As someone who builds observability tools for embedded software, I am flabbergasted that you're finding a more tools-friendly culture in embedded than in distributed systems!
Most hardware companies have zero observability, and haven't yet seen the light ("our code doesn't really have bugs" is a quote I hear multiple times a week!).
My experience with mid-size to enterprise is having lots of observability and observability-adjacent tools purchased but not properly configured. Or the completely wrong tools for the job being used.
A few I've seen recently: Grafana running on local Docker of developers because of lack of permissions in the production version (the cherry on top: the CTO himself installed this on the PMs computers), Prometheus integration implemented by dev team but env variables still missing after a couple years, several thousand a month being paid to Datadog but nothing being done with the data nor with the dog.
On startups it's surprisingly different, IME. But as soon as you "elect" a group to be administrator of a certain tool or some resource needed by those tools, you're doomed.
You’d be surprised at how many hardware companies think this is a good idea!
I’m the founder and CEO of a company called Memfault, we make observability SaaS for hardware companies.
I constantly get asked if we could just offer a remote access solution. Many of our competitors do! But we think it’s (a) a huge security liability and (b) too ripe for abuse.
But fundamentally consumers do not care, and until that changes you can expect any embedded Linux device to have this kind of backdoor (they do more often than not).
I think in an employee owned model the CEO is less visible and a different role, that role is then incentivized to actually drive the business instead of creating hype in the market to ensure valuation for investors/stock markets.
The value of an employee owned business is that you can vote the CEO out if they’re not working in the best interests.
Frankly what the CEO actually does day-to-day doesn’t matter relative to a startup or a publicly traded tech company, or anything in between in the scope of ownership and organized employee value.
I’ve watched a company in deep debt spiral out of control because the CEO didn’t understand the business and let bottom up management be how the company runs. The board that also didn’t understand the business just let 3 rounds of layoffs occur before forcing the CEO out. When layoffs come, if it is going to be the employees who pay the price, they should have a mechanism to push the pilot out of the seat before it costs them.
This is a glib, but important insight. If the split between founders and early employees is fundamentally off, then we should see many more early employee types start companies and take the other side of that bargain. In fact, they do not!
First: you've heard of at least one of these companies.
Second: some of them are very well known in their vertical, just not yet household names.
Third: you have no idea what you're talking about. E.g. Hubspot was founded in 2006, I guarantee nobody here who isn't a marketer had heard of them in 2011.
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