[Jtsummers]

That's what I was getting at with this:

> They can't be in charge because you can't have engineers answering to non-engineers (ie, very few leads let alone managers coming from the software side). Which leads to a culture that's overly hardware centric with insufficient leadership/management understanding of what software actually entails.

In hardware-centric orgs, software developers are a small step above technicians in their pecking order, sometimes below. The pecking order itself is annoying enough, but when you switch from designing your own ASICs to buying COTS dev boards and primarily only adding software to it, you're not really a hardware company anymore. But it'll take another generation for them to realize it, or a severe crunch if someone comes along and realizes that they can pay embedded devs $200k+ and eat the lunch of half these companies.