I agree. Software is "always new" but it often shouldn't be. I work for an engineering services firm that does mostly embedded systems. I push hard for reuse,

I agree. Software is "always new" but it often shouldn't be. I work for an engineering services firm that does mostly embedded systems. I push hard for reuse, basing our work on standard platforms, etc. Unfortunately, client needs vary so much -- one client might need a wearable, another wants a large system that is mounted on a skid, another needs something to sit on a desktop, all with hugely different feature sets -- that it's difficult to find a small set of devices that we can reuse. So one of our big problems is that we're very often bidding on a project that uses a device, or a technology we've never seen before and that's where the uncertainty comes in. Patterns certainly help, higher-level languages would definitely help (I'm the only one in the organization programming small processors in C++, everyone else is only comfortable with C), but that's a slow, risky change.