Problems like this always come down to salary. I love embedded (hardware in general, really) and would absolutely love to do it, but during my entire career, the salaries for embedded have been so much lower than you get for slinging JS/web shit. And now with 15 years in, the gap is even worse.
At this point, when I wanted to get back into hardware, it made more financial sense to outfit my home office with all the measuring instruments, debuggers, tools and other equipment necessary for embedded work and do it as a hobby. If I had the space, I could even get full-size CNC machines and still come out ahead cash wise. It’s insane.
It’s no wonder they can’t find experienced embedded devs, when it makes no financial sense to stick with it over a decade.
it is possible to get an embedded-adjacent job that pays well over 500k (my friend was bit banging FPGAs), it'll just be at an HFT instead of a car company
It’s definitely possible. There are probably a few embedded engineers making over $1M. But those are all outliers. It’s a whole lot easier to make $500k in web dev.
At this point, when I wanted to get back into hardware, it made more financial sense to outfit my home office with all the measuring instruments, debuggers, tools and other equipment necessary for embedded work and do it as a hobby. If I had the space, I could even get full-size CNC machines and still come out ahead cash wise. It’s insane.
It’s no wonder they can’t find experienced embedded devs, when it makes no financial sense to stick with it over a decade.