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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

As I sit here spending hours and hours importing packages, installing modules, downloading tools, finding libraries, patching scripts, following deployment guidelines and building gigabytes and gigabytes of artifacts ...for what amounts to a mobile app wrapper around HTML pages.

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The disease has a name: over engineering.

https://www.smart-jokes.org/programmer-evolution.html

Most working programmers are in the middle near “seasoned professional.” They spend all their time thinking about how to manage complexity when they should be thinking about how to avoid it.

Oh my I hadn't seen this before and it is divine!

The app epidemic is mostly thanks to one single dead dude. Of course it made (and continues to make) billions to Apple. Then naturally half the industry wanted in on the app store game.

Eventually it might stop being such a cash cow - maybe thanks to endless numbers of teenagers hyping Fortnite.

To be fair, the tech stacks they have to work with often have staggering amounts of accidental complexity.

It’s seasoned professionals all the way down.

Only yesterday I encountered a fantastic example. I have to implement an API, there is a swagger/openAPI doc for it, but still, the real interaction and meaning of the calls can be a bit hard to grasp. But the developers provide an example application (in C#).

I expected something basic that implements the login flow and some of the more important calls. Instead I found something that could be described as an C# architecture example application. If I wanted to learn C#, I think I could learn a lot about application patterns from it. MVVM, how to separate the concerns into separate "packages" for reusability and the likes. What I can't really learn from it (without already being a C# pro, I work in other environments) is how to use the API.

That's one of the reasons I like my low level system programming job (maybe you could call it "embedded"). Of course it has problems of its own, but this particular area is at least a little bit better.

Except the pay sucks. You can make a lot of money concatenating HTML strings.

That is not universally true.

That is universally true.

Can you share some pointers to embedded jobs that pay well? It's been a source of fascination over the years the way embedded jobs that sound as if they are important, challenging and interesting pay a fraction of other programming jobs.

I'm not the parent comment here but I'll note that the uptick in IoT/PaaS projects has created a nice niche if you have low level experience + embedded Linux + some cloud API experience. And not just taking an RPi and having it send JSON up to Azure, but defining a platform and creating a whole project full-stack.

Companies are realizing that the IoT node structure is not just a one-shot project that ships and is never maintained. It's part of the revenue stream. So the need for embedded Linux developers is increasing and the experience base out there isn't great. Again, having an RPi in your desk drawer doesn't make you an embedded Linux dev.

How do the jobs pay, outside FAANG or whatever? The money for developing embedded software was out of line (far too low) with the difficulty of those jobs and the importance of those systems even before those systems had "IoT" sprinkled all over them.

> So the need for embedded Linux developers is increasing and the experience base out there isn't great. Again, having an RPi in your desk drawer doesn't make you an embedded Linux dev.

Maybe things have changed, but in the past there hasn't been much financial incentive for devs to build up those skills beyond the "RPi in the desk drawer" (zing!) level. "Work hard, make a lot less than a web dev, be less hirable in the future because of your niche skills." I'm speaking as someone who actually did look into what training myself on some of Wind River's products would cost, about eight years ago, and looked into what the jobs paid.

edit: I can see by looking at a grandparent comment that we're probably in agreement

This is extremely untrue; a barely competent embedded developer can make gobs of money. It's a much rarer skill, somewhere at the intersection of software developer and electrical engineer.

Show me the offers. I have worked as embedded dev some time ago, and my job offer feed keeps sending me embedded opportunities. I'm making significantly more doing JS + React

I'd love to see this as well. Outside the FAANGs embedded devs are treated as a line-item cost on the BOM. 5 years of experience gets you a "senior" title and salaries here in the midwest cap at $150K with very few exceptions. I'm pretty sure you can make $150K as a freshout writing ReactJS.

Then again I refuse to make FPGAs for HF trading firms, and apparently you can make bank there if you can put up with their crap.

This is my experience.

I worked for over 10 years doing Linux Kernel driver implementation. At Intel.

When I quit last year my base was $120k (150 TC). I couldn’t afford a house in the HCOLA I’m in. Remote wasn’t an option. For me a house is a prerequisite to starting a family.

So I left to get housing. Either making more or going remote and moving to a less expensive area.

Embedded is really fun for me, but it just can’t keep up in times of such inflation- especially WRT housing.

After working on bloated systems at all my day jobs (pick any company) I go home at night and try to figure out how to use delta compression and trees to reduce storage costs on large datasets so I can fit them on $5 VPS or raspberry pi attached storage.

It's so satisfying to use 10,000x less resources to do something like full text search or handle 1,000 tps.

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