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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the take in this article.

I've done embedded work. I could do embedded work, I probably wont because the pay is mostly terrible compared with either traditional software engineering or the more data orientated stuff I usually do.

So, if there is a shortage of embedded engineers, it's because nobody really want to pay them properly. As to moving things up the stack... well that's always been a trend. But someone has to write the board support package and do all the hardware interfacing to the often broken and buggy hardware.

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I think the pay is terrible because this type of work is now mostly being done in parts of the world where labour costs are lower than the US.

For example, I was working with a device that came with a SoC from a large American/global SoC manufacturer. I ended up disassembling some of the firmware blobs and was able to find the devs on LinkedIn who wrote the BSP and the power management firmware. I found large networks of teams of devs in India working on these very esoteric things.

I think the pay is terrible because this type of work is now mostly being done in parts of the world where labour costs are lower than the US.

This is true, and it works for small localized code...but when it comes to application work it backfires a good amount of the time. A serious portion of embedded application work is digesting the business knowledge of the client and translating it into working firmware.

If you need to take a stateside engineer and write and review the specifications to the code, then throw it over the wall, THEN review the finished work before delivery....what was the point in the first place?

any hints which soc manufacturer?

That's interesting. I have found that there is excellent demand here for proper embedded skills and I am paid very well (Cambridge, UK).

As one of those embedded softies in Cambridge, I can confirm that.

I always found that bemusing. The more low level, difficult and involved your programming job the less you get paid. It makes sense on a capitalist pays for productivity level but it really doesn't make sense on any other level.

I suspect its because the work itself is more fun for a certain kind of people than pushing data from A to B. You also need more data pushers than bit-bangers, so maybe there is not such a shortage?

It makes sense on all levels. Pay is not correlated with how hard your job is. It's correlated with how large of an impact you have on the business.

It's really easy to have $1M+ (or basically very large) impact on a business by making data more accessible and providing solid analysis.

On the flip side, it's really hard to have a really large impact writing low level embedded code.

The reason for that is because since it is a well defined problem (control this hardware, send data from here to there) there is not a lot of room for creative flexibility. So it's hard to differentiate yourself above others (even though very technical people know that the quality of low level code can vary dramatically, this often isn't reflected in the success of the business).

At the end of the day I always ask myself, is what I am doing driving business value for my clients. If not, I try to reframe what I am working on so that is the case.

> even though very technical people know that the quality of low level code can vary dramatically, this often isn't reflected in the success of the business

I would rephrase that as the quality of low level code is not often recognized as having a huge impact on the success of the business but when low level code goes wrong it can have very costly negative effects which ripple up through the company. The usual manifestation is a buggy product with many layers of hacked together bloat. Low level code often does not get the attention it deserves because the higher ups don't understand it.

> it's really hard to have a really large impact writing low level embedded code

Like the person designing the foundation doesn't have a large impact on the stability of a tower?

You are missing my point. The point is that the impact one has writing embedded software is largely defined in the spec. Other than perfectly meeting that spec, there is not a lot of room to go above and beyond and create extra value. I'll admit I am not a 30 year veteran in embedded development, but I did spend a few years in the field.

Embedded development is very time consuming because it's generally so critical to get right and keep bugs to an absolute minimum. Which is also why it's important to keep it as simple as possible. This inherently limits how creative one can get.

> It makes sense on a capitalist pays for productivity level but it really doesn't make sense on any other level.

Capitalism doesn't pay for productivity; it pays whatever price it can get away with.

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