[rcktmrtn]

> technical leadership is hired by managers who's background is in the unrelated field of automobiles.

... On top of that, I think there is a bit of a generational gap between firmware engineers. I have worked with several firmware engineers who were artists at optimizing single threaded superloops and miracle workers at squeezing in yet another feature and become tech leads, only to find they have an infinite blank canvas. Some don't actually have the wisdom to not use the new freedom to paint themselves into a corner. A lot of the old projects are trivial now, but dealing with bureaucratic application-level protocols in firmware without getting requires a set of skills and tricks that don't often translate well from what Cloud/App developers are doing.