Embedded software developer here, with very minimal professional hardware design experience. I mostly write nostdlib C, and never use malloc. I write peripheral drivers from scratch even if there’s an “SDK” for it. I spend almost 40% of my time reading documentation, 30% scribbling state machines, 15% writing code and 15% testing it on hardware. LLMs don’t help me much. I use them to write scripts for me to parse my stdout and find patterns. For breakfast, I fight EEs to prove their hardware doesn’t work. I have exploded hardware setups for the products I’m developing for on my desk. JLink is the favorite thing in my aresenal. Even the slightest latency on my text editor annoys the shit out of me, which is why I don’t use IDEs.