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One of the biggest problems is how insular and impenetrable that community is. The FPGA community, and to a certain extent the entire semiconductor industry, s

One of the biggest problems is how insular and impenetrable that community is. The FPGA community, and to a certain extent the entire semiconductor industry, seems to have a prescribed path for engineers. First, you get an electrical or computer engineering degree with a couple internships at semiconductor companies. Then, you get a junior role at one of those companies where you are mentored by senior engineers, who pass on the black arts of chip design, tool usage, Verilog/VHDL quirks, and such. You slowly move up the ranks, either at your first company or another semiconductor company, until you are the senior engineer mentoring new grads. Then you retire. Any deviation from this path and you're screwed. You don't come into this clique from the outside, and they won't let you back in if you move too far away. It has resulted in a negative feedback loop: this attitude is bolstered by how odd, archaic, and inaccessible the tooling is, but also serves to keep different approaches out and keep the tooling odd, archaic, and inaccessible. Disclaimer: I'm a disgruntled EE and systems software developer who gets a steady stream of pings for web and NLP dev jobs but can't get the time of day from a hardware company.

frozenport 12y ago
This is non-sense, consider the thousands of self taught FPGA programmers in Asia.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  I was not aware there were thousands of self-taught FPGA programmers in Asia. Even accounting for that: a) I'll wager most are using pirated software; b) that number pales in comparison to the billions of people and millions of self-taught programmers in Asia; c) they still have a snowball's chance in hell of working for or otherwise influencing Western hardware companies.
gluggymug 12y ago
I was one of those semiconductor guys for about 15 years but now I am in the retirement phase. I worked for Motorola, Freescale, Canon and Qualcomm. Did the FPGA stuff at Canon. Believe it or not they let people in all the time. And they let you back in. I got my Qualcomm gig after ~2 years of being out of tech entirely. I reckon it's because of that crappy tooling thing you mentioned. Years later and nothing has really changed hence I was ready to jump back in pretty easily. Things haven't really changed in 10 years IMO. Tools vendors just pump out the same crap. I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special. The main point is the engineering aspect: You start with the problem then weigh up the pros and cons of each solution. Most problems require a specialist in the domain. E.g. DSP, Image processing, telecommunications. Stuff that requires fast computations at low level. That can be a way for outsiders to get in. They learn the HW stuff as they go. Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special. It's more the nature of the work. I want to work on hardware, but not for a defense contractor again. I'm reasonably good at the CS-ey stuff I'm doing now, but I don't really like it. I like making physical devices do things. > Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately. Until four weeks ago I had never done any serious web dev, and NLP was just the first escape path that presented itself when I desperately wanted out of a defense contractor black hole. I am, fundamentally, a signal processing engineer. Even when I was doing real-time radar code nobody wanted to talk to me.
  - gluggymug 12y ago
    Radar is a bit niche. Embedded signal processing SW might be a good avenue. Verification is another one. Like any job, HW companies either want experienced people or grads to do the crap work. You need a related skill-set to go for experienced positions. FPGA hobbyists are not considered to be experienced.

frozenport 12y ago

This is non-sense, consider the thousands of self taught FPGA programmers in Asia.

vonmoltke 12y ago
I was not aware there were thousands of self-taught FPGA programmers in Asia. Even accounting for that: a) I'll wager most are using pirated software; b) that number pales in comparison to the billions of people and millions of self-taught programmers in Asia; c) they still have a snowball's chance in hell of working for or otherwise influencing Western hardware companies.

gluggymug 12y ago

I was one of those semiconductor guys for about 15 years but now I am in the retirement phase. I worked for Motorola, Freescale, Canon and Qualcomm. Did the FPGA stuff at Canon. Believe it or not they let people in all the time. And they let you back in. I got my Qualcomm gig after ~2 years of being out of tech entirely. I reckon it's because of that crappy tooling thing you mentioned. Years later and nothing has really changed hence I was ready to jump back in pretty easily. Things haven't really changed in 10 years IMO. Tools vendors just pump out the same crap. I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special. The main point is the engineering aspect: You start with the problem then weigh up the pros and cons of each solution. Most problems require a specialist in the domain. E.g. DSP, Image processing, telecommunications. Stuff that requires fast computations at low level. That can be a way for outsiders to get in. They learn the HW stuff as they go. Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.

vonmoltke 12y ago
> I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special. It's more the nature of the work. I want to work on hardware, but not for a defense contractor again. I'm reasonably good at the CS-ey stuff I'm doing now, but I don't really like it. I like making physical devices do things. > Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately. Until four weeks ago I had never done any serious web dev, and NLP was just the first escape path that presented itself when I desperately wanted out of a defense contractor black hole. I am, fundamentally, a signal processing engineer. Even when I was doing real-time radar code nobody wanted to talk to me.
- gluggymug 12y ago
  Radar is a bit niche. Embedded signal processing SW might be a good avenue. Verification is another one. Like any job, HW companies either want experienced people or grads to do the crap work. You need a related skill-set to go for experienced positions. FPGA hobbyists are not considered to be experienced.