[larve]

At a previous job, the project lead (mechanical) assigned the embedded team (2 people) writing the firmwares for 3 boards (multi-element heater control, motor controller and move orchestrator with custom BLDC setup, multi-sensor temperature probes) in 2 weeks over christmas, because the junior EE said “I can control a motor with arduino in 30 minutes.” My only guess as to why such a disconnect from reality was possible is that the EE had a MIT degree, while I’m self-taught, and that we had always delivered our firmwares on time and without bugs.

[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, it's the same phenomenon I've seen even in webdev where a PM or UX person who has produced a whole series of mocks then hands it off to the "programmers" and demands a short schedule because... well... they did all the hard stuff, right? You're just making it "go."

People naturally see their own hard work and skills as primary. I know enough about HW Eng and EE to know that it's actually really hard. That said, it doesn't have the same kind of emergent complexity problems that software has. Not to say that HW eng doesn't have such problems, but they're a different kind.

If you see the product as "the board", then the stuff that runs on the board, that can end up just seeming ancillary.

Very frustrating, for sure.

[alxlaz]

Oh, no, this was super common. When the Arduino (and, soon afterwards, the Pi) were launched, for several years, about 20% of my time was spent explaining higher-ups why there's a very wide gap to cross between a junior's "I can control a motor with Arduino in 30 minutes" and "We can manufacture this and make a profit and you can safely ship it to customers".

Don't get me wrong, the Arduino is one of the best things that ever happened to engineering education. Back in college I had to save money for months to buy an entry-level development kit. But it made the non-technical part of my job exponentially harder.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Ha. Try telling a customer that even though he's prototyped his machine with three arduinos (he used three because he couldn't figure out how to do multitasking with just a single one...) in a couple of weeks, it will be a $100k project to spin up a custom circuit board and firmware to do the same thing. And no, we can't reuse the code he already wrote.

[sigh]