I had to take computer architecture. We made a 4 bit CPU... or maybe it was 8 bit. I can't remember. But it was all in a software breadboard simulator thing. LogicWorks.

No shortage of talent. It's just that the big players are used to cheap almost minimum wage Taiwanese wages and refuse to pay the full price of an EE.

Even as a professional EE working on high speed digital and mixed signal designs (smartphones and motherboards), I used reference designs all the time, for almost every major part in a design. We had to rip up the schematics to fit our needs and follow manufacturer routing guidelines rather than copying the layout wholesale, but unless simulations told us otherwise we followed them religiously. When I started I was surprised how much of the industry is just doing the tedious work of footprint verification and PCB routing after copying existing designs and using calculators like the Saturn toolkit.

The exception was cutting edge motherboards that had to be released alongside a new Intel chipset but that project had at least a dozen engineers working in shifts.

> "CS majors could be taught to design hardware, and the EE curriculum"

"Electrical and Computer Engineering" (ECE) departments already exist and already have such a major: "Computer Engineering".

Weird article, came to it hoping to see if I could train into a new job. But instead it went on and on about AI for almost the entire piece. Never learned what classes I might need to take or what the job prospects are.

Working in EE post BSc in EE from 99-06, it's pretty much CS + I know how to bread board and solder if absolutely necessary.

A whole lot of my coursework could be described as UML diagramming but using glyphs for resistors and ground.

Robots handle much of the assembly work these days. Most of the human work is jotting down arbitrary notation to represent a loop or when to cache state (use a capacitor).

Software engineers have come up with a whole lot of euphemistic notations for "store this value and transform it when these signals/events occur". It's more of a psychosis that long ago quit serving humanity and became a fetish for screen addicts.

I know you said it in jest, but there is a strong justification for cross-feeding the two disciplines - on one side, we might get hardware that’s easier to program and, on the other end, we might get software that’s better tuned to the hardware it runs on.

> The reason for the "talent shortage" (aka "talent more expensive than we'd like") is really just because hardware design is a niche field that most people a) don't need to do, b) can't access because almost all the tools are proprietary and c) can't afford, outside of tiny FPGAs.

Mostly B. Even if you work in company that does both you'll rarely get a chance to touch the hardware as a software developer because all the EDA tools are seat-licensed, making it an expensive gamble to let someone who doesn't have domain experience take a crack at it. If you work at a verilog shop you can sneak in verilator, but the digital designers tend to push back in favor of vendor tools.

> is really just because hardware design is a niche field

Which doesn't pay as well as jobs in software do, unfortunately.

In fact I'll go further - in my experience people with a software background make much better hardware designers than people with an EE background because they are aware of modern software best practices. Many hardware designers are happy to hack whatever together with duck tape and glue. As a result most of the hardware industry is decades behind the software industry in many ways, e.g. still relying on hacky Perl and TCL scripts to cobble things together.

The notable exceptions are:

* Formal verification, which is very widely used in hardware and barely used in software (not software's fault really - there are good reasons for it).

* What the software guys now call "deterministic system testing", which is just called "testing" in the hardware world because that's how it has always been done.