alt Hacker NewsI'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did.
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.
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I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.
> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."
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 see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.
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):
A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.
There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.
I kinda want to join such a company as a software guy, but I really can’t take a 50% pay cut. This is really sad! Have always wanted to work at places that can grow very solid engineering cultures.
Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.
These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.
What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?
I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least.
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.