[Jtsummers]

"Programming is just typing" was a typical management refrain when I was in the embedded field (more properly, now I'm adjacent to it). It was frustrating. Computer scientists and programmers aren't Real(tm) Engineers so they don't deserve as much money. They can't be in charge because you can't have engineers answering to non-engineers (ie, very few leads let alone managers coming from the software side). Which leads to a culture that's overly hardware centric with insufficient leadership/management understanding of what software actually entails.

Also, "This doesn't meet the current requirements, fix it with software!" The best one was when the case wasn't waterproof... How the fuck is software supposed to fix that? They literally expected the software team to work magic. A lot of pushback got that requirement kicked back over to the mechanical engineering team to address, but it took months. Moronic.

[AtlasBarfed]

It might also be that the management chains in embedded are likely former engineers or EE people. In Web you get a lot of management interfaces where the boss can't do their job: that's the perfect recipe for high pay.

In embedded and other non-software engineering but engineering firms, the management is typically engineers that CAN do their subordinates jobs, they just don't want to.

[Jtsummers]

That's what I was getting at with this:

> They can't be in charge because you can't have engineers answering to non-engineers (ie, very few leads let alone managers coming from the software side). Which leads to a culture that's overly hardware centric with insufficient leadership/management understanding of what software actually entails.

In hardware-centric orgs, software developers are a small step above technicians in their pecking order, sometimes below. The pecking order itself is annoying enough, but when you switch from designing your own ASICs to buying COTS dev boards and primarily only adding software to it, you're not really a hardware company anymore. But it'll take another generation for them to realize it, or a severe crunch if someone comes along and realizes that they can pay embedded devs $200k+ and eat the lunch of half these companies.