One organization that I worked at had a firmware team that moved quickly, and wrote the interface layer to the PHY/MAC/Network devices. After they defined the

One organization that I worked at had a firmware team that moved quickly, and wrote the interface layer to the PHY/MAC/Network devices. After they defined the interface, later on enterprise software teams, and utility software teams, would write the "User Friendly" tools that would be used to configure the networking devices, but the firmware team did write a tiny "shim" utility that they released with firmware, that could be used to control the firmware at a very raw/native level. Whenever you were wondering what parameters to pass to this low level (very useful) utility, the answer was almost always, "Just check out the Code" - and answer that was actually surprising straightforward once you got used to it.