[setitimer]

You need to talk to the person you report to at your employer. Dragging the contracting agency into this at this point is not reasonable.

And, unfortunately, you may find that this is the situation and you have to live with it. My first job was very similar. I worked as an embedded C developer at a laser printer manufacturer, and I had to fix bugs in a giant codebase with basically no documentation on the software itself. It was a sink or swim situation, discouraging at first but once I got over the learning curve I did fine.

[valarauca1]

This is not my first, or even second position. I have several years of experience. The company paid good lip service to proper software methodologies in interviews.

On top of this is a monolithic object model. With every device produced by the company (the company does PCB fabs) supported within the code base, literally hundreds of thousands of devices.

[setitimer]

OK. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of embedded development. The mentality tends to be that "nobody is going to see" the code, so only the external interfaces are well documented and understanding of the internals resides in comments and institutional knowledge.