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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Teams are so small. As in commonly 1 hardware and 1 software engineer.

You at least need some common vocabulary. "Hey the gpios are floating at startup and messing with the meter. Can we pull them down? Hmm no but perhaps we can reset the meter after startup to a known state." That sort of thing.

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Counterpoint: in the space/aerospace world, having embedded systems running tens of millions of lines of code is common.

These have many large software teams working together. Most software engineers on these embedded programs are just that: software engineers. I've worked in embedded for a long time and have never "physically" debugged or otherwise physically touched the hardware I work on. There's a lot to embedded systems outside of microcontrollers.

Depends on the embedded system. I've only worked in mid-sized companies, and most of my projects were teams of 4 to 12 SWE-type with 1 to 3 EE for the project. Typically light ARM4 or weaker microcontrollers will have smaller teams, or no team, while anything beefier, like embedded Linux projects or anything with a UI, will have bigger ones.

Depends on the project. Most of the teams I've been on were 4-12 SWE for 1-3 EEs. These were usually mid-range microcontrollers with GUIs. It's typically only weaker, single-purpose embedded without an RTOS (like sensors or whatnot) that has 1 to 1 unless the company wants the project to drag on for half a decade.

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