The article writer said he was in the Devices org so I would bet there are a huge number of hardware engineers there. That engineer could be very proficient with C and firmware and might have not touched web stuff since college, even if that was covered then.

Really telling of an organization that your personal skills don't matter when they just need bodies.

Nailed it ... they were experts in firmware and systems programming and had never really done web development before (that said, they were working very hard to do a good job, just unfortunate that they were set up for failure in a lot of ways).

And reporting to a management chain that doesn’t know any of it!