FPGAs are where it’s at, and the job market is surprisingly pretty open right now. Everybody’s sleeping on them, everyone wants study CUDA cores or architecture or… ML hardware accelerators or whatever. If you can transition to RTL design or even silicon engineering, it’s a good industry to be in.
Now, me personally, I’ve never made the funny magic smoke come out from one of my FPGAs, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fucked up an entire pipeline because I thought a series of logic would take 3 cycles but really it took 2 and now my entire data path is wrong and somehow I missed it in simulation and now I’ve gotta rearchitect everything and running synthesis/P&R takes a goddamn century to run and this is like my 5th time programming my board and…
It’s been so long since I’ve touched RTL and the last time I used VHDL/Verilog was college.
I probably could get back into it, but I’d only be qualified as an entry level, and I’m 10 years into software industry making a comfortable salary, I don’t know that I could take the pay cut due to other life shit.
It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing, just being able to play pokemon all day with my son while I’m on PTO today makes it all worth it.
I wanted to work with FPGAs.
Got set up on designing test systems.
Now I do .Net and Angular.
I miss hardware from the standpoint that it really makes sense. I don’t miss hardware when the magic smoke comes out because I fucked up
i could never work in hardware. i’d feel too bad for all the very small people i’d be shoving in the computers
FPGAs are where it’s at, and the job market is surprisingly pretty open right now. Everybody’s sleeping on them, everyone wants study CUDA cores or architecture or… ML hardware accelerators or whatever. If you can transition to RTL design or even silicon engineering, it’s a good industry to be in.
Now, me personally, I’ve never made the funny magic smoke come out from one of my FPGAs, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fucked up an entire pipeline because I thought a series of logic would take 3 cycles but really it took 2 and now my entire data path is wrong and somehow I missed it in simulation and now I’ve gotta rearchitect everything and running synthesis/P&R takes a goddamn century to run and this is like my 5th time programming my board and…
It’s been so long since I’ve touched RTL and the last time I used VHDL/Verilog was college.
I probably could get back into it, but I’d only be qualified as an entry level, and I’m 10 years into software industry making a comfortable salary, I don’t know that I could take the pay cut due to other life shit.
It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing, just being able to play pokemon all day with my son while I’m on PTO today makes it all worth it.