alt Hacker News> The reason for the "talent shortage" (aka "talent more expensive than we'd like") is really just because hardware design is a niche field that most people a) don't need to do, b) can't access because almost all the tools are proprietary and c) can't afford, outside of tiny FPGAs.
Mostly B. Even if you work in company that does both you'll rarely get a chance to touch the hardware as a software developer because all the EDA tools are seat-licensed, making it an expensive gamble to let someone who doesn't have domain experience take a crack at it. If you work at a verilog shop you can sneak in verilator, but the digital designers tend to push back in favor of vendor tools.
> digital designers tend to push back in favor of vendor tools.
Which is fair in my experience because Verilator has serious limitations compared to the other three - no 4-state simulation (though that is apparently coming!), no GUI, no coverage, UVM etc. UVM is utter shite tbf, and I think they are working on support for it.
Also it's much slower than the commercial simulators in my experience. Much slower to compile designs, and runtime is on the order of 3x slower. Kind of weird because it has a reputation for being faster but I've seen this same result in at least two different companies with totally different designs.
I gave up on Verilator support in a previous company when we ran into a plain miscompilation. There was some boolean expression that it simply compiled incorrectly. Difficult to trust with your $10m silicon order after that!
It's definitely nice that it doesn't require any ludicrously expensive licenses though.