[tialaramex]

I don't think any of my immediate opportunities are "real-time industrial automation" shaped, but, can't hurt to ask: Do you think it was the work that inherently was the worst ever, or was there some other enviromental factor (e.g. terrible wages, for some reason your office was up six flights of stairs with no elevator, colleague insisted on playing music from your least favourite genre at maximum volume) ?

[platinumrad]

It was the work itself. Embedded systems are already known for bad tooling. Once safety certification gets thrown in the mix you're limited to ancient broken versions of GCC that have been rebranded and certified, and are thus more fit for purpose than newer versions of GCC that actually work. MISRA, its derivatives, and the associated static analysis tooling ecosystem are also low quality evolutionary dead ends that ignore the state of the art in both academia and industry.