I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where

I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where I’d need to turn off the power quickly. After talking a bit about my experience with hard real time deadlines, I sheepishly asked why they didn’t have diodes to mitigate the problem. I think it was one of the questions that got me an offer. Apparently having firmware engineers with even minor EE background and will think about analogue design is a little uncommon. Today, I’d ask about more ways to push the responsibility away from the firmware to stop catastrophic failures. If the debugger pauses the CPU you can’t use the CPU to regulate things. I’ve worked on things where the failure mode can be explosive and it makes dev really harrowing if you can’t rely on hardware interlocks.