Management BS

I work for a consumer electronics company. Which means that $0.01 matters. Even $0.001. Their religion involves CES as sacred dates in the profane Los Vegas. They make smoother needles for electronic drugs. ---- They give us these constraints, and expect them all to be followed: * cheap --64KB program memory, 2KB sram * flexible --change chips in a few months!!!! * small code --else not cheap * due on a certain time, despite putting a new employee on critical functions, and pretending to be able to estimate completion times * reliable They have about 5 people who if left, would disable the $100,000,000 SEC-traded company. I am learning stuff all the time; my mentor has 5+ years in the exact business, and 20+ in the embedded space. But they expect me to master this stuff on CES deadlines. Bad managing, relying on guesses about newbies and complexity. And not having good docs for the newbies to learn from. Reading code leaves out a lot of information about design intent.