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Comment by pyb | Hacker News Reader

IME : they had to move up the stack, in order to access better employment opportunities.

Seconded. I look around, at this week's "Who's Hiring" thread, for example, and the systems/firmware/embedded jobs are slim pickings. Filter out the super-senior positions and I can count them on one hand. How's a guy supposed to gain the experience to be a senior embedded dev when nobody's hiring junior embedded devs? I'm sticking at this, hoping for a needle in the haystack, because I like it, but most people in our position would just pick up some JavaScript and Leetcode and double their salary.

If you also take into consideration the years it takes to go from junior to senior/experienced in the systems area, salary becomes a much bigger deciding factor. It’s not just 20k a year less for one year, its 20/30/40k less for as long as you’re mastering your area when you could spend less time mastering something else for more money.

Part of the issue is that places like HN cater to smaller startups and places eager to seem 'hip'. Companies that employ a lot of embedded engineers are invariably either FAANG type companies that don't need to advertise that way, or hardware companies so institutionalized that they treat it like any other administrative job and only post on LinkedIn/indeed. Occasionally you'll get a smaller startup/unicorn that's trying to complete with SV tech giants, but that's uncommon.

I'm trying to implement these sorts of changes (and many others) right now at my own place, but it's quite frustrating from the other side too.

Hacker News is just the wrong place to look. This is essentially a web dev site. Just use linked in or zip recruiter or whatever. There are tons of positions for embedded now, same trouble hiring as everyone else, and often they’re open to anyone with software experience, you don’t need to know the difference between Vdd and Vcc or how to use an oscilloscope, though obviously employers would prefer you did. (Well, forget the first one, Vdd vs Vcc is essentially trivia)

I am looking on those other, more traditional sites as well, and junior-level embedded jobs (without moving to California or China) are still far less common.

As someone who has recently left embedded engineering to pursue other avenues, I got tired of:

1. Being paid much less than my similarly leveled colleagues

2. Needing to work with engineers well outside my timezone

3. Being hounded by recruiters to do bluetooth comms and nothing but bluetooth comms

4. Having to be very careful to not put myself in a position where I need to fly to China to deal with manufacturing issues on a moments notice

5. Lack of remote work opportunites for obvious reasons

I do enjoy working on low level code but not enough to deal with the industry in its current state.

I don’t know about the other FAANGs but if you get into Meta you can then select a systems / embedded team during boot camp.

What area are you in? I'm in Detroit, a major manufacturing center, and there's always demand for embedded devs on job boards. Maybe you need to relocate?

I've got a friend who is a long-time embedded C developer, about 20 years of experience. Really knows his stuff. I just hired him to write python and he got a massive pay rise to come over, because all the embedded shops in our area pay shit.

I'd love to get paid doing low-level coding (or at least try my hand at that). Sadly, I am very passionate about being able to afford food, so DevOps it is (not that I'm complaining).

I'm in webdev to access any employment opportunities. Moving to kernel/embedded would be fun but it almost feels like jumping to another industry. I have no connections and no idea how to find a good company (e.g. what is the Joel Test for hardware companies?) I have gone on a few job sites and sprayed/prayed my resume, which so far has gotten zero interest from anyone. OTOH I'm lucky to have landed where I did so it might be for the best that I stay in webdev.

Koopman's Better Embedded Software should give you some good things to ask about.

In 30 years, I have moved all the way from the bottom of the stack doing assembly to the top, where I now do deployment pipelines and other DevOps related tasks.

They also won't give a second glance to those who would like to move down the stack, even in markets where these sorts of skills are practically non-existent.

Not even remotely close. As OP posted: there are too few low-level people left. This skillset commands much better pay than "upstack"

How much does it pay? From what I’ve seen, market pay for systems devs is substantially lower than for those up the stack, outside of FAANGs and HFT outfits.

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