What It's Like Being a Software Engineer at a Hardware Company — The Reality of SW Development Dragged Along by HW Schedules

I used to work in software development in the mobile industry, and now I develop software at a camera module company. We make camera modules for smartphones and industrial devices. The core of the product is hardware — lenses, sensors, mechanical design — and software's role is to make that hardware work or to develop test programs. Working as a software engineer in this kind of environment, you run into some unique situations. Things that would be hard to imagine at a pure software company (though, to be fair, I've never actually worked at one, so I can't say for sure). Here are a few experiences I've put together. "We Can't Change the Hardware, So Fix It in Software" This is the phrase you hear the most as a software engineer at a hardware company. Once, the hardware team physically mounted a display in the wrong orientation. With assembly already complete, tearing it off and reattaching it didn't make sense in terms of cost or time. So the request that came to software was simple: "