Auto software engineer here.

It’s frankly because Motorsport software guys are pretty arrogant. They look down on road car and truck engineers, but reality is they develop stuff with virtually no processes and they usually have only very basic engineering skills, yet every day they are told Motorsport is at the forefront of technology.

“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch or constant maintenance to work correctly.

Not surprised there was a bug, and not surprised they were able to develop and deploy a patch in 1 hour without V&V testing it or anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of the motorsport software engineers you mention come from mechatronic/electronic/aero backgrounds. Don't get me wrong, I've seen an analog electronic engineer perform software wonders; 10,000+ lines of bash, custom C macro libraries, and a PHP runtime older than I am have taught me that programming can be closer to art than science. But relying on that cursed bundle of chaos felt deeply violating and unsafe lol.

Nowadays, I mentally place any engineer without production software experience into a 'research' box. Any resulting code may break the laws of physics, and should be tested as such ;).

Edit: It's also a minor crime to look down on automotive software engineering! The stakes of mass-manufacturing have forged some seriously awesome software. Top-of-mind for me is CAN support in Linux and safety-critical contributions going into ROS2.

Similar HFT and quants, they are elite in a very specialized niche: aerodynamics and CFD. The rest is extremely outdated.

Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.

Preach; I worked with a couple guys who left the F1 software industry and my experience matches yours. They wrote JavaScript like it was old school C, didn’t know version control etc, and refused to learn anything different.

Ah, yes, because the software on road cars is so much better.

The amount of times I had to turn off and on again my dad's Skoda because the screen was stuck on "loading user profile".