Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

atempleton.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 160 posts

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#111

Post by stingraycharles »

pjc50 wrote: post #108
superxpro12 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

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-softw…

> 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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#112

Post by varjag »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #61
girvo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

i’m sure all auditing and qa reasons for human in the loop firmware development will magically go poof soon as well

Quite so. There's literally no moat that can withstand a prospect of 10x cost cut.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#113

Post by rbanffy »

drtz wrote: post #39
WarmWash wrote: post #10

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 fa…

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 i…

> 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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#114

Post by rbanffy »

stingraycharles wrote: post #111
pjc50 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-softw…

> 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.

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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#115

Post by rbanffy »

pjc50 wrote: post #108
superxpro12 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

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-softw…

> 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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#116

Post by rbanffy »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28
WarmWash wrote: post #10

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 fa…

> " ...stuck with hardware out of passion... " At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

> 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).

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#117

Post by rbanffy »

girvo wrote: post #35
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " ...stuck with hardware out of passion... " At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

> 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…

> I miss doing firmware engineering.

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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#118

Post by tamimio »

WarmWash wrote: post #10

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 fa…

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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#119

Post by keyringlight »

stingraycharles wrote: post #111
pjc50 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-softw…

> 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.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#120

Post by manwe150 »

rbanffy wrote: post #114
stingraycharles wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

If that is the only issue, any initial CUDA patents will be expiring now
Post reply on HN