In all fairness, depending on his age, that's kind of how it goes. Hardware design is big money and long product cycles, you can't really just drop into a compa

In all fairness, depending on his age, that's kind of how it goes. Hardware design is big money and long product cycles, you can't really just drop into a company and immediately starting masking out a new processor. Plus, computer engineers are (in my experience) pretty rare; you get a lot of electrical, and a lot of software. So they probably have a glut of coders, and a glut of semiconductor guys, but not a lot of 'bridge' people. If you can carve out a niche doing a bit of both, you become pretty valuable. This is speaking as a comp eng. student who has gotten very little hands-on hardware experience. I've now worked two years doing pretty much exclusively software; the closest I got to real design was product verification and manufacturing support.