[technothrasher]

Yep. There are plenty of small manufacturing companies that have embedded programming projects that aren't sexy or cutting edge, but are just little STM32 or similar chips running bare metal no-OS code for all kinds of simple little devices for different industries. I've been doing that work for the past twenty years. It scratches my engineering itch, but also lets me work pretty independently, put in my mostly stress free 40 hours a week, and then go home and not think about it.