There definitely isn't enough _specialised_ software. If you look at engineering tools the open source/free stuff is just not good, and the professional software packages run in the tens of thousands per user. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we get competitive open source alternatives to simulink, HFSS, autocad, solidworks, LT Spice, etc.
Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.
This point gets raised every single time managed languages and low latency development come up together. The trade off is running "fast" all of the time, even when you don't have to, vs running slow most of the time and tinkering when you need to go fast.
I've spent a fair few years developing lowish (10-20us wire to wire) latency trading systems and the majority of the code does not need to go fast. It's just wasted effort, a debugging headache, and technical debt. So the natural trade off is a bit of pain to make the hot path fast through spans, unsafe code, pre-allocated object pools, etc and in return you get to use a safe and easy programming language everywhere else.
In C# low latency dev is not even that painful, as there are a lot of tools available specifically for this purpose by the runtime.
That is the object of the sentence. He is asking who the subject is, in other words the thing or person that is doing the housing of the people. Is it the government? Is it you? I'm currently responsible for housing myself, which is annoying so I would prefer someone else take on this responsibility.
Perhaps, I don't consider them shitty myself but palates differ. Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but not far beyond to be able to progress. Simply allowing them to make a mess of a difficult project is not a good way to get there.
There is such a thing as software engineering skill and it is not domain knowledge, nor knowledge of a specific codebase. It is good taste, an abstract ability to create/identify good solutions to a difficult problem.
I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types and tag values:
https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/
They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect during trading. I use it regularly.
Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.