My point is that none of us know nearly as much as we think we do. If you think you’ve somehow zeroed in on the truth while sitting behind a screen or keyboard, you are sorely mistaken.
Telling me about how the world works while trying to treat it like a comic book with clearly delineated good and bad guys is kind of ironic.
I have similar thoughts all the time. What behaviors are incentivized and what are punished? And it has little to do what leadership says and a lot to do with what it does, and we all know those can be drastically at odds with one another.
It has bothered me for a long time that we spend so much money on roads/transportation infrastructure and digging up rocks from the ground. I wish there would be more investment in developing expertise in knowledge-based industries.
Learning to cross-compile, do embedded debugging, the process of booting an embedded system (which varies depending on the answers to the above questions), learning how to read a technical reference for the processor you’re using as well as for peripherals you’re likely to interact with - SPI, i2c, UART, maybe PCIe, are all handy skills. Learn a bit about JTAG, hardware, reading schematics, etc. Even being able solder is helpful.
There may be books (I had a great embedded Linux book when I started) but there are lots of online materials too. Check out https://platformio.org/
There are fun embedded boards and projects for microcontrollers too - micropython on an rpi pico, tinygo, eLua, etc.
omg yes. This is my single biggest complaint about large Python projects, or anything with complex implicit type conversions. Fun to write, a nightmare to read.
One big lesson that newer languages like go and rust seemed to have learned is that the tooling, building and dependency management need to be dictated as part of the language ecosystem. Dealing with tons of other C++ projects written by other people (even in the same company) - how to specify dependencies, where their build artifacts can be found, etc - is a HUGE pain in the ass and consumer of my time.