In Xbox, many of the firmware hires the hardware folks made seemed to be payed poorly. Also, there were tons of contractors, and not much institutional knowledg

In Xbox, many of the firmware hires the hardware folks made seemed to be payed poorly. Also, there were tons of contractors, and not much institutional knowledge was retained. (At one point they had to pay a consulting firm to decompile the firmware for a controller because they had lost the source code). "Why do we need source control? It's all there, right on my laptop. Source Depot is just a bunch of trouble." [rough quote from memory, maybe conflated from a couple of engineers]. I'm happy to report that things got better. On the software side of Xbox the people were much better compensated, and we wrote lots of firmware, too. It was probably harder to be hired, though.