Global knowledge is like common sense, people know these things, but their may be someone else with the same idea. One person can come up with the idea but their is also another with same so don't give someone to much credit.
Answer: Any person or people asking about someone being a hardware or software person displays that they are questioning about the computer knowledge of the person and his/her interest.
The interest can be regarding software tools for programming, designing , etc or hardware device like troubleshooting, assembling the computer parts ,etc.
The person persisting good knowledge about software programming language and software is diverted towards software side .The person who likes to deal with hardware parts of the computer system is hardware-oriented person.
