Re:How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)
by gluggymug on Friday April 17, 2015 @05:57PM
(#9397419)
Radar is a bit niche. Embedded signal processing SW might be a good avenue. Verification is another one.
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.
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.