Nobody warns junior engineers that eventually the problem won’t be their C code.
It’ll be the linker script.
Or the startup code.
Or the memory map.
Or the vector table sitting somewhere the processor isn’t looking.
Most engineering courses teach you how to write code. They don’t really teach you what happens between power-on and main().
Then you get into a real embedded system and suddenly you’re reading linker maps, startup assembly, register definitions and 2,000-page reference manuals trying to work out why the CPU never reached your code.
This is also where senior engineers earn their keep.
Not by fixing the problem in five minutes and disappearing.
By showing the junior engineer how to find it.
Walk through the memory map. Explain the register. Show them why that bit matters. Show them what actually happens when the processor comes out of reset.
Fix it yourself and you’ve solved one bug.
Teach someone how to debug it and you’ve made the whole team stronger.
What’s the one thing nobody warned you about when you first started working with bare-metal systems?
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