alt Hacker NewsMy first week on the job they told me they're about to manufacture 20k units and can you please fix this bug in the firmware by Friday?
I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.
Nearly the same experience. Had to fix an issue in a boot loader. It came down to improper setup of the memory controllers ECC engine. It would correct and ignore a single fault. If you managed to get two faults it would raise an exception that was not handled and the boot would fail. For the customer this meant that a reboot might randomly brick the unit until you go in and manually power cycle it.
Just convincing them that their problem boiled down to a single incorrect bit was difficult enough but then having to, in a day, build and successfully operate a test harness to prove the fix worked was the real stress.
I do not miss embedded engineering.