(no title)
jore
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3 years ago
I have thought about this myself. I do not think it is directly related to China. I think it is just not trendy to be an embedded developer. And the reason is that it is extremely difficult to start a hardware company (even more with the chip shortages in the last 2 years) because one needs to take care of delivering components that are rare or not available for months, to create the firmware for the board, to manufacture it and deliver it to the customer. Working from home office is often not possible, because soldering stations are needed, oscilloscopes, power supplies etc. The tools are also often not cheap, a debugger can cost 10-15$, but often for bigger projects the debuggers are 100x more expensive, the compiler could also cost a couple of thousand dollars. Then if there are bugs in the SW (there are always bugs) it is again difficult to update the software (this has improved in recent years with all the connected devices/cars etc., but it is still difficult). And as far as I know there are not that many hardware companies that have big exits.
On the other side, being a web developer does not require being in an office, buying expensive hardware and tools, nothing is physically delivered and at the end there is a chance to be part of a big tech exit. Big exits -> big salaries
ChuckNorris89|3 years ago
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.
ClumsyPilot|3 years ago
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.
bornfreddy|3 years ago
Hermitian909|3 years ago