There's always so much to talk about software engineers and hardware engineers.
The following is illustrative of the student's writing:
I personally understand the employment and industry prospects
Work normalcy
Now I am an intern at a top 100 software company that designs software for design hardware companies, and most of the work I do is software-biased, so I don't have a very deep sense of my own work normality. But from the perspective of my observation of colleagues around me and the communication with others, whether it is software or hardware, it is all about the computer.
Software engineers usually go to work to debug programs, and relatively low-level coders can only give senior software engineers a big hand, help them do testing, and implement the things they designed. Of course, only when you become a senior engineer can you have the ability to develop and design your own company's products. If you work at a startup company at a more intense pace, you may need to work overtime to debug if you catch up with the product to go live. When the program explodes, you may also need to call on (that is, if something suddenly goes wrong with the thing you are responsible for, your manager will call you directly and you have to go to the company to fix the bug immediately), at least I know that Amazon has this mechanism. I haven't done an internship at a pure hardware company yet, but from what I know, a hardware engineer is not going to have it easier than a software engineer. Hardware engineers also need to debug circuits, debug scripts, and have cross-work with software engineers anyway.
The work environment depends on the subdivided job category. It is estimated that the developers of FPGAs will sit in the office like coders, and those who are embedded in MEMS will be in the laboratory for a long time. Because most hardware companies are relatively mature and large, the pace of work is generally not as tense as in startups, but in companies like Huawei, that's a different story...... Of course, whether it is a software engineer or a hardware engineer, the work intensity should be higher than that of other professions in other industries. After all, the competition in this industry will become more and more fierce, and this is also where smart people gather. As for salary, on average, software engineers in the United States earn slightly more than hardware engineers (according to data from glassdoor and other portals), but software engineers also have low incomes, and hardware engineers also earn more than software engineers. As long as you're skilled, the salary doesn't matter.
Personal feelings
Looking at the subject's problem description, it is said that software engineers have a broader prospect. My personal feeling is that no matter what, there will be a lot of opportunities and challenges in the future for these two industries (see point 1 for detailed reasons). Whether it is software design or hardware design, there are more small branches (for example, whether you want to do VLSI, DSP, processor design, communication, FPGA development or embedded, software design, you want to do web development, app development, software development, embedded software engineer, operating system or distributed system).
Personally, I'm interested in both general directions, but I decided that my ultimate direction is embedded design and processor design, both of which should be sandwiched between pure hardware design and pure software design. In particular, the industry has higher requirements for embedded engineers, who can design their own Mixed Signal PCB, debug application code and write kernel code, and debug wireless communication, which basically means that a qualified embedded engineer must have enough knowledge of hardware and software related aspects.
I myself hate to do web development app pure software development work, because the threshold for these jobs is too low, and people who are not from a professional class may be able to mix much better than you, and they can't reflect their own value. I also like the feeling of holding the board and various components in my hands, and I find that I feel a higher sense of accomplishment when I can design a piece of hardware that can be used than I do after debugging. When you find that you have the ability to learn knowledge after you have undergone the training of the university, the rich online resources and your own accumulation will make it very easy for you to learn these web app knowledge, so I personally prefer the hardware underneath and the software field that deals with the hardware underneath. The courses of software and hardware will not be simple, and the workload of the two disciplines is not comparable to that of other disciplines (those who study engineering do project labs every day, and those who study statistics go home to watch movies after class.) Therefore, if you want to learn well, you still need to spend a certain amount of energy, especially the workload of engineering departments in American universities is increasing unabated compared with domestic universities. Make sure it's what you want, and then think about it.
The author is an American school student and anonymous user of Zhihu.
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