I was one of those semiconductor guys for about 15 years but now I am in the retirement phase.
I worked for Motorola, Freescale, Canon and Qualcomm. Did the FPGA stuff at Canon.
Believe it or not they let people in all the time. And they let you back in. I got my Qualcomm gig after ~2 years of being out of tech entirely.
I reckon it's because of that crappy tooling thing you mentioned. Years later and nothing has really changed hence I was ready to jump back in pretty easily. Things haven't really changed in 10 years IMO. Tools vendors just pump out the same crap.
I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special.
The main point is the engineering aspect:
You start with the problem then weigh up the pros and cons of each solution. Most problems require a specialist in the domain. E.g. DSP, Image processing, telecommunications. Stuff that requires fast computations at low level. That can be a way for outsiders to get in. They learn the HW stuff as they go.
Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.
> I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special.
It's more the nature of the work. I want to work on hardware, but not for a defense contractor again. I'm reasonably good at the CS-ey stuff I'm doing now, but I don't really like it. I like making physical devices do things.
> Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.
Until four weeks ago I had never done any serious web dev, and NLP was just the first escape path that presented itself when I desperately wanted out of a defense contractor black hole. I am, fundamentally, a signal processing engineer. Even when I was doing real-time radar code nobody wanted to talk to me.
Believe it or not they let people in all the time. And they let you back in. I got my Qualcomm gig after ~2 years of being out of tech entirely.
I reckon it's because of that crappy tooling thing you mentioned. Years later and nothing has really changed hence I was ready to jump back in pretty easily. Things haven't really changed in 10 years IMO. Tools vendors just pump out the same crap.
I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special.
The main point is the engineering aspect: You start with the problem then weigh up the pros and cons of each solution. Most problems require a specialist in the domain. E.g. DSP, Image processing, telecommunications. Stuff that requires fast computations at low level. That can be a way for outsiders to get in. They learn the HW stuff as they go.
Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.