> I found that for embedded C++ to be successful, you need to have some good (excellent sometimes was harmful, but that's a different topic)
Why were excellent C++ skills sometimes harmful?
Why were excellent C++ skills sometimes harmful?
Also, it did in our case take you away so far from the bare metal, that the code was elegant, but slow. It did not play well with our static allocators and allocated/deallocated way too much, especially temporaries.
You might i.e. check out talks like [0].
Maybe it could be that he didn't know all the requirements up front and his mediocre colleague accidentally wrote code that better suited the company's unstated requirements (e.g. portability to niche systems). But that's hardly the most likely explanation.