Hola Peoplez: Hardware VS Software. Yep

Salmarnir wrote:I have school Monday/Thursday, college ftw

Eagle Eye307 wrote:

Salmarnir wrote:I have school Monday/Thursday, college ftw

Lucky... This semester I have an advanced math class every day of the week. Plus four other classes.

Discrete Math (Set Theory) on M/W/F and Calculus 3 on T/Th. I also have Digital Logic and Data Structures which all involve a lot of math.

FlareonMaster wrote:This year at Full Sail my schedule is one class per month online, 4 days a week (and extended time if necessary during that week) and will remain like this until next August/September. Which is when I will have five day a week classes (also only one class a month) on campus and roughly four hours a day and an additional two-four hours of lab time depending.

I am quite excited about this. First class is Behavioral Science. Going to campus in the morning for the tour!

Eagle Eye307 wrote:

FlareonMaster wrote:This year at Full Sail my schedule is one class per month online, 4 days a week (and extended time if necessary during that week) and will remain like this until next August/September. Which is when I will have five day a week classes (also only one class a month) on campus and roughly four hours a day and an additional two-four hours of lab time depending.

I am quite excited about this. First class is Behavioral Science. Going to campus in the morning for the tour!

Nice! I wish I could take my classes one at a time in a condensed form. I'm bad at multitasking...

FlareonMaster wrote:Dude!! I went to the campus today for the full behind the scenes tour and it is so amazing! You would honestly love it here at Full Sail! So awesome haha Peter Jackson was here recently to talk to the students as well!

Eagle Eye307 wrote:

FlareonMaster wrote:Dude!! I went to the campus today for the full behind the scenes tour and it is so amazing! You would honestly love it here at Full Sail! So awesome haha Peter Jackson was here recently to talk to the students as well!

Sweet, sounds pretty awesome.

TerseRat5204 wrote:Did you got to bubba gumps at universal? It's worth visiting

Dovahkiin wrote:yep also wanted to go there too but just didnt have the chance lol.


maybe ill go to botched next time.

Stormageddon, Dark Lord wrote:Hardware > software

Software Engineer is like a middle Management whereas Hardware Engineer is like the blue collar workers. Not a good analogy.

It's up to you and how you feel working with electronics, parts, components, in a hands-on environment much like an inventor whereas Software tends to be more intense on the brain having to think more about scripting and sitting at a desk staring at a screen 16 hours a day (7 days a week), than putting "lego" together..

I've done programming for about 15 years but in different fields, not even an expert even though I did achieve Distinction in Visual Basics (Dip IT), much of that knowledge goes by the wayside in todays' environment. I've done javascript. VB6, HTML, VBA for Ofice, but those sorts of things are just the tip of the iceberg, Software Engineer would most likely be for making machines work, or writing full programs for an industry rather than just a program for a small retail oufit.

You'd need to go talk with the people in the industry to actually understand and appreciate the work involved.


Edit -
I'd just like to add than many software developers (and programmers) do tend to forgo Error Handling which is a big problem in the final product (patches, updates etc) so if you are keen to learn programming languages and software development, try not to use terms like
"On Error got to 0", handle the expected (or unexpected) error as it should be done.

The problem with error handling is that it does add about an hour or so to the scripting (sometimes days for extra large scripts) and the file size can, at times, more than double (sometimes 10 times larger in size than the original scripting) what would otherwise be a small executable. But that's programming for you, either you do it well the first time or do it badly and add patches and updates.

This is why hardware engineers secretly despise software engineers. Here's the low-down, this software engineering guy has no idea was real hardware engineering is. Most sophisticated electronics are made as INTEGRATED CIRCUITS which means that everything is manufactured at the nano scale and you can fit a lot of transistors into a small area. All that is done on the computer. There is a huge design cycle that goes on between Specifications, Architecture, Logic Design, Circuit Design, Layout, Floorplanning, Verification, Timing, Signal Integrity, and more. It's very exciting but a very difficult field to get into because it REQUIRES an advanced degree 90% of the time.

This lego [CENSORED BUT ORIGINALLY ACCURATE] he's describing is DISCRETE CIRCUITS with DISCRETE COMPONENTS. Outside of power delivery or analog circuitry that's not how things are done. Any and all digital circuits today are being made on INTEGRATED CIRCUITS. Again, it's a lot of CAD and signal timing. Something software engineers would know nothing about.

Software engineering on the other hand is truthfully not that hard. Even hardware engineers design most of the chip functions using programming languages like Verilog and VHDL. Software engineers act like their job is so hard, but in my experience I NEVER found a programming course to be difficult. Most of the world's best software companies were started by college dropouts. The hard part about software is the rapid rate of change. There's hundreds of programming languages and more being added all the time. An employer might ask that you know about XYZ coding language but you only have experience with A, B, C. It never ends and thus was never appealing to me at least. The actual coding part is not that hard and something I COULD DO in my sleep. 50% coding 50% testing, guess which part doesn't usually get done?

Eagle Eye307 wrote:I agree that the first guy doesn't really understand hardware engineering. He even admits in his post that he has only worked with extremely high level programming languages (in fact, I wouldn't even call HTML and Javascript programming languages). Also based on his post, I would guess that he doesn't have much experience with top down design, which can and should be applied to both hardware and software engineering. So I doubt that he even understands what it means to be a software engineer, which is a lot more than a code monkey. In my opinion the fields really aren't that different in the sense that you are designing and implementing a system to accomplish specific tasks. You must have good logic and problem solving skills to be successful at either job. However, you will get more sub-par programmers since it's a lot easier to get into software development than it is hardware (meaning that as a hardware engineer your options are mostly limited to large companies that expect certain educational standards to be met, whereas any bloke with a computer can start typing code). So in many cases "code monkeys" who haven't had formal training will give programmers a bad name because they haven't taken the time to learn proper practices and techniques. In my opinion, good hardware engineers will understand the basics of software and good software engineers will understand the basics of hardware.

With regard to the line about coding being easy and how he could do it in his sleep, I would say it all depends on what he's coding. If it's something trivial like a basic data structure or a GUI (which is just time consuming, not logically challenging) then sure, it's a piece of cake. But I would like to see him program a cutting-edge artificial intelligence or a dynamic path-finding algorithm so easily. It's not learning/writing code that's hard, it's the problem solving. Software engineers aren't paid for their knowledge of C++, but rather for the solution of complex problems. Coding is just a tool they use to get their jobs done.

Eagle Eye307 wrote:(meaning that as a hardware engineer your options are mostly limited to large companies that expect certain educational standards to be met, whereas any bloke....

bloke