in embedded development at a company where there was a significant RF component (essentially, we were doing wireless networking in 1986 - like wifi about 10 years early). All of the digital & software folks were youngish - 20s, 30s. But the RF guys were all in their 50s or older.

GrumpyYoungMan 6mo ago

> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..." At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

girvo 6mo ago
> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession. I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me... More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying to: I miss doing firmware engineering. Gosh that is so much fun.
- qazxcvbnmlp 6mo ago
  I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.
  - girvo 6mo ago
    Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up. The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there. But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.
    - sitzkrieg 6mo ago
      i’m sure all auditing and qa reasons for human in the loop firmware development will magically go poof soon as well

amelius 6mo ago

Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.

mikestorrent 6mo ago
And now we're actively making this worse by not hiring juniors to learn from us while we're still able to take on apprentices. What could go wrong?
sleepycat801 6mo ago
A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff). China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".

chromacity 6mo ago

There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.

drtz 6mo ago

I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least. Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge.

superxpro12 6mo ago
It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company. The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team. It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team. At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection systems that increased our compile times from 10 seconds to over 600.... And we STRUGGLED to get our issue escalated because "it was a software problem" and the hardware team didnt really care about anything other than hardware issues. Like imagine grinding an entire division to a halt, and not even raising that concern. Thats a Tier1 issue. It took over a month to get a workaround in place. IT wasnt ever really fixed. We were just told "youre not important enough so youre gonna have to deal with 3x compile times. tough"
- pjc50 6mo ago
  I've observed this as well, that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen. The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this. But software in general - well, in America - got pulled up into the stratosphere by FAANG money. I feel that should have had more of an effect than it did on non-software orgs.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    > The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this. I’m still so dumbfounded by this. It’s almost 20 years since NVidia introduced CUDA. Developer tooling / experience appears to be something AMD does not understand, for some reason.

CamperBob2 6mo ago

What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?

mikestorrent 6mo ago
I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  If this was the US (and depending on how long ago) there is a federal requirement to have all the relevant MSDS printed out in binders on a shelf somewhere accessible to the rank and file. Those list PPE requirements and safe exposure limits among other things. Not that anyone ever bothers to read them.
- CamperBob2 6mo ago
  Oh, yeah, a board house is a dark Satanic mill if there ever was one. But it's not a place where RF engineers are going to clock in and out on a daily basis.

teleforce 6mo ago

> I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback. I cannot disagree more. Actually the synergy of software and hardware (primarily due to the increasing popularity of electromagnetics EM spectrums sensing like Radar/LIDAR/mmWave/THz/etc compared to sound) will create unprecedented beyond human perception and intelligence embodied and enhanced by physical AI. Heck the EXG sensings including ECG/EMG/EEG/etc that are technically part of EM, are now generating hundreds of papers/patents/articles everyday in which this product/patent/paper by Meta and its subsidiary CTRL-labs is only the tip of the iceberg [1],[2]. Please check my other comments for more contexts. [1] A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction (Nature article): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w [2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306

Pay08 6mo ago
Not to mention the various manufacturing nationalisation initiatives by the USA, EU, etc. And while it's a scant hope after Covid, maybe American investment culture will calm down and software engineering ceases to be so overvalued.

TheBog 6mo ago

A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.

colechristensen 6mo ago
everyone retiring doesn't mean pay or culture is actually going to improve

tamimio 6mo ago

It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I applied before for a radar engineer and while interviewing it turned out they just procure radars, not building and designing), or a hardware role but requires a deep expertise in a very specific area that hard to acquire unless you are in the industry like some roles in AMD or Intel. But I always loved hardware more than software, and way before AI or even neo-tools like github and git existed, maybe because software is basically writing and I am not fan of writing in general, while hardware it’s more of component based logical thinking, who knows, but if I managed to get into the hardware I would definitely do.

guzfip 6mo ago
[dead]

saargrin 6mo ago

on the other hand you produce stuff in the real world and not some hidden UX button nobody ever uses so theres that