I can’t say with authority, since I never worked as a hardware engineer on hardware. I do know a few, though… based on what I saw and heard from them, off the top of my head, I’d say they care about reproducibility a lot more. As a software engineer at an application level, it’s plausible to go through your code, with a known failure mode in mind, and find that one “<” that should have been “<=”, or whatever.

Not so – or at least less so – in hardware because it’s rare for any one engineer to have access to all the relevant “code”; there’s a lot more horizontal segregation. Is it the driver kext? The kernel? The device firmware? The cable? Electrical? Mechanical? So a lot of hardware issues seem to pivot on pinpointing which layer is at fault – i.e. who’s responsible – and passing it on to them. Especially when you’re talking about graphics issues, for example, since that’s a big chunk of hardware not made by or necessarily transparent to Apple.