Posted by merlinq 2 days ago
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
I remember my feelings when I learned how to use the Cell's SPUs and how much I didn't want to touch it with a barge pole after that.
I noticed that with mainframes and banks.
IBM makes some really amazing hardware at the very top of the market, but the companies who own those machines don't seem to think any competitive advantage can come from them - they are the cost of doing business. Because of that, the mainframe teams are often neglected.
I would even be happy to write code on the least sexy language ever invented, COBOL, just so it could run on the sexiest hardware ever built.
RF engineering, in particular, is punishing. The subject is viciously hard (you think shared mutable state is hard? Ha!) and, as people pointed out, for most companies, hardware engineering is considered a cost sink, not a revenue driver, something to be avoided if possible. The only parts where it's not is where companies do vertical integration instead of external suppliers.
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.
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.
I remember my Apple II days (different platform, similarly constrained environment) where every game had a hard real-time multitasking core under all the code. In the Apple II it was particularly critical, because you didn't have programmable sound generators - you had to programmatically change the voltage of the speaker. If you were really crazy, you could do PWM and expect the electronics of the board would coerce your output square wave into something pleasant.
It never worked well, but it was still super cool.
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.
For personal stuff? Sure.
But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.
Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.
There will always be people who work to pay the bills, not to answer some inner call. I am happy - don't tell my boss, but I would do my work for free, including meeting users and extracting requirements (some colleagues say I'd be a master interrogator in another universe).
The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.
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
[2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments):
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".
To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.
Apart from that I wonder how much of the resurgence can be traced back to more active conflicts around the world? There is a booming Drone and EW development within the military sector which could be what drives it?
I gave up on OpenEMS.
Then you have a lot of work being done on new WiFi standards, satellie antennas, cell network development, and so on.
Also companies like Tarana are building a lot of unique things.
This article also needs a huge (in the US) disclaimer on it as Europe, especially, has had a boom in automotive components and vehicle telemetry in recent years and obviously a lot of consumer devices and handset stuff comes out of China now.
Do undergrad EEs get work as RF engineers? Again, when I went to school, so many of the RF classes were mostly grad school classes, or at very minimum last year undergrad classes. I personally did not have any during undergrad. So many prereq courses.
Since you mentioned pySDR: `sdr` is a newer Python library I like https://github.com/mhostetter/sdr
Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.
Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?
The product work is higher level system packaging, such as antennas and application-level manipulation of the whole RF block. But since so much is digital now, that is more software/computer architecture work rather than RF. The COTS RF circuit itself may have standardized serial or even packet interfaces to the rest of the product.
If you are budget constrained then you just design your signal chain in discretes like everyone else.
Lots of RF devices doesn't actually mean much RF engineering.
If you want 5G connectivity almost everyone buys an integrated module. Chip, antenna, and certifications included. No serious RF engineering required, no RF engineer in the building.
Those modules designers would be purchasing their chip from one of a few companies, like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Even then most of the work isn't RF engineering, it's stitching together a product and grinding through the certifications.
Much of the innovation is done away from the consumer space where certifications are less constraining.
Theres the whole thing where all the wigig chips that dell binned got upcycled into a companies flagship rf product.
Cambium v Ubiquiti has been an ongoing contest. Add Mikrotik in for good measure.
RF Elements is always trying to sell me something new.
Aviat has bought out NEC's famous flagship RF line, at least in terms of US distribution.
Theres enough happening.
Mil systems have severely constrained supply chain limitations too, while consumer vehicle systems can comfortably be produced in their millions from China.
Mil is huge