Sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
* One project where the CI took something like 48 hours
* Trying to apply waterfall hardware engineering processes to software development
* Mostly hiring devs fresh from university so there was a ton of group think due to a lack of new ideas
* Low salaries so most of the devs left once they got promoted beyond a junior level
When I was there in the early 2010s, I met a greybeard hardware engineer with a big chip mask poster on his cube wall. He told me they lost the schematics and all documentation to one of their first timing chips that was used in lots of products. They ended up calling the manufacturer and asking for the mask image back, and any question anyone had had to be reverse engineered from the mask.
This is a very interesting description of group think between less experienced developers. I've never thought of it this way, but it seems to have some truth in it.
NI = No Income. Keep in mind, they're also HQ'd in Austin, TX, which is essentially the most expensive city in Texas.
Enough demand in the market that it makes sense for a company to design and build them, but not so many units sold that all those design costs are easily amortized away.