I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did.
You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far far more than a laptop. Information is much more sparse so being around knowledgeable others is often critical.
The industry is packed with grey beards, I'm often the youngest guy by 20 years in customer meetings.
Maybe things will change now that we're in a period of uncertainty, but I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.
I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least.
Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge.
It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company.
The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team.
It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team.
At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection systems that increased our compile times from 10 seconds to over 600.... And we STRUGGLED to get our issue escalated because "it was a software problem" and the hardware team didnt really care about anything other than hardware issues.
Like imagine grinding an entire division to a halt, and not even raising that concern. Thats a Tier1 issue. It took over a month to get a workaround in place. IT wasnt ever really fixed. We were just told "youre not important enough so youre gonna have to deal with 3x compile times. tough"
I've observed this as well, that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen. The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this.
But software in general - well, in America - got pulled up into the stratosphere by FAANG money. I feel that should have had more of an effect than it did on non-software orgs.
> The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this.
I’m still so dumbfounded by this. It’s almost 20 years since NVidia introduced CUDA. Developer tooling / experience appears to be something AMD does not understand, for some reason.
20 years ago is also the time frame for when AMD acquired ATi (who IIRC were 99% on gaming graphics), and AMD was floundering in the following decade. They made the choice to prioritize the CPU side of the business, but on the GPU graphics/compute side it's hard to see that they've got much vision for how they want to steer the future to go and the ability to make that happen with their partners.
It might be related to patent portfolios. AMD might be reluctant to pursue something that can step on Nvidia's minefield. OTOH, you mention developer experience, and it'd be wonderful to have something less developer hostile than CUDA.
I remember my feelings when I learned how to use the Cell's SPUs and how much I didn't want to touch it with a barge pole after that.
> that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen
I noticed that with mainframes and banks.
IBM makes some really amazing hardware at the very top of the market, but the companies who own those machines don't seem to think any competitive advantage can come from them - they are the cost of doing business. Because of that, the mainframe teams are often neglected.
I would even be happy to write code on the least sexy language ever invented, COBOL, just so it could run on the sexiest hardware ever built.
> despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry in engineering difficulty and technical knowledge
RF engineering, in particular, is punishing. The subject is viciously hard (you think shared mutable state is hard? Ha!) and, as people pointed out, for most companies, hardware engineering is considered a cost sink, not a revenue driver, something to be avoided if possible. The only parts where it's not is where companies do vertical integration instead of external suppliers.
I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.
I also started in embedded development at a company where there was a significant RF component (essentially, we were doing wireless networking in 1986 - like wifi about 10 years early). All of the digital & software folks were youngish - 20s, 30s. But the RF guys were all in their 50s or older.
> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.
I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me...
More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying to: I miss doing firmware engineering. Gosh that is so much fun.
I remember my Apple II days (different platform, similarly constrained environment) where every game had a hard real-time multitasking core under all the code. In the Apple II it was particularly critical, because you didn't have programmable sound generators - you had to programmatically change the voltage of the speaker. If you were really crazy, you could do PWM and expect the electronics of the board would coerce your output square wave into something pleasant.
It never worked well, but it was still super cool.
I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.
Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up.
The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there.
But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.
> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!".
For personal stuff? Sure.
But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.
Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.
> how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession
There will always be people who work to pay the bills, not to answer some inner call. I am happy - don't tell my boss, but I would do my work for free, including meeting users and extracting requirements (some colleagues say I'd be a master interrogator in another universe).
I could say the same, ee graduate who majored in telecom/RF but there was no work in it (or rather nobody wanted to hire a graduate). I did get hired into power electronics, but the work they needed was in software. Since then it has been redundancies every few years, through automotive application development, some audio visual, and even dev-ops.
The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.
A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.
There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.
It’s funny because I always tried to go into hardware side but I get pulled into the software or software and integration. I got myself learning fpga and pcb and all, tried to get into an exclusive hardware role, never got the chance, it also make things worse if you are in Canada since hardware opportunities aren’t that much, and either they have the hardware title but all you do is barely designing (for example, I applied before for a radar engineer and while interviewing it turned out they just procure radars, not building and designing), or a hardware role but requires a deep expertise in a very specific area that hard to acquire unless you are in the industry like some roles in AMD or Intel. But I always loved hardware more than software, and way before AI or even neo-tools like github and git existed, maybe because software is basically writing and I am not fan of writing in general, while hardware it’s more of component based logical thinking, who knows, but if I managed to get into the hardware I would definitely do.
