I was an FPGA dev at a trading shop and moved to software at big tech. Hardware development in trading is fairly unique in that it is more like software than anything else. At other companies, FPGA dev is not well-rewarded, and is treated a lot more like hardware than software. That leads to slow development cycles and project-based hiring/management, which make it very hard to treat the project like software.

In addition, lack of a standard library and bad tooling (buggy, slow compilers) makes developing simple things very difficult.

The same attributes that made me a good FPGA developer have also made me a good low-level software developer (x86 assembly doesn't hold a candle to FPGA dev in complexity), so I do that now.