Hacker News Reader

This describes my son's experience at Google exactly. He is a computer engineer with strong software and chip level design experience. He sought and was offered a hardware design job at Google. When he got there he was given a job writing python scripts to manage hardware, not the same thing at all. When he tried to change jobs, he was told he had to wait 18 months, so he quit.

View on HN

In all fairness, depending on his age, that's kind of how it goes. Hardware design is big money and long product cycles, you can't really just drop into a company and immediately starting masking out a new processor. Plus, computer engineers are (in my experience) pretty rare; you get a lot of electrical, and a lot of software. So they probably have a glut of coders, and a glut of semiconductor guys, but not a lot of 'bridge' people. If you can carve out a niche doing a bit of both, you become pretty valuable.

This is speaking as a comp eng. student who has gotten very little hands-on hardware experience. I've now worked two years doing pretty much exclusively software; the closest I got to real design was product verification and manufacturing support.

He is the 'bridge' person you speak of. He was only 30 but had about 15 years of professional software development experience. He spent 3 years at a startup developing highly parallel algorithms in C and implementing them in FPGAs resulting in commercial products. He said that in interviewing chip designers for his company that nearly all had no sense of algorithms. He felt that his software experience was a major strength in hardware design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com