[mgse]

I'd agree. Those ratios sound pretty reasonable for firmware. Actually, 60% was probably a good year.

I worked on i&p series servers at IBM and a vast majority of what we did wasn't really new functionality. It was more adapting the existing code base to the next gen hardware. Power on sequences had to be modified, hardware access went from GPIO to I2C and vice-versa, and the rules of what could be plugged into where under what conditions were always changing.

And once everything was working, you've got years of support to look forward to. It wasn't uncommon to get pulled into discussions for products released 5+ years ago.

As an aside, hardware enablement might not be flashy work, but it can be loads of fun even if you're not writing massive amounts of new code. Sure, the documentation stinks and the first pass of hardware is about as good as airport TP, but it is amazing feeling when it finally works.