akislev: I think you paint with too broad a brush - I've worked as a chip designer, embedded systems programmer, kernel hack - it really depends on the team - a

akislev: I think you paint with too broad a brush - I've worked as a chip designer, embedded systems programmer, kernel hack - it really depends on the team - also most chip teams I've worked with have been relatively young (most in their 20s)- most big silicon projects depend on good version control software because you are doing continual integrations and practice tapeouts through the last half of a project - you may have 2-3 different versions of the code you're working on passing through different portions of the process at any one time As the guy on the chip team who understood software well (or the guy on the software team who understood the gates) I do think there's a somewhat different issue that has to do with schedules: as a chip designer you get to do maybe 1 month a year of creative design and 11 months meeting timing and making damn sure that silicon will really work the first time - by the time you tape out you're really looking forward to that creative bit and about the time you've up to your armpits in it the silicon comes back and the firmware guys are doing bringup - you don't have a lot of time for the firmware guys because they're getting in the way of the cool part of your job, and besides you are sooo done with that chip you slaved over last year I don't know what the answer is other than making sure you have firmware running on your logic simulator long before tapeout (you should be doing that anyway)