> Hence the difference between the traditional engineers and the software folks is the traditional engineers have to fix stuff before it breaks, software engineers can afford to fix stuff after it breaks.

Absolutely. The mindset is just very different. I remember once running some software in debugger during a major tech demo, and fixing a display bug I saw was going to become a problem in the next few minutes using Edit & Continue in Visual Studio. That's the "software guy," "start up," way of doing it. That shit would never fly with "hardware guys."