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.
drtz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
scruple 4 hours ago [-]
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.
UncleOxidant 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
GrumpyYoungMan 3 hours ago [-]
> "...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.
girvo 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
qazxcvbnmlp 1 hours ago [-]
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.
girvo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bikelang 1 hours ago [-]
And then there’s those of us that loved writing software and loathe what AI has reduced it to.
teleforce 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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):
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.
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mikestorrent 8 minutes ago [-]
And now we're actively making this worse by not hiring juniors to learn from us while we're still able to take on apprentices. What could go wrong?
CamperBob2 27 minutes ago [-]
What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?
mikestorrent 9 minutes ago [-]
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....
markus_zhang 4 hours ago [-]
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.
uejfiweun 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dublinstats 3 hours ago [-]
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.
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
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.
0xffff2 4 hours ago [-]
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.
high_priest 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rhave 5 hours ago [-]
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?
Scene_Cast2 5 hours ago [-]
Oh interesting, I've heard of EMerge but haven't given it a try yet. Sounds like it's solid enough to be useful?
rhave 4 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
Mil is driving a lot of small and large radar development, electronic warfare weapons, RF communications, etc.
Then you have a lot of work being done on new WiFi standards, satellie antennas, cell network development, and so on.
Also companies like Tarana are building a lot of unique things.
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
Wow. Thank you.
drivebyhooting 7 minutes ago [-]
But when will RF engineering pay 500k (common mid level SWE)?
cactacea 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
saltcured 4 hours ago [-]
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.
willis936 34 minutes ago [-]
I'm not an RF insider, but RFSoCs and deep budgets are a thing. I don't really see this as a constraint.
If you are budget constrained then you just design your signal chain in discretes like everyone else.
loodish 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bigfatkitten 4 hours ago [-]
Even in defense, the advancements being made in fields like radar are incredible.
dTal 5 hours ago [-]
Bit older than 8 years but even cramming a working GPS reciever into a phone was a huge, nontrivial achievement.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
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?
amoshebb 4 hours ago [-]
Also ignoring the massive new market that has been automotive radars which, as a market, have totally eclipsed weapons
greggsy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
Anti-drone is sucking up a lot of time and money from a lot of people right now. Every country is looking for both defensive and offense tools.
Mil is huge
teleforce 1 hours ago [-]
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 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?
bri3d 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ambicapter 15 minutes ago [-]
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?
commandlinefan 3 hours ago [-]
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).
merlinq 4 hours ago [-]
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
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
There is an author comment that is invisible if you don't have showdead on in the thread below.
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.
The demand for electronic warfare specialists is growing.
abeppu 3 hours ago [-]
> RF was nowhere on my radar.
cue rimshot
TimorousBestie 5 hours ago [-]
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.
uejfiweun 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pryanbeng 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
RhysabOweyn 32 minutes ago [-]
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".
GrumpyYoungMan 2 hours ago [-]
In what way? RF test equipment is costly and so is building a home electronics lab.
TimorousBestie 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
4 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 00:09:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w
[2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306
To build a $100M software company you need 5 capable friends and a cloud account. To build a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
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?
Then you have a lot of work being done on new WiFi standards, satellie antennas, cell network development, and so on.
Also companies like Tarana are building a lot of unique things.
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?
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.
If you are budget constrained then you just design your signal chain in discretes like everyone else.
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.
Mil systems have severely constrained supply chain limitations too, while consumer vehicle systems can comfortably be produced in their millions from China.
Mil is huge
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":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821336
[2] What is physical AI?
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/physical-ai
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926755
Mostly, expensive tools became more accessible like TinySA, LiteVNA64 and NanoVNA.
For the amateur Ham hobby, it has been a bit of a golden age with <$50 rtl-sdr SDR kits. =3
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
cue rimshot
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.
These are not topics you will just figure out on your own or "on the job".
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.