Comment by ZebrasEat

In my embedded career I always assumed the value of a SW engineer was to cut costs, regardless of whether it was a few cents (and of course add to quality and reliability). It seems in embedded, it’s one of the only SW fields left where software can affect the cost of the system. By choosing a processor in a family with the least amount of memory and speed, you can achieve a lower system cost. In this world, the ability to write fast code in a minimal footprint matters. You still have to wrestle with development time/cost versus HW cost tradeoffs vs sales, but I think it still remains true that the coding practices we saw in 60s-80s are still valued in this space. My impression is these skills these days are being lost/ignored for the most part. When a HW limit is reached, the only way forward for quicker SW solution is optimization.