As I said, it was the 90s, so pay may be better today
. At the time it seemed to be more a job you did because you found it interesting than because you wanted to make money; you could go and spend your life writing database software for a bank if you wanted to be rich. We got to work with a lot of unusual hardware -- it was the first time I ever saw something using core memory in the real world
-- and help spec it with the hardware guys.
I think my biggest question would be whether the skills would transfer easily over to other fields, or you'd be restricted to avionics forever? I believe there's a lot more C++ and similar languages these days, so you should at least be able to transfer to other embedded areas. I've never had a need to use Ada since I left that job.
And yeah, hacking in a patch and shipping it straight out the door wasn't considered good practice, unlike some of my other jobs since
.