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0 pointsneilv11mo ago0 comments

> It’s something about hardware companies writing software.

I've seen enough examples of that, to suspect there's some truth to it, and wonder why that is...

Speculation:

* Systems programming is hard, and systems programmers who are familiar enough with the kind of target hardware are even more rare. A company might decide to hire a hardware engineer who can code, rather than a systems programmer software engineer who knows enough hardware.

* Hardware companies know hardware, and might have hardware engineers as execs and managers, so they probably know how to hire hardware engineers, but maybe not software engineers.

* Hardware companies respect hardware engineers, and not so much software people. You don't need all those hard math and engineering classes to be a "coder". Even their 12yo can make an app, but you usually need a team with a ton of hardware education and experience to produce a viable board or IC. ("Coding" even sounds like a tedious but straightforward clerical task.)

Other speculation, or does anyone know?

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miki12321111mo ago

It's not a point of competition, plain and simple.

Better software doesn't sell more hardware. From those companies' point of view, what matters is hardware features to make consumers want the product, and manufacturing efficiency to make margins high. The quality of what's in the ROM is no more important than the quality of the fans, servos, DACs or what have you. As long as the parts don't break too often and are within specifications, they're good enough, no point in wasting money to make them better.

This, of course, is true until it isn't. At some point, somebody comes along who disrupts the space completely by making the software great and well integrated (or just by making it do what people have previously had to do in hardware), and traditional companies don't know how to cope.

neilvOP11mo ago

So it might be a mix of cost-engineering, and (consequently) not having the organizational capability to do software better on the occasions that would actually would be worthwhile?

privatelypublic11mo ago

Knowing several deep hardware people: they're incredibly dismissive of vulnerabilities. Direct quote (as best I can remember) "Some PhD student can figure out theoretical power attacks. They're not relevant to actual products"

Same person thinks I'm literally paranoid for splitting home, IoT, and Security cameras into separate networks... despite the cameras and dvr being the banned/recalled costco ones.

nikanj11mo ago

To be fair, many CVEs are just that

worthless-trash11mo ago

Everyone says that till they get remote rootkitted in ane exploit chain that uses a moderate rated cve.

privatelypublic11mo ago

More like: go see fusee gelee. Nvidia didn't do boundary checking on their usb DFU boot and it compromised every nintendo switch up to that date, and (i expect) got all nvidia shields' level 2 widevine keys revoked.

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db48x11mo ago

All of that sounds very plausible to me.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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miki12321111mo ago

It's not a point of competition, plain and simple.

neilvOP11mo ago

So it might be a mix of cost-engineering, and (consequently) not having the organizational capability to do software better on the occasions that would actually would be worthwhile?

privatelypublic11mo ago

Same person thinks I'm literally paranoid for splitting home, IoT, and Security cameras into separate networks... despite the cameras and dvr being the banned/recalled costco ones.

nikanj11mo ago

To be fair, many CVEs are just that

worthless-trash11mo ago

Everyone says that till they get remote rootkitted in ane exploit chain that uses a moderate rated cve.

privatelypublic11mo ago

1 more reply

db48x11mo ago

All of that sounds very plausible to me.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse