What do hardware engineers do?

Hello /prog/,
Could you please explain in ways a software engineer would understand what exactly do hardware engineers do? I've heard of languages such as VHDL and Verilog, are they actually used or do they draw circuits manually? Do they test hardware through emulation or do they use FPGA? Is a VLSI chip just a big ASIC?

Circuitry design is still a software engineering. Hardware engineers work with physical materials.