Both. There's a huge difference between designing a functional chip and designing a chip with high yield and long term reliability. Companies and individuals vary wildly in their processes and understanding.
It's becoming a wide spread problem in the industry. For decades technology-minded folks have been told to go into software development because that's where the money is. The field of custom IC design has been both short on applicants and has had huge barriers to entry. As a result, the experienced engineers are retiring and there aren't enough juniors coming up to replace them. Skills and institutional knowledge are being lost.
There is a lot of focus right now on tools such as AI to allow junior people to produce things at an expert level based on encoding that expert knowledge. It would be great if it worked, but so far the results aren't there.
Source: I develop EDA software for custom IC design.
It's becoming a wide spread problem in the industry. For decades technology-minded folks have been told to go into software development because that's where the money is. The field of custom IC design has been both short on applicants and has had huge barriers to entry. As a result, the experienced engineers are retiring and there aren't enough juniors coming up to replace them. Skills and institutional knowledge are being lost.
There is a lot of focus right now on tools such as AI to allow junior people to produce things at an expert level based on encoding that expert knowledge. It would be great if it worked, but so far the results aren't there.
Source: I develop EDA software for custom IC design.