[bippi]

"Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away."

--Robert Metcalfe

Speaking as a software guy at a hardware company for TVs, one of the challenges is that there isn't a cohesive conversation between the hardware designers and software engineers.

On more than 3 occasions I could name off-the-top of my head, we've had to write workarounds or re-architect entirely for missing or over-promised performance of the silicon.

Likewise, some very useful features have been scrapped because they would add $1.00 onto the cost of a unit. While I get that 1 million units x $1.00 adds-up, the conversation about how this could either make a better product or that subsequently spending 2 million in software maintenance, isn't cheaper---is missing entirely.

This is a familiar refrain from other jobs and other engineers throughout the custom hardware industry. This doesn't even scratch the surface of how software engineers are essentially held to hardware engineering deadlines regardless of the complexity of the software they're being asked to produce.