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Comment by coumbaya | Hacker News Reader

Yup, switched from embedded (on high-speed trains), to modern backend, x4 my salary. Unfortunate since embedded was super interesting.

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>> Yup, switched from embedded (on high-speed trains), to modern backend, x4 my salary.

These comments leave me confused. My Michigan based understanding would have you both poorly paid for embedded work and obscenely paid for backend work. I know some folks in CA make 200K and up, I'm just not sure how common that is. And anyone doing embedded should be at least 100K, so I don't see an easy x4.

Ah, the explanation is quite simple and I should've included it, sorry. I'm working in France, so I was at more or less 25k in embedded (not poor by french standard for my age, and had a lot of extra perks (like free train) compared to other companies, but not great either. I doubled when I started working for a french startup, and doubled again when I started working for an US-based startup.

Oh you changed countries in there too! That explains it ;-)

Off-topic but, could you share a transition plan with me?

I am a pure embedded sw. guy (3 YOE) and have already started to learn DB management and higher-level languages (Java and C#). How was your transition?

Any tips on moving from embedded?

Not sure I'm the best to give tips because I just had many great opportunities at work, moved from C/C++ embedded to Go embedded (same company) and then Go web backend at another. I wouldn't do anything different, because money is great, but tbh it's less interesting than C on an 8086 or embedded Go with audio/video, lua interpreter, GPS pathing and stuff like that.

what do you mean by 'modern backend'? backend is pretty legacy except for the SSR node.js movements these days as far as I can tell, maybe some Go-lang microservices too.

Maybe in my head 'modern' is the wrong word, I just meant web backend on modern stack (yes, in go), or at least backend for recent startups with everything in the cloud etc. While I don't really agree with using a shiton of cloud services (especially coming from embedded without even dynamic allocations), it does make for interesting problems related to distributed messaging and things like that.

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