Ask HN: Is hardware engineering more stressful since bugs are not allowed?

4 points·amichail··3 comments

Would you get fired for an unintentional serious bug in a CPU?

Would you get fired for an unintentional serious bug in an operating system?

I want to imagine that hardware engineering follows better practices than software engineering:

- no stupid sprints

- no agile

So, if a new "feature" needs to be implemented at the hardware level, then all the time needed will be spent thinking about the problem, the design to be applied, the architecture of the design... and only when everything is crystal clear and all the relevant aspects have been assessed (performance, cost, efficiency, etc.) then the implementation can start. Compare that to the "sprint circus" software developers are part of: almost no time for long-term thinking, everything has to be done within the sprint (usually 2 weeks), "move fast and break things".

There is a reason why you don't see an abundance of 'hardware engineering bootcamps' or 'Learn electronic engineering in 24 hours' scam courses and why lots of formal verification, prototyping and testing is done before it is mass manufactured and to get that FCC number.

One bug in hardware for non-safety critical applications are just left there and a revision is done to replace its production. In the most serious cases, a bug in hardware inside a home appliance or safety critical component in a vehicle will trigger a re-call.

Nothing fun about that in HW engineering. Unlike the wild west of software engineering with all that Javascript.

Yes.

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