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, an

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?