I kinda want to join such a company as a software guy, but I really can’t take a 50% pay cut. This is really sad! Have always wanted to work at places that can grow very solid engineering cultures.
> I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.
I cannot disagree more.
Actually the synergy of software and hardware (primarily due to the increasing popularity of electromagnetics EM spectrums sensing like Radar/LIDAR/mmWave/THz/etc compared to sound) will create unprecedented beyond human perception and intelligence embodied and enhanced by physical AI. Heck the EXG sensings including ECG/EMG/EEG/etc that are technically part of EM, are now generating hundreds of papers/patents/articles everyday in which this product/patent/paper by Meta and its subsidiary CTRL-labs is only the tip of the iceberg [1],[2].
Please check my other comments for more contexts.
[1] A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction (Nature article):
Not to mention the various manufacturing nationalisation initiatives by the USA, EU, etc. And while it's a scant hope after Covid, maybe American investment culture will calm down and software engineering ceases to be so overvalued.
Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.
A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff).
China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".
These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.
Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.
You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.
I think the real deciding factor is government policy. So far they have favored software and services companies, letting them eat the lunch of the hardware producers.
The reality is that software is valued like it is hardware, but has a teeny fraction of the input costs and running costs. The government didn't have to do anything, investors naturally ran to the software "copy+paste" money printer. Build it once with only labor costs and then copy for nothing infinite times.
To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
The government heavily revised and reinterpreted patent law many times in favor of software companies starting in the 80s. Otherwise hardware companies would have the only real moat since, as you say, software is relatively cheap and fast to produce.
There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living.
You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.
I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....
If this was the US (and depending on how long ago) there is a federal requirement to have all the relevant MSDS printed out in binders on a shelf somewhere accessible to the rank and file. Those list PPE requirements and safe exposure limits among other things. Not that anyone ever bothers to read them.
There was never a decline in RF engineering demand, it's actually going up massively. But not in the US, Canada, Sweden... all the work is in China.
It will actually be impossible to catch up with China on RF unless the US and Europe legislate for IP (not manufacturing!) to originate in the West. No Huawei 5G, no cheap Chinese SDN/ethernet, etc. Core switching and 5/6G edge. Remove patent protection for 5G designs.
I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or sites that go into detail about this fascinating field?
While not an RF book per se, High Speed Digital design does a great job of spanning the gap from EE undergrad to the basics of RF as it relates to digital design. I'd also recommend brushing up on more advanced E&M, eg T{E,M} modes and antenna design if you haven't looked at them in a while
Going into the RF field myself, I've been troubled with the license costs of tools like HFSS and CST. After a brief test of the open source tool OpenEMS I've landed firmly on the newer open source tool EMerge (https://github.com/FennisRobert/EMerge). It's a little rough around the edges still as it was released in the fall. But I've already gotten good results from it designing my own RF hardware.
Apart from that I wonder how much of the resurgence can be traced back to more active conflicts around the world? There is a booming Drone and EW development within the military sector which could be what drives it?
On the military front, the US has pressured allies to spend more GDP on weapons. Most countries have realised that as domestic industrial policy, rather than shell out foreign exchange for (cost ineffective) US made equipment.
Definitely solid enough to be useful. I'm about to print my second set of RF PCB's based on the simulations with it. There are still some quirks where you have to read the manual a couple of times until the right order of commands "clicks". But there are good examples that can be followed and they seem to be expanded all the time.
I don't know that I agree with the article's point about stagnation ("quiet, non-evolving field") as there have been plenty of new developments in the 2010s and 2020s, but speaking as someone who hires RF engineers of various sorts, the hiring market is definitely heating up. As the article points out, space seems to be the main driver by a huge margin, with Amazon especially as well as SpaceX hiring a ridiculous number of folks directly and then the second-order LEO military applications pushing a boom on that side as well. Apple has affected the hiring on the handset baseband side some too, but nowhere near as much as space.
This article also needs a huge (in the US) disclaimer on it as Europe, especially, has had a boom in automotive components and vehicle telemetry in recent years and obviously a lot of consumer devices and handset stuff comes out of China now.
Does a hiring boom result in entry-level positions being made available or is it just going to lead to higher salaries for those already in the industry?
Unfortunately for us software types, somebody with an EE degree can go into software and then pivot back into RF engineering. I doubt that somebody with a CS degree could (as in, I think they'd be intellectually capable of it, but they'd never get hired).
