The problem isn't that your engineers are too smart, it's that they aren't smart enough. It reminds me of the church of the subgenius: a church for those who ar

The problem isn't that your engineers are too smart, it's that they aren't smart enough. It reminds me of the church of the subgenius: a church for those who aren't quite smart enough to be genius level and know it. Basically, they're bored. And they make their job more interesting by making things unnecessarily harder. I mean, when you think about it embedded is pretty simple; there aren't a lot of new challenges. You bring up a new board, it's like an old board but different. Port a new package over, big whoop. What you need to do is give them a real challenge...then all the other stuff will become super simplified because they want to spend their brainpower on meat. What about a way to retarget your code? Or do some super cool thing, like a HAL (you said you were embedded, and a HAL is something that usually would benefit any embedded team)? What about porting WASM to your platform(s) and retargeting your stuff at it? Or doing an LLVM-based runtime for your embedded stuff? TL;DR: Your company hired a bunch of smart guys, and they want to do smart things. Code maintenance isn't a smart thing, it's boring. Give them something smart to do that'll help your company long term, something really hard.