On the other hand it also means that the problems person encountered are likely nothing extraordinary. And that it's something other beginners should watch out and further research, as they are likely to encounter similar challenges. Beginner articles can also be useful for those who have no idea where to start as means to gather keywords for further reading.

Having beginners share their experience might not be useful for most experts. But it can be helpful to highlight common pain points and areas of potential improvements for educators and people making tools.

Personally, I'm also a software engineer who ventured into hardware, and even am now professionally doing hardware design. I find that perspective worthwhile. But I am an ASIC engineer, which is a very different kind of hardware than PCB design or integrating ICs on a breadboard. The lessons and realities of each are different. So I would find it helpful if the post (and title) clarified what specific field was being discussed.

What I find concerning is the unwelcoming attitude towards newcomers like myself, prevalent in some hardware and electronics communities. My critique in the article is directed at this exclusionary mindset. It’s important to remember that every expert started as a beginner, and a dismissive approach does not benefit the community. We all have unique contributions to make, and diminishing the experiences of newcomers isn’t constructive. Let’s focus on fostering a community where learning and growth are encouraged for everyone.

That’s literally one of your headings. You can’t hide behind the arrogance of the EE community when you say stuff like that, especially if you’re just ordering a four layer board from JLPCB. No offense but you didn’t manufacture anything - you did the equivalent of spinning up an EC2 instance, installed nginx on it, and blogged about it as if you were a cloud architect. That tone permeates the post.

I would approach any professional community with more humility.

Literally I say that manufacturing is like using AWS in 2006…

Imho the most valueable part of the article is between the lines: showing how many aspects are in play, how long the route from first experiments to shippable product can be.

The devil is in the details. And those details can differ a lot depending on project, expertise or suppliers. For example one pcb manufacturer may have very different capabilities, pricing structure or quality control than another. Picking suitable components is almost an art in itself. Etc etc.

The HN audience has folks from all aspects of hardware design, from architecture, to RTL coding, to physical design, or hobbyists programming FPGAs, etc., Saying "hardware was an entirely new world for me. I found it to be an unforgiving, harsh, complex terrain," just sounds wrong to them, like you're drawing conclusions about a huge field based on a narrow hobby project.

You seem to have set out to write an opinionated piece with a particular point of view, and said in your intro that you were going to be controversial, so you must have expected not everyone would agree with everything you said.

> So it is with hardware, and personally it frustrates me when software people think they can generalize about the "hardware" space because they printed a 4 layer with JLCPCB and now they know the "hardware" world and its ins and outs.

You appear to be who he is complaining about. I'm an embedded dev, and what he wrote isn't far off the mark - I see more inaccurate posts of about from software-only devs.