[ludjer]

There is very little physical interactions when designing hardware these days. You do most of the work and CAD software and simulations.

[daniel_reetz]

There's a ton of lab work, reverse engineering, validation, prototyping, measurement, the list goes on forever. CAD and simulation are just the beginning.

[ajb]

It depends. Some fabless chip design work could be done at home. A dept I worked at did everything in simulation. But another dept did prototyping on FPGAs and would have at struggled -everyone would at least have had to take home a board

[yarri]

We all still do a lot of lab work