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Comment by Lind5 | Hacker News Reader

Software engineers looking for a job should consider the chip industry, which is not just about hardware engineers. Plenty of software engineer openings https://semiengineering.com/jobs/ and many are remote

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Are you speaking from experience? Almost all of the jobs at the page you linked are either not in the U.S. or require hardware education or experience. Most are not remote. Could you please describe the actual steps and timeline for, say, a frontend or backend web developer without an engineering degree to transition into one of those jobs?

Do you have strong CS fundamentals (generally acquired through university education) ? Because that stuff really matters if you want to work on stuff related to hardware

Most of the listings require past experience with hardware stuff, not just CS fundamentals. I'm seeing very little interest in hiring someone like an experienced React developer who just got laid off from FAANG. There's a big difference between being theoretically capable of doing a job, and having any reasonable chance of getting hired for that job.

eh if you were a senior at FB people will give you the benefit of the doubt in a lot of cases. If you're interested you should apply

why did you say CS fundamentals when it's clear that it should be computer architecture and instruction sets and compiler engineering, which are a very narrow and specific parts of CS and in fact are never the parts that people refer to (DS & algo) when they say CS fundamentals.

They're pretty closely tied together. If you have a strong background in algorithms you should be able to understand ISA's and compilers more easily. In the end its just algorithms all the way down

lol nice try

what do you mean by that lol

Software engineering in the chip industry always seemed like a completely and totally different thing to me. Knowledge of physics and nanoscale architecture and calculus and all kinds of stuff that I don't need to know just to create an online form on my webiste for people to fill out.

I don't know, maybe I have the wrong view, but it always seemed like that to me. I just do business software development because all it has is addition, subtraction, division, and muliplication, and percentages every once in a while. No way could I create a program for a hardcore physics app. Because you have to know physics. To some extent, anyways. Anything more than basic math, forget it. And I think most people at organizations like facebook, netflix, etc are more like me. Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be my bet.

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