[allenu]

My first job out of college was doing embedded development and since then I've moved onto Mac and iOS development with a little bit of web frontend and backend work.

I have to say, the embedded stuff feels way more like you have control over the machine, I guess for obvious reasons. The tooling is specifically designed for your hardware, so what you need to do to achieve your goals is more obvious. I've found native app development similar to that. There's nothing quite like just focusing on a specific problem and plugging away at it and not having tools get in your way.

On the other hand, web development is kind of a chore in that there are so many tools, frameworks, and just different ways of doing things. For focused work, I think I prefer embedded development, but it's kind of limited in the type experiences you can gain for sure.