It’s team/company culture related. I’ve worked at places super laid back and places that demanded 12 hour days and Saturdays when things got behind. I also think when you’re younger you just put more pressure in yourself. At some point, you just stop caring about the competition and fake pressure of “the world is falling if we don’t get it done on this day”. At this point in my career if someone told me to work 12hr days I’d tell them to eat a dick. If they asked and explained the urgency I might but I wouldn’t feel the pressure. More on reddit.com

Best location to find support I know is Dave's eevblog. As embedded (SW) development is very closely tied to electronics design, the broad nature of that community is a great source for all sorts of answers and discussions. And Dave's videos are great, too. More on reddit.com

I was an EE undergraduate 15 years ago, decided not to pursue embedded because the barrier for entry is high, and I wasn’t especially good with designing a hardware compared to writing some code. Thus I ended up as a software engineer, and discovered that there’s another layer of complexity that requires deeper understanding of math. If you start doing computer graphics, machine learning, signal processing,, compression, cryptography, etc. It really depends on what motivates you More on reddit.com

I blame Hollywood for associating jumbles of colored wires with bombs! People seem to forget it's explosives that make a bomb, and not wires.

I've got something that I suppose counts as an embedded anecdote. One of my main products is a programmable LED hula hoop - it's a pretty fancy piece of hardware for a plastic circle with some lights crammed in it, and our customers include the likes of Cirque du Soleil.

Once while I was on vacation, one of my employees (at my office in California) took an urgent tech support call. The customer was a performer in the UK who was supposed to be on stage in half an hour at the Glastonbury Festival and her hoop wasn't working. The problem was beyond what the employee knew how to troubleshoot and she apologized that the boss was out of the country on vacation.

But when the customer mentioned Glastonbury, the employee remembered that I was at the festival. So I got a text message about the issue maybe 20 minutes before showtime, except I was also there as a performer and was supposed to be on at the same time in another area. My role was just helping out with a public hoop workshop though and I could miss a few minutes without affecting anything.

I got the customer on the phone and she was absolutely frantic. The hoop wasn't going to be repairable in the few minutes we had, but I had a spare hoop of the same basic type and size. Only we didn't know where to find each other - we were both in the Theatre and Circus fields but it's hard to give directions in that chaos. "I'm by the giant birdcage with the disco ball in it" wasn't helping.

We picked the bridge between fields as our target and both went running for it. I'm running through thousands of people in a disco ball combat helmet waving an LED hoop over my head, still on the phone with her but unable to make out much between the noise, her panting, and the accent but I finally spotted a pink-haired girl with a phone to her ear coming over the bridge. We met up and ran back to her stage.

Fortunately she knew what files she needed for her choreography and we got everything copied over in about a minute. I showed her how the power switch was different from her model, we checked that the choreography script worked, and then it was 11:00 and she was on stage with literally not a second to spare.

I doubt I'll ever have a more dramatic customer service moment. Customer calls up, 5500 miles from the office, and the owner of the company and designer of the product shows up with a replacement within 30 minutes.

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