Why hardware development is hard, part 1: Verilog is weird (2013)
I&#x27;ll throw in my opinion for this. The author states how its routine for people to be older in the Hardware Industry. I work as a Verification engineer for a CPU project.<p>From what I see, every company in this sector works off of years of experience. Even if you are god&#x27;s gift to the world of CPU design, the career options available to your are linked to the years you have worked.<p>I recently attended a presentation by ARM, where they boasted of this quote &quot;At ARM, we don&#x27;t really expect our graduates to be able to do anything until they&#x27;re about 2 years into their careers, at which point they&#x27;re expected to be decent at something&quot;<p>And they boasted of it! To a theater full of CS students. And this was a 35 year old line manager making the comment.<p>If you want a career where you can rise based on merit, and not the numbers of years on your CV, don&#x27;t pick hardware. I&#x27;ve seen it as an insider, the occasional &quot;kid&quot; comment being thrown around(ARM), designers refusing to work with junior verif staff(imagination tech), people who have written a project from scratch over 2 years not given tech lead roles as the project grew, etc.<p>Such an enviroment quite often bleeds younger engineers. It saps desire and motivation. Because there are so few startups, good practices don&#x27;t matter. Here&#x27;s some conversations I&#x27;ve had:<p>&quot;We don&#x27;t need to write tests for our software ISG, its a waste of time&quot;
&quot;What is wrong with me writing an extension to the software as a special case? It only executes that code if the username is me&quot;
&quot;We don&#x27;t do training for new people&quot;.<p>I routinely see younger engineers with 3-4 years of experience try and spin out of CPU&#x2F;Hardware and into Software.