The stages of calendar gnarlyness:* Fresh: a few one-on-ones and a team meeting (only found with new employees)* Filling: handful of recurring meeting and more team communications / sync* "Stand-Up Square": 30 minute free blocks don't exist anymore. RIP.* "Director's Dilemma": So many people to sync up. Do thinking work after hours.* Utter Bankruptcy: better luck meeting with the president....
I'm skeptical and think someone must have spun quite the yarn for the CEO.
At some point, you may want to version your apis in a breaking way. You'll spend weeks sketching out a migration plan for all active routers in the field, sell it internally , get a thumbs up, then try to prep customer support. Customer support might tell you that you still need to support some devices which were unplugged on a firmware released 6 months ago. Oops.
When building deployed firmware, you always need to include a reliable fallback that allows you to bump the firmware on that device, even when it can't talk to anything else wirelessly.
Realistically, Whirlpool just isn't going to be able to field that team to make their laundry machine resilient to malware attacks or a bricking update.
I always thought the only way forward with IoT was if it a big tech player offered an SDK / IoT platform that allowed developers to focus on the widgety part of their widget without having to think about the complexities of running an internet connected device. This seems like a big jump towards that.
(I worked at a wifi router company.)