alt Hacker News* The fact that there are comments misunderstanding the article, that are talking about PCB Design rather than (Silicon) Chip Design, speaks to the problem facing the chip industry. Total lack of wider awareness and many misunderstandings.
* Chip design pays better than software in many cases and many places (US and UK included; but excluding comparisons to Finance/FinTech software, unless you happen to be in hardware for those two sectors)
* Software engineers make great digital logic verification engineers. They can also gradually be trained to do design too. There are significant and valuable skill and knowledge crossovers.
* Software engineers lack the knowledge to learn analogue design / verification, and there’s little to no knowledge-crossover.
* We have a shortage of engineers in the chip industry, particularly in chip design and verification, but also architecture, modelling/simulation, and low-level software. Unfortunately, the decline in hardware courses in academia is very long standing, and AI Software is just the latest fuel on the fire. AI Hardware has inspired some new people to join the industry but nothing like the tidal wave of new software engineers.
* The lack of open source hardware tools, workflows, high-quality examples, relative to the gross abundance of open source software, doesn’t help the situation, but I think it is more a symptom than it is a cause.
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> * The lack of open source hardware tools, workflows, high-quality examples, relative to the gross abundance of open source software, doesn’t help the situation, but I think it is more a symptom than it is a cause.
To this, I would point to librelane/yosys/TinyTapeout/waferspace and say there are quite a bit of opportunities to learn stuff and there are oss initiative trying to _do stuff_ in this field. I wouldn't know how it applies to the wider industry, but the ecosystem deff piqued my interest. I do write quite a bit of embedded systems in my day to day though, so I got a rough idea what is in a chip. Would love to have the time to dive deeper.
> The fact that there are comments misunderstanding the article, that are talking about PCB Design rather than (Silicon) Chip Design, speaks to the problem facing the chip industry. Total lack of wider awareness and many misunderstandings.
No, there is no misunderstanding. Even the US companies mentioned _in the very article_ that have both software and "chip design" roles (however you call it) will pay more to their software engineers. I have almost never heard of anyone moving from software to the design side, but rather most people move from design side to software which seems like the more natural path.
How does one pivot? It seems to me the job market demand is probably even more concentrated than the software market?
Are all positions onsite for these kind of jobs?
> * Chip design pays better than software in many cases and many places (US and UK included;
Where are these companies? All you ever hear from the hardware side of things are that the tools suck, everyone makes you sign NDAs for everything and that the pay is around 30% less. You can come up with counterexamples like Nvidia I suppose, but that's a bit like saying just work for a startup that becomes a billion dollar unicorn.
If these well paying jobs truly exist (which I'm going to be honest I doubt quite a bit) the companies offering them seem to be doing a horrendous job advertising that fact.
The same seems to apply to software jobs in the embedded world as well, which seem to be consistently paid less then web developers despite arguably having a more difficult job.