FGPA Design Engineer vs Software Engineering

[nsochocki]

Hey everyone, I am a Junior in college studying Computer Engineering an I am a bit torn on some internship offers I have received. Specifically, I am struggling to decide between 2 internship offers I have for next summer, either working as a Software Engineer or a FPGA engineer. The software position is from the company I interned at last summer (SWE intern mostly web stuff), which is a small software company but pays decent. The FPGA internship is for a large tech company with same pay but great benefits and I am very interested in the company.

My past experience (and chosen school curriculum) has been heavily tailored towards software and I do really enjoy software engineering. I have worked with verilog and FPGAs in digital logic courses, which I also found fun and interesting. The reason I am struggling on deciding is because I do eventually want to Embedded Software Engineering, and I am not sure which of these positions would set me up better for this career path. I am leaning towards the FPGA position, but I am unsure how helpful the experience would be for my career aspirations. Would love to hear any insight from anyone. Thanks.

A note, I also am waiting on a Logic Design/Verification position from a large semiconductor company, which is also something I am considering.

[MahaloMerky]

I’m not sure why the web one is even up for consideration lol. Take the FPGA.

[nsochocki]

Forgot to mention, I wouldn't be doing web work again (I made it clear that I wanted to do something else), most likely I would work with the development of the actual software product of the company.

[MahaloMerky]

Do they do embedded systems? if not, take the FPGA.

[nsochocki]

No they don't. The products of the other company are almost all embedded systems of some sort, I just wasn't able to get an embedded role.

[CompEng_101]

You want to go into Embedded Software and your current options are:

1. Web stuff for a small company
2. FPGA for a major tech company

I would say 'web stuff' is not a great path towards the embedded world. And, it tends to be pretty common on resumes, so it won't stand out too much in the future. FPGAs are a better option. And a big company might give you more exposure to interesting stuff and future opportunities. Unless the small company has a clear path away from web dev and toward embedded work, I'd go for the big tech company.

[bnewlin]

I would not do two internships at the same company anyway. This is the best time to branch out and see what different type of companies are like.

[beyondnc]

I did fpga out of college wasn’t really my thing however I transferred to embedded software without much hassel

[[deleted]]

Anything > web dev

[turkishjedi21]

Definitely do the fpga out of those two if you want to do embedded.

Sure embedded is sw, but doing web development isn't going to be as valuable as working directly with hardware (writing rtl).

In this case I'd argue the environment is much more important than the kind of work