i could never work in hardware. i’d feel too bad for all the very small people i’d be shoving in the computers

FPGAs are where it's at, and the job market is surprisingly pretty open right now. Everybody's sleeping on them, everyone wants study CUDA cores or architecture or... ML hardware accelerators or whatever. If you can transition to RTL design or even silicon engineering, it's a good industry to be in.

Now, me personally, I've never made the funny magic smoke come out from one of my FPGAs, but I can't tell you how many times I've fucked up an entire pipeline because I thought a series of logic would take 3 cycles but really it took 2 and now my entire data path is wrong and somehow I missed it in simulation and now I've gotta rearchitect everything and running synthesis/P&R takes a goddamn century to run and this is like my 5th time programming my board and...