Reverse engineering is done by R&D engineers as a normal part of the process of designing products. I did it in an R&D lab.
Reverse engineering is done in four ways.
1 a design engineer is given a component or system to replicate. This often violates copyright and patent laws.
2 a design engineer is given a component or system to replicate the action of. This is essentially a complete re-design and does not violate copyright laws as the end product internally would normally be radically different from the original.
3 The owner of the original equipment has lost blueprints or diagrams (this often happens for designs over 20 years old). Often this is farmed out to an external design house and engineers from the IP (Intelectual property) owner assist in what is effectively a re-design.
4 the original company no longer exists and there is some legacy equipment that must be maintained (this happens in military and aviation industries a lot) a team usually a government will own the patent or copyright but not have any diagrams or blueprints and occasionally not even a specification. This is often the most difficult trpe of reverse enfineering as occasionally you come across RTL or DTL designs from the 60's which were obsolete in the 1970's as TTL came along and it's a complete git getting the logic levels right.
The R&D for most of this happens in several places and usually has a team involved (though I have worked on my own a lot too). Usually there is a technician or two working under the supervision of a design engineer in a workshop or lab aw well as the engineer also working in the design office to document everything.
Reverse engineering is taking apart an object to see how it works in order to duplicate or enhance the object. The practice, taken from older industries, is now frequently used on computer hardware and software. Software reverse engineering involves reversing a program's machine code (the string of 0s and 1s that are sent to the logic processor) back into the source code that it was written in, using program language statements.
I think they should work at office.
Any place they have to.
Proper reverse engineering (to result in a legal product) takes two steps
1 - a group of people looks at a product, which may be pure software or hardware or a mix and makes and exact description of what it does without saying how it does it (which may be covered by patents, copyright, or trademarks) - size of ammunition, velocity of bullets, rotation speed of wheels, entry points for clearing the screen, bit layout of color bytes - whatever is needed. When done
2 - another team that has had no contact with the members of the first team or the original product takes the extensive documentation and produces devices, software, wiring, etc., that will produce those results - creating them independently - documenting their work, so if challenged in court they can show that they did not steal.
Of course, if just trying to figure out how something works, this process is not followed.
Again, they work where ever they have to. And can afford to.
They work in secrecy. You can't really put it on your resume if you do reverse engineering, because nobody will hire you. It is possible to do reverse engineering legally, just as it is possible to break into bank vaults legally. But neither one is a good thing to brag about.
Do they work in offices? what about the reverse engineering where you take about things like a computer? do they do that in a warehouse? :(
