It's probably way more complicated than that. Ever seen the cold start disaster recovery procedure for a big system with identity and encryption-at-rest and message busses involved? You might be lucky if the bring-up doesnt have any individual stages that take a week to quiesce all by themselves. I know that this system probably isn't all that big, but if I assume their server-side software is as low-quality as their embedded software, I can easily imagine it being that complex and interdependent and poorly documented.
I once saw a small team of FANG engineers, that included two well seasoned senior engineers, revive a project left unmaintained for two years after the owning team was disbanded.
That small team took two weeks alone to get the project to build and run locally, with tons of bits missing.
But hey, if a random anonymous internet expert says that all it takes to revive a project is a week of browsing through the source code then that must be true.
> But hey, if a random anonymous internet expert says that all it takes to revive a project is a week of browsing through the source code then that must be true.
I think the claim of "a week" is probably very wrong, but it's probably possible, at least in some capacity.
However, I think that the actual problem is how badly a lot of software is currently developed. Codebases without proper README files or code comments, even, no proper CI/CD setups in a lot of places and so on. In part, I think it is because developers don't really care about those that will come after them, or because having good discoverability isn't a blocker to get something working or even shipping software. If the situation is absolutely crap in web dev, I fear to think how much worse it is in other industries.
> Sure there is, if you let an outside expert read the source code for a week.
It's mesmerizing how random anonymous people online always have all the answers to the most challenging technical problems conceivable by Man, and they all involve having someone else do the hard/impossible part.
They overestimate tech. I've met some brilliant people, and most of their "secret" was simply their ability to be obsessed with a problem for 12+ hours a day, for days, weeks on end. You can maybe argue they simply process and inerpret information presented faster as well, but that may be a byproduct of the former.
That doesn't necessarily mean they can even layout a plan for something as complex as this for a week, let alone execute anything.