It's more the nature of the work. I want to work on hardware, but not for a defense contractor again. I'm reasonably good at the CS-ey stuff I'm doing now, but I don't really like it. I like making physical devices do things.
> Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.
Until four weeks ago I had never done any serious web dev, and NLP was just the first escape path that presented itself when I desperately wanted out of a defense contractor black hole. I am, fundamentally, a signal processing engineer. Even when I was doing real-time radar code nobody wanted to talk to me.
Like any job, HW companies either want experienced people or grads to do the crap work. You need a related skill-set to go for experienced positions.
FPGA hobbyists are not considered to be experienced.
Believe it or not they let people in all the time. And they let you back in. I got my Qualcomm gig after ~2 years of being out of tech entirely.
I reckon it's because of that crappy tooling thing you mentioned. Years later and nothing has really changed hence I was ready to jump back in pretty easily. Things haven't really changed in 10 years IMO. Tools vendors just pump out the same crap.
I wouldn't worry about working for a HW company. The job is nothing special.
The main point is the engineering aspect: You start with the problem then weigh up the pros and cons of each solution. Most problems require a specialist in the domain. E.g. DSP, Image processing, telecommunications. Stuff that requires fast computations at low level. That can be a way for outsiders to get in. They learn the HW stuff as they go.
Stuff like web and NLP (Natural Language Processing I assume?) is a little bit too high level for most HW engineering work unfortunately.