This paper presents results and observations from a survey of 120 industry practitioners in the field of real-time embedded systems. The survey provides insights into the characteristics of the systems being developed today and identifies important trends for the future. It extends the results from the survey data to the broader population that it is representative of, and discusses significant differences between application domains. The survey aims to inform both academics and practitioners, helping to avoid divergence between industry practice and academic research. The value of this research is highlighted by a study showing that the aggregate findings of the survey are not common knowledge in the real-time systems community.