I've been telling people since the late 00's that starting my career in embedded was the single best thing that happened to my career. I quickly follow that up

I've been telling people since the late 00's that starting my career in embedded was the single best thing that happened to my career. I quickly follow that up with the fact that leaving embedded was the second best thing that happened to my career. I've dreamed about going back, because I do miss it, but the jobs aren't there (in my area and especially now that I've fallen in love with full-time remote work). I know a hell of a lot more about what our code is actually doing up and down the stack than my colleagues, including most of the managers I've had and "Principals" I've worked with and so on. It helps, a whole lot, in fact, and I find that it's personally rewarding, but it doesn't amount to much more than being the person who gets asked the challenging profiling/performance/optimization questions.