Culture. It permeates a company.<p>The CEO of a hardware company has often risen there from being a junior HW engineer or researcher. Same story for managers 1-2 steps down. They are often not competent to hire competent software people on their own. So how could they begin to change their company, even if they wanted to?<p>I think it&#x27;s asymmetric though:<p>1. Software people realize and accept that hardware construction is complex.<p>2. Many hardware people actually do seem to think that software construction is trivial in comparison to the what they do themselves.<p>Especially in SV I also sense a sort of resentment from HW engineers that SW people nowadays often get paid a lot better. (&quot;For creating dating apps.&quot;)<p>(One difference between software and hardware is that hardware people often have much &quot;higher&quot; academic credentials - quite a lot of them have PhD&#x27;s. Great software people often don&#x27;t even graduate from university. I could see how this could make the hardware people think less of the software people.)