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Comment by nickelpro | Hacker News Reader

Just like "software" is a huge field with a wide variety of technologies, payscales, opportunities, and niches, so it is hardware.

You wouldn't expect someone writing about the opportunities and lessons from the JavaScript/CSS frontend world to have a huge amount of insight into the work and opportunities of firmware developers.

So it is with hardware, and personally it frustrates me when software people think they can generalize about the "hardware" space because they printed a 4 layer with JLCPCB and now they know the "hardware" world and its ins and outs.

This post is about PCB design and fabrication. The equivalent would be if a hardware person spent a day banging their head against Azure Continuous Integration workflows and wrote a post entitled, "Lessons learned by a hardware guy venturing into software".

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As the author of the blog post, it’s disappointing to hear that you didn’t enjoy it. My article was never about claiming to be a hardware expert, but rather about sharing my personal experience as a newcomer for those interested.

What I find concerning is the unwelcoming attitude towards newcomers like myself, prevalent in some hardware and electronics communities. My critique in the article is directed at this exclusionary mindset. It’s important to remember that every expert started as a beginner, and a dismissive approach does not benefit the community. We all have unique contributions to make, and diminishing the experiences of newcomers isn’t constructive. Let’s focus on fostering a community where learning and growth are encouraged for everyone.

I think several of the slightly negative responses are because the article is about "creating a side project for a specific user segment...in a tiny market," plus discussion of business considerations, and the headline suggests something much broader.

The HN audience has folks from all aspects of hardware design, from architecture, to RTL coding, to physical design, or hobbyists programming FPGAs, etc., Saying "hardware was an entirely new world for me. I found it to be an unforgiving, harsh, complex terrain," just sounds wrong to them, like you're drawing conclusions about a huge field based on a narrow hobby project.

You seem to have set out to write an opinionated piece with a particular point of view, and said in your intro that you were going to be controversial, so you must have expected not everyone would agree with everything you said.

> Manufacturing Isn’t That Difficult

That’s literally one of your headings. You can’t hide behind the arrogance of the EE community when you say stuff like that, especially if you’re just ordering a four layer board from JLPCB. No offense but you didn’t manufacture anything - you did the equivalent of spinning up an EC2 instance via the web interface, installed nginx on it, and blogged about it as if you were a cloud architect. That tone permeates the post, despite the titular admission.

I would approach any professional community with much more humility. Especially when you’re still learning stuff like ”When assembling parts, you may face delays if some are unavailable.”

> I felt like using Amazon Web Services for the first time in 2006!

Literally I say that manufacturing is like using AWS in 2006…

As an EE/firmware engineer working in the field, don't listen to the naysayers. Just because it's not some 10 layer RF board doesn't mean it's not a rewarding project and a worthwhile product. For the record, the products we design and assemble in-house are only 4 layer boards, and our business is doing just fine.There's too much elitism in engineering. I think the article is awesome; you found out a lot of pain points that I deal with regularly. The only nitpick I have is that I wish more people were on the side of open source hardware than patents.

> I think the article is awesome; you found out a lot of pain points that I deal with regularly.

Imho the most valueable part of the article is between the lines: showing how many aspects are in play, how long the route from first experiments to shippable product can be.

The devil is in the details. And those details can differ a lot depending on project, expertise or suppliers. For example one pcb manufacturer may have very different capabilities, pricing structure or quality control than another. Picking suitable components is almost an art in itself. Etc etc.

I personally don't see a problem. Writing shouldn't be limited to experts, as long as person clearly identifies what it is and what it isn't. Both in the title and introduction of article it clearly says that it is experience of person who is new to field. Which to me implies that whatever they are saying should be taken with grain of salt and that they might not have exhaustive or fully accurate knowledge. It doesn't claim to be "ultimate reference book for everything hardware". That doesn't change the fact that that's experience they got as beginner. It's up to you decide whether reading beginners experience is useful to you.

On the other hand it also means that the problems person encountered are likely nothing extraordinary. And that it's something other beginners should watch out and further research, as they are likely to encounter similar challenges. Beginner articles can also be useful for those who have no idea where to start as means to gather keywords for further reading.

Having beginners share their experience might not be useful for most experts. But it can be helpful to highlight common pain points and areas of potential improvements for educators and people making tools.

Yeah, I think it's fine, and even very positive, to be sharing their view. However, I do agree with the sentiment that "hardware" used as a generalization is confusing. There are lots of different kinds of hardware and the article does not clarify it anywhere, although you can derive what they mean through the later descriptions. I had to re-read the intro once I had figured out what "hardware" meant.

Personally, I'm also a software engineer who ventured into hardware, and even am now professionally doing hardware design. I find that perspective worthwhile. But I am an ASIC engineer, which is a very different kind of hardware than PCB design or integrating ICs on a breadboard. The lessons and realities of each are different. So I would find it helpful if the post (and title) clarified what specific field was being discussed.

>> Asking an expert and getting explained is invaluable, but what I found particularly disheartening is the treatment of ‘noobs’ in amateur electronics forums. Being insulted when asking questions is not pleasant. I thought ego issues were unique to software development communities, but they were not. If you need to ask questions on the forums and you’re learning, you better have tough skin.

> So it is with hardware, and personally it frustrates me when software people think they can generalize about the "hardware" space because they printed a 4 layer with JLCPCB and now they know the "hardware" world and its ins and outs.

You appear to be who he is complaining about. I'm an embedded dev, and what he wrote isn't far off the mark - I see more inaccurate posts of about from software-only devs.

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