[fndrplayer13]

I loved being an embedded developer. Loved it. I had been out of college for 4 years and thought that the work at startups would be even more exciting. I took a job as a backend developer at my current company because I was really excited about the technology they were working on from a conceptual level, and I still am. I transitioned from working on computer vision/image processing embedded work to natural language generation stuff in AWS. The AI aspect just generally excited me, but so did expanding my skill set in a much wider sense. Today I can talk about embedded concepts all the way up to AWS concepts like lambdas, cloud formation, etc. That's a pretty cool breadth of skill (notice I didn't necessarily say depth :P). I still feel like an embedded developer at heart, though. I'll go back to it someday.

[eplanit]

Thank you, interesting. I am curious because I've gone the other direction. I began in the latter 1980s on the IBM PC (literally with IBM). At IBM they gave us a PC, a copy of the Technical Reference Manuals, and a screwdriver. It was really fun to learn the machine literally from the metal upwards. Beyond the screwdriver was Macro Assembler and a C compiler. Avoiding reminiscence, the point is that over the ensuing years my career took me further and further up the stack into software only, from end-user applications to a long time in the server "backend" space. During those years I became ever decreasingly aware of the hardware and internals of the OS. Machines themselves became "virtual instances". Thus is the modern world of highly scalable, distributed 'net and [dread] enterprise computing, and it's all great and exciting in many ways -- but, for me I also felt that my heart was happiest when thinking of things at the lower level. That drove playing with embedded systems, which led ultimately to a complete career shift. All is good. And, yes, we are all so very fortunate to be in an economic segment (technology, hardware and software) that allows us such freedom to choose our paths (and then change them).