No, it didn't take a decade, that was just how long I did it for (before it got boring) - I just mean that you have to learn to think about parallelism in a different way, we train hardware engineers to do this but not software ones

So it eventually got boring for you. So... threads are a bad mental model for our brains? :P

Not sure what you mean by your statement that hardware engineers are trained to think differently about it. I am not sure there's much overlap between HW and SW engineers in terms of parallelism modelling. Do you have a few examples?

No, chip making got boring - essentially it's a month a year of doing fun creative stuff and 11 months a year making sure that it makes timing and is perfect before you tape out. When you're coding on the other hand you can get something new working every day. I chose to go back to software.

However having said that I find myself designing silicon again, change is good for the brain I guess

Hardware people tend to think in terms of netlists and pipelining so they have to worry about parallism on every clock