I can see why it sounds fun. 40 pages later of dense schematics that you're desperately trying to match to what you have on your desk you'd realise it's 90% frustration and 10% headache. It's like navigating a city with a map showing cracks in the pavement split into 1000 individual one page puzzle pieces and written in Chinese (sometimes literally). God forbid someone made some modifications along the way at which point you might as well call it a day and bugger off to the pub. Now THAT last bit is actually good.
I once spent days trying to figure out why a 10 hour timer on a battery charger chip was going off hours too early, leading to the device draining its battery instead of charging it. Turned out the manufacturing partner had substituted another part, functionally equivalent except for the one feature we were relying on...
I can't remember what it was that made me actually look at the chip to check the part number.
Work, I gather, though the game also includes a bunch of (to laymen) dense schematics, one of which is indeed in (what looks like) chinese. So.
All of this talk about how miserable embedded development is makes it sound like these guys need more automated tools. Is there not a fuzz testing machine for embedded electronics prototypes?
