I used to write GPU device drivers

My first job was on working on drivers for a proprietary OS. Every time a new board came out, the protocol was to copy the code for the most similar board and start making modifications. It works, but there's a whole lot of repeated logic for common init sequences and logical mapping of memory addresses to what they control. The "simulator" that was widely praised for cutting down on spin-up time for a new board was nothing more than stub code. It all worked and was maintainable, but everything was harder than it needed to be.

It's a weird field in that regard. I'm a CompE, but I started college as an EE and switched pretty late. My skillset is more closely aligned with the CS folks, but my formal education and training was by EEs, for EEs. I still do "hardware stuff" for fun. The best firmware teams I've worked on have always had a mix of disciplines. Heck, I mentored a mechanical engineer for a while (he became a very good firmware dev). You have to have good programmers who manage to write modular, maintainable code even if the language and hardware limitations fight them the whole way. You need folks who understand Electrical Engineer-speak. Depending what you're doing, you might HDL people, and that stuff might as well be a completely separate discipline from regular software. You need people who are comfortable debugging with nothing more than log messages, and if you're lucky, a coredump. You need a man…