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Hardware companies often find it very hard to competently build software.

They tend to lack appreciation/understanding of software in the first place (hardware-first thinking) leading to underinvestments.

It's also hard for them to identify great software people - at all levels, starting from the CEO/board.

Software developers, especially for certain type of components, e.g. compilers, are NOT easy to find out.

There's no such thing as hard to find. Only "I don't want to pay what they ask". Which is weird for a hardware company since you don't need that many and you only write the driver once, but you sell it with millions of devices.

They can start on GCC and LLVM mailing lists.

Writing VHDL/Verilog is much like writing software, however.