Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxmdev | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why traditional hardware makers are still dragging their feet when it comes to investing in quality software that does justice to their physical products. By software I mean both firmware with extra functionality and clumsy companion apps.

It's like the idea that software and hardware need to work together and are equally important to the user experience gets lost somewhere along the way, making way for all sorts of design and logic bugs.

View on HN

Big companies are not rational.

Organizational inertia is very difficult to overcome. If you have a company that's grown for 30 years as a hardware company and as a result the whole management structure is filled with people who got to their positions by being good with hardware, it's very difficult for them to appreciate the importance of something like software with which they're unfamiliar. Some managers would even perceive raising the profile of a software group as a threat to their own power and influence and may even actively fight it.

It’s worse than that because even once the hardware engineers have identified software as a deficiency and decide that they need to start hiring some software people, it’s the hardware people who will hire the software people to begin with. Will they wind up with good software people? Who knows! Worse, the hardware people will usually be calling the shots and won’t see past their BOM cost. Will the hardware get a decent CPU? Probably not!

I have some experience working on SSD firmware development. My opinion is that is is a competitive low profit industry. It was always difficult to hire the right kind of engineers that want to work on firmware. A lot of the bright engineers coming out of college want to work on web apps, distributed computing, machine learning, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com