My first week on the job they told me they're about to manufacture 20k units and can you please fix this bug in the firmware by Friday?

I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.

Anything special you noticed about the deployment processes involved with that versus more typical software engineering work?

I can’t quite imagine, even shipping on prem stuff is much harder than the cloud. Especially when people can mess with stuff