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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

Is it even possible to make as much as the hype fields (webdev, data science, ML) in embedded? Is there opportunities for startups in HW sector?

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Sadly no - apart from a very tiny number of silicon valley companies, everyone else in embedded tech seems to pay the people who write verilog and assembly the same as the people who make the schematics and the mechanical designs. That's sometimes only 40% of what people who write python and nodejs get in the same city...

I think that's partly due to market forces and the value produced per developer. A few Webdev's can write software that enables an entire web company in a few months. Due to the poor state of embedded development ecosystem the same is not true in hardware, compounded by the time/effort required to workaround bugs in the hardware plus working in error prone C. Then embedded developers/companies don't share workarounds via open source, so every team must spend time working around already solved issues. Personally, I'm using the ESP32 largely because of the open-source SDK, that didn't require an NDA or some crappy IDE, then I ported Nim to it. But normally it might take 2-3x more embedded devs to create products with comparable profits to similar devs in pure software

If you're doing automation of some kind in the bay, embedded has roughly comparable payscales to other dev jobs. Beyond that, no. You'll generally be paid slightly less than webdevs (but still far more than most engineers make).

In my humble experience, slightly less ≈ 30% to 40% less.

Wow, that's a much bigger differential than my experience. Are you comfortable sharing the general region so I can avoid it?

I have been involved in embedded systems for more than 25 years now, and I barely do "pure" embedded development these days. That is projects that comprise only designing a specific PCB hardware, or writing the firmware drivers and top level application for them.

Except for a couple of years I have resided mostly outside of California, but when doing consulting I have mostly engaged with companies in the Bay area.

In the past when I did pure embedded development I had to fight tooth and claw to get rates close to $100/hour, while at the same time iOS app developers or webdevs were starting at $120-$140/hour easily, even after the mobile app craze. Despite taking into consideration that I am both a hardware and a software engineer, and rates outside of California were much lower ($45-$70/hour at the time). Which was one of the reasons I pushed hard to find my clients in the Bay area instead.

These days since I have more experience and business contacts I have diversified into more complex projects that have embedded components and pay me better since they belong to regulated industries. Even now I work with full-stack software programmers in AWS/GCP cloud apps, React/Vue frameworks, modern databases and connected middleware that make around $200/hour. For comparison, in the last years I have been involved in the development of a medical device where I did the hardware design (MCU/FPGA, signal acquisition), HDL/firmware programming (Verilog, RTOS, Linux, BLE), technical host tools (C++, Python, Qt) and was paid $180/hour, and lately a mobile robot project where I did the hardware architecture, integration and system control loops (MCUs), and prototyped the high level software application (RT-Linux, ROS, Nvidia Jetson) for $150/hour. An acquaintance in the valley that was working for a similar project but entirely in the ML/CV stack was billing $270/hour. That may be a bit extreme example since ML is hot today, but nevertheless.

Is this the same in Europe or outside of Bay area? It really isn't fair since you are doing the actual full-stack (from F_freaking_PGA to C++/Vue on host) but the ML type is invoking an amalgamation of libraries to do something with 90% confidence level.

> Is there opportunities for startups in HW sector?

Yes, but certainly not in the Western hemisphere.

Starting out no, but there is plenty of demand for experienced people. If you don't have experience then build up a portfolio.

Your best bet is anti-trust:

Basically, if there more customers but smaller orders, the wasteful overhead of customers reverse engineering the produce will grow. But then there's more incentive for HW companies to overtake the competition by offering better docs.

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