Comment by Aromasin

I can back this up. I work as an FPGA engineer, which is very much an amalgam of software, "firmware" (RTL), and hardware. If I find a software bug or want to spin up something quickly on the HPS (on chip CPU) it might take me a few days - the reward cycle is really quick. Hardware issues on the other hand might take months if not a year+ to fix depending on complexity, meaning the design cycle is long. It might involve multiple board respins because something has been incorrectly connected, whole redesigns because there was a baked in bug on the chip that we need to workaround, or there's some really ethereal signal integrity issue that can come up when working with high speed interfaces that nobody can work out why its failling 1/4000 times. It's fulfilling, but really is a slog at times for a smaller reward financially for something that cost so much more (12 hour day crunch times I've found are way more common in hardware).