It's just super super super sad, but so many really good really important really high expertise bits of computing are just trash fire worlds. Firmware developers should be gods, should be paid incredibly well. They know real shit, facing obscene & intricate challenges. But below the bottom of most sw devs stack lies some incredibly shitty code made by incredibly underpaid labor, from orgs & people absolutely desperate just to get the hardware up and call it a day.
You do not want these jobs. The whole computer industry has kind of adapted to expecting people who make chips to just have gobsmacking poor setups & standards. Quality at the sw base is not regarded. Software/firmware is just a fourth fiddle to these orgs.
This is far from universally true. But you want to play in places that make money. Firmware is so important so real such a base of it all, but it's not a profit center. It's also just a tiny segmemt, miniscule. The last 8 years have seen hardware companies gobbling each other up like crazy, intense intense intense considation, and there's just so few jobs out there to make the hardware go. That should put a premium on quality & effort & trying, should make it a competitive advantage, but it's so rarely true. Such a sad shame.
The hyperscalers as is usual for their lot have basically stepped in once again with a patronage model to pay good people to de-shittify & comoddify a bunch of the lower levels. Chrome books have some wild ass Embedded Controller tech that gets passed around as a less-tragic off-the-shelf-replacement for like 50% of PC system building, is built with some overall intent & purpose (& as is Google a way, utterly uncaring about existing compounded expectations & blank slated).
OpenCompute is a more visible broader hyperscalers effort, where like 30% of the work is just building sensible firmware standards & implementations that are competemt & agreeable & don't suck. They just got tired of endless proprietary shovelware & were like, we'll do it.
It is shocking how confined computing has become. The web was like a tiny niche for ages. Until node.js (2009) almost no one took Javascript seriously, everyone had other shit they did & maybe dabbled a little in js (I did use some JScript at my first job 2005+ because I was doing a ton of js anyways but it was raw & rare).
There's a ton of wild-lands-esque datascience shit going on & those folk could definitely use some help, but it doesn't seem like being the CS person to help the org is a regular enough thing.