Embedded roles pay less than almost any other role... I feel there should be some sort of diagram possible that explains which industries and technologies pay more or less.
Is the entity you are selling your services to earning a large profit margin? If yes, then it is possible (but not guaranteed) for you to earn more. If not, then look elsewhere.
Generally, this situation happens in businesses that can scale with little to no marginal costs (software, media), can use governments to defend its property (intellectual property, land), and can be easily used as collateral (land) with which you can obtain leverage (money).
Note the C/C++/C#/SQL cluster at $70k/12years of experience.
> Wt is a web GUI library in modern C++. Quickly develop highly interactive web UIs with widgets, without having to write a single line of JavaScript. Wt handles all request handling and page rendering for you, so you can focus on functionality.
HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23812791
I actually doing all web backend using C++. I do not render to HTML though. All JSON based RPC. Rendering done by front end JavaScript.
I get paid very well doing embedded firmware dev, but that’s because we don’t make money on our hardware, we make money on the software that it talks to for industrial IoT analytics
1. A lot of the tooling is made by the hardware suppliers. Hardware suppliers tend to be very bad at writing desktop software; I have some theories as to why that is, but no direct evidence for them.
2. When tools are selected, they are rarely evaluated by software developers who will be using them. It's more like "Here's a list of boxes anything our development tools need to check" and then the final selection for anything that checks engoubh boxes is done for business reasons (cost, likely availability of support down the line &c.)
3. The same reason that embedded developers are often paid poor salaries; for a lot of hardware companies, the firmware development is treated more as a cost-center than as something that generates revenue.