As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO
i have done firmware development, pcb design and light ee work and basic rf and antenna design professionally with zero degrees. like anything else it’s a matter of getting your foot in the door first, then outperforming the academic nerds with zero experience
I took a bunch of RF / coms classes during my MSEE. Those were some of the hardest for me to learn - and we were few students. Never more than 10, but usually in the 3-5 range depending on how "general" the classes were, with microwave engineering being the biggest class.
Do undergrad EEs get work as RF engineers? Again, when I went to school, so many of the RF classes were mostly grad school classes, or at very minimum last year undergrad classes. I personally did not have any during undergrad. So many prereq courses.
Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from the start. Still learning/new to writing more publicly so knowing where the framing didn't land is super helpful for me going forward
You're right, and Hubble Network (https://hubble.com) is proof. We make commodity Bluetooth LE chips talk to satellites. That required antenna design and link budget work no software abstraction would fix.
Hubble does the deep RF work so that firmware engineers building IoT devices never have to.
> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field.
Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?
Isn't the issue that this kind of RF is a lot like designing CPUs? There aren't many economically viable products that don't just use a COTS highly integrated circuit, so there aren't that many full on design jobs to go along with all the usage.
The product work is higher level system packaging, such as antennas and application-level manipulation of the whole RF block. But since so much is digital now, that is more software/computer architecture work rather than RF. The COTS RF circuit itself may have standardized serial or even packet interfaces to the rest of the product.
> Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space -
Lots of RF devices doesn't actually mean much RF engineering.
If you want 5G connectivity almost everyone buys an integrated module. Chip, antenna, and certifications included. No serious RF engineering required, no RF engineer in the building.
Those modules designers would be purchasing their chip from one of a few companies, like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Even then most of the work isn't RF engineering, it's stitching together a product and grinding through the certifications.
Much of the innovation is done away from the consumer space where certifications are less constraining.
Theres multiple duelling companies just in the class license antenna space. Like not even emitters, just designing compatible antennas for other peoples telco products.
Theres the whole thing where all the wigig chips that dell binned got upcycled into a companies flagship rf product.
Cambium v Ubiquiti has been an ongoing contest. Add Mikrotik in for good measure.
RF Elements is always trying to sell me something new.
Aviat has bought out NEC's famous flagship RF line, at least in terms of US distribution.
3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x predate their 8 years in aerospace. I worked on some of those 25 years ago. If you're not an EE, maybe you also didn't consider the lead time of working on HW to its adoption.
I agree with the author, certainly 5 years ago most things looked like a "solved problem". Huawei gave the telco equipment makers a run for their money with some interesting applications of SDR, but incumbents preferred trade barriers and export restrictions to competition. Even 5G was more of an optimisation of LTE than a revolution. Baseband over fibre is the only major innovation in that period which I can think of.
Was it? My memory is that there were GPS watches (e.g. Garmin) before GPS became common in phones. Wasn't the miniaturization already there by the time phones started integrating GPS?
It's all about power -- the computation required for processing the signal in the presence of noise, multi path fading etc. The RF part is not the limitation.
Radar improvements have also propagated to consumer fields. You can buy a mmWave presence sensor for smart home purposes for ~$40 on Amazon, and the raw sensors for $2-4 in bulk from Aliexpress. I remember seeing tech demos of mmWave in college used for imaging humans through tent fabric and dust storms, and now they're cheap enough you could put one in every room of your house.
It’s a big market but theres only a handful of use cases and R&D requirements, compared to military where the use cases and niche requirements are still continually evolving.
Mil systems have severely constrained supply chain limitations too, while consumer vehicle systems can comfortably be produced in their millions from China.
This is my recent comments on the new RF System-on-Module (SoM) assemblies [1].
If you want to venture or pivot into RF, especially from software background this is the golden time that's made possible/feasible by software-defined radio (SDR) technology as mentioned in the OP article.
One very important thing that the article did not mention is the emerging and increasing popularity of physical AI [2]. RF can be the crucial enabler to to further enhance human limited sensing capabilities with EM based waveforms. A simple analogy is how the dog's powerful smelling capabilities is helping/enhancing human detection capability.
Rather than just training and inferencing on image based I/O, the physical AI now can feed on the much richer RF, mmWave, THz and LIDAR raw waveforms. The good news is that the latter processing of mmWave, THz and LIDAR, can be greatly enhanced by the former lower RF baseband (modulated information signals) that's not previously possible/feasible.
