Sabeer Bhatia, cofounder of Hotmail
quoted in Founders at Work, p. 21

Also, when you are hardware designers, you have tremendously more
discipline in writing and describing software because in hardware
you cannot get it wrong.  Every turn of every chip costs you
millions of dollars, so when hardware designers design any piece
of software, they normally get it right.  They use something
called state machines to describe the functioning of the software.
When you do that, you are very deterministic: if this is the input,
then this will be the output.

So you write it in a very deterministic fashion and therefore you
tend not to make too many mistakes.  Whereas the pure software
writers - the way they think and architect software is very
creative.  They put in lots of bells and whistles, but they think,
"No big deal.  If there is a bug, we'll fix it.  Put in a patch."
You can't do that in hardware.  There's no patch  Once you ship a
chip, it has to work all the time.  So in terms of being able to
test it out, there is somewhat of a difference, but I just think
that hardware designers would be pretty good software designers
as well.