People didn’t seem to believe me when I said that hardware engineers have a better time than software engineers.
But think about it: they can and will “start from scratch” whenever they see the need to do so, while software engineers have been forced to cope with bad decisions from the 80s because the cost of starting fresh was simply unaffordable for most projects.
Hardware is not starting from scratch every time. You might think that if you've never worked with hardware, but there are plenty of SDKs out there that support 300 device types from the same extended family with different combinations of ifdefs.
But think about it: they can and will “start from scratch” whenever they see the need to do so, while software engineers have been forced to cope with bad decisions from the 80s because the cost of starting fresh was simply unaffordable for most projects.