[1] Comments on "ADSY1100-Series: RF System-on-Module Assemblies":
I've come full circle, and it is amazing how much has changed since I've last worked with anything in this field. Frequencies and a degree of precision and insight that you could have only dreamed of on a normal person's budget in the 80's are now easily attainable and combined with some knowledge of software there isn't a whole lot you can not do that you can think of, as long as it is physically possible and you have the time to spare to implement it. Still, it's hardware, and debugging is an order of magnitude harder than debugging software, so you have to prepare for that, as well as to make sure you get very close to being 100% right on your first try, respins in hardware are - unlike software - very expensive and can easily kill you. And in a way that's good, and it would be much better still if the software world was somehow forced to stop shipping halfbaked stuff.
RF seems to have been doing fine? Like you specifically mention telco, and I have been watching a steady stream of rf telco products and improvements released over just the last 15 years? You sort of skip straight to 5G ignoring everything up until that point.
Even as a dot point mentioning the whole WiGig -> IgniteNet thing? Is that not interesting to you?
>>> The underlying physics (electromagnetics, thermodynamics, materials science, manufacturing tolerances) don't reduce to algorithms. You have to build intuition for it, and that's not something you can shortcut.
It's such a dark art I think they will be bad for a long time, until someone invests in a giant corpus of simulated designs and some better spatial understanding in LLMs.
A basic RF design LLM good enough for low end work will kill the development of human talent, leading to an eventual crunch in lack of advanced skills.
I’m not sure how the unit counts relate to the idea that vastly more EEs will be required. Sure there is some overhead in scaling manufacturing but I doubt it requires that many more EEs whether your satellite or automotive fleet is 10 units or 1000.
SWE are paid that because the industry makes so much money off advertising, and it marks the market for everything else.
It's more business model than skillset, because RF engineering is, in many ways, so much more technically challenging.
People who care about pay should mostly be thinking about how their potential employers make money. Do they have fat variable margins? Is there volume? Do I have the opportunity to impact those margins in some way? If you do, there's a good chance you can make good money, regardless of the actual technical challenge at hand.
For a lot of RF engineering, the answers are generally no, at least enough such that the general market isn't getting set at a high clearing rate.
Hardware engineers can get paid that, although it’s rarer. That said, there’s also a much broader base of hardware engineers than just the Bay Area… so cost of living is a lot lower, therefore salaries don’t need to be as sky high to compensate.
Also for a student: I was at university 20 years ago and there was no possibility to "hack" RF devices.
Right now, with less than 200€ (a NanoVNA and a good SDR), you can do almost everything.
I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.
Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.
To just get started in RF you need to have a basic understanding of multivariate calculus, circuit analysis (including non-linear devices), systems and signals, electromagnetism, and semiconductor physics.
These are not topics you will just figure out on your own or "on the job".
I find it hard to see there being an alternative for the time being. I had access to tens of thousands of dollars of lab equipment during my EE degree. Probably worth the cost of tuition itself. Not to mention the commercial cost of simulation and cad software that we got for "free".
The other aspect is the professional engineering credentials. At least in Canada Engineering is a protected title. of which the easiest way to get your P.Eng is getting a degree through an accredited engineering program.
> Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck?
Yes. I think American society will struggle to produce enough competent electrical engineers outside of the university system.
> there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context
In my experience, very few people like learning the math needed to be competent at RF. It’s hard and exhausting and without a human connection most people are going to bounce. This isn’t like software where if you get it 80% right something still occurs.
I’ve worked with homeschoolers too, and unless they’re the small fraction of people for whom math comes naturally, they’re not going to study it on their own. But that’s exactly the audience one has to reach to grow the EE supply.
This person knows nothing about RF and is just another applications monkey. Without taking fields and waves you are at best a technician. Anyone who actually worked in defense knows that minicircuits is a notorious company that pays very poorly and has massive turnover. Many of the other defense/space RF subs are just the same. The author is just mangling all RF communications applications into one big ball. And of course the authors pathetic theory background means that RADAR is the only sensing application they "understand".
I never understand why posts like this do not start with explaining what they are talking about. I am not familiar with the abbreviation RF and I'm not going on a research quest to guess which one the author could mean.
Thanks. The early 2000s wants their joke back. And just like it was back then, it's still not funny, just rude.
My criticism still stands. If I know what I am searching for, it's easy to find. But often enough have I seen authors use terms which can have multiple meanings and I would need to look at their definitions in parallel of the context of the article, just to understand what it's even about. No thanks, I'll just pick the next HN post instead.