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> I do not think it is directly related to China. I think it is just not trendy to be an embedded developer Not true at all. Pay has nothing to do with trendiness, but the other way around, being a webdev is trendy because of the high pay, great benefits like WFH and low bar to entry. Meanwhile embedded dev has a higher bar to entry due to the difficulty of the work, low relative pay and low flexibility in terms of WFH, making the jobs untrendy. And no, the outsourcing of most HW related dev work to China has had a big impact in lowering embedded dev wages in the west, coupled with the fall of great electronics giants in the west. When I started uni to become an EE there was Nortel, Blackberry, Siemens, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Sagem, Philips, etc. developing HW and mobile devices in Europe, or the west, and were hiring like crazy. Fast forward 6 years when I finished my Master's and most of those companies have either went bust, or have become just brand names for Chinese OEMs, or have become sweatshops for far east workforce, keeping only some of their sales and senior management in the west. The EE market in the west has went way down in the last 10-15 years in comparison to the web dev market which went way up. The only western HW company making insane profits is Apple and semi titans like ASML, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Quallcomm, while the Japanese, Korean and Chinese companies fighting for the rest of the scraps, and most of the European ones throwing the towel completely. The commodization of HW and FW dev has meant the commodization of dev wages as well. After graduation, some of my colleagues went into mobile app dev (the iPhone has been out for a few years but were far away from becoming the norm) and are now making several times what I do as an embedded dev at the same level of YoE. Talk about betting on the wrong horse. I still can't stop kicking myself for choosing such a poor career path and wonder if I can still switch as most companies seem reluctant to hire a thirty-someting embedded senior to do junior web dev work usually done by a teen or twenty-something out of bootcamp. |
If you are based in UK, drop me a line.
If you are an embedded developer with experience, you probably understand the difference between a linked list and an array, I am interviewing 'senior' web devs and half don't.
Many 'boring' companies like corporate accounting or whatever, need developers badly and pay maybe 70-80% of what 'fashionable' ones do. It could a good place to break in.