Hardware vs. Software

The mission at ORI (https://openresearch.institute) is educational, personal, and professional advancement through open source digital radio work. The vast majority of this work is done on the amateur radio bands, simply because it's the best choice for experimental work. We use FPGAs, processors, ADCs, DACs, and a pile of other circuits to get work done. 

When it comes to basic electronics competence, we are seeing (in general) a recession or decline. People that used to go into RF hardware in college, for instance, are much more likely to choose computer science. This is primarily because of the perception that it results in more income. There are fewer people, and fewer young people, that have any idea on how their bits are handled electrically. Some are totally unaware of registers, except as a target for program values. In the best possible case, this is totally ok. You shouldn't need to know details of the transistor model your processor has in order to write a  while(1) loop. Specialization means you have to start taking others at their word when you are given the "go flight" signal. 

However - the decline in RF/hardware engineering is mirrored by the influx into computer science, coding, boot camping, etc. 

Is this a problem? Well, the market doesn't currently think so. Markets currently reward pure computer programming solutions at very high rates, and we're generally pretty stingy when it comes to hardware development. But is it a problem? Yeah, it actually might be.

We now have a lot of people with coding skills that don't understand the circuits that their code runs on, and/or cannot do basic electronics. We also have a shortage of people that can produce designs that support a very demanding computational market. 

And that is a problem. It's a problem that will play out over a longer term than any computer science or coding bubble will. We will continue to have a lopsided and self-limited approach to computing if we put all our energy and attention in the computer instruction category, and none in the instruction set and hardware category. 

What will the eventual re-balancing look like?