The bulk of the work is mundane and can be done anywhere in the world, so pay is rather low. The work consists, much like pure software programming, of taking functional requirements and translating them into smaller chunks. Those become hardware and software components; the hardware you buy and assemble, the software you copy and glue together or write yourself. You know those disks at take out restaurants that buzz when your order is ready to pick up? Good example of a mundane design for an electronics engineer.

You can pick up work like that on upwork or fiverr, but you have to have a bit of business sense to know which projects are feasible and practical.

Combined with another specialty, it can be challenging and lucrative. High-speed/FPGA specialists for example earn more, as do instrumentation electronics engineers (physics/signal processing) and optical electronics engineers.