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I had similarly painful experiences. Also the project I was on was mostly in maintenance mode, with mostly junior engineers out of college on it who had little experience with that particular code. Not many tests. Lots of code archaeology and "I'm crossing my fingers I didn't just break some subset of the enormous configuration space of this tool"

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The code archaeology was probably the most fun part for me but I had so much free time to do that because my projects were mostly maintenance as well

Fun NI archeology story.

When I was there in the early 2010s, I met a greybeard hardware engineer with a big chip mask poster on his cube wall. He told me they lost the schematics and all documentation to one of their first timing chips that was used in lots of products. They ended up calling the manufacturer and asking for the mask image back, and any question anyone had had to be reverse engineered from the mask.

Did they leave and go to CrowdStrike?

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