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I get where the author is coming from, but that's not why shops can't hire. Embedded pays poorly. The work is challenging and rewarding, but also grueling and

I get where the author is coming from, but that's not why shops can't hire. Embedded pays poorly. The work is challenging and rewarding, but also grueling and frustrating like little else. Embedded wages are miserable. Almost any Yocto developer could immediately improve their quality of life by picking up a Ruby on Rails book and then nearly doubling their salary in a month or two. That's essentially what I did and I've never looked back. As long as that holds true, hiring good folks will be challenging.

solarkraft 4y ago
That's crazy. I always looked at embedded stuff thinking "that looks complex and hard, but I guess that's why it must be well paid". What's up with that?
- ehaskins 4y ago
  As a full-stack web engineer who's ended up being competent with Yocto, I think a major factor is which companies need embedded Linux or proper microcontroller embedded work. They're not you VC, SASS, zero marginal cost software first company. They're hardware manufacturers with physical product margins. The embedded project I work on only ships on a few thousand units/year, and it's only a small component of the overall system. I think within that group of companies, the comp for embedded vs "software" isn't significantly different. "Software" just has FANG/VC backed salary inflation making the averages look crazy.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    The FAANGs have definitely inflated prices, but in those companies the average revenue per employee is just orders of magnitude larger than anything a physical product company can produce. Giving a software engineer 2x or 5x salary compared to embedded is literally noise on the balance sheet.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Because you're a line item in a product's bill of materials and nothing more. I work on Yocto-based products and am responsible for the platform, but working on recipes and kernel mods is only 10% of my work, and by the end you're not touching it at all. If you're making kernel and rootfs changes in validation you have a serious problem. I'm not sure what projects need someone that is hacking recipes 40 hours a week.
SteeleDynamics 4y ago
Totally agree. I did some Yocto work and it was really rewarding, just not monetarily rewarding. So I haven't done that work since. But it's nice to get hardware working with the correct Yocto config.

solarkraft 4y ago

That's crazy. I always looked at embedded stuff thinking "that looks complex and hard, but I guess that's why it must be well paid". What's up with that?

ehaskins 4y ago
As a full-stack web engineer who's ended up being competent with Yocto, I think a major factor is which companies need embedded Linux or proper microcontroller embedded work. They're not you VC, SASS, zero marginal cost software first company. They're hardware manufacturers with physical product margins. The embedded project I work on only ships on a few thousand units/year, and it's only a small component of the overall system. I think within that group of companies, the comp for embedded vs "software" isn't significantly different. "Software" just has FANG/VC backed salary inflation making the averages look crazy.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  The FAANGs have definitely inflated prices, but in those companies the average revenue per employee is just orders of magnitude larger than anything a physical product company can produce. Giving a software engineer 2x or 5x salary compared to embedded is literally noise on the balance sheet.
joezydeco 4y ago
Because you're a line item in a product's bill of materials and nothing more. I work on Yocto-based products and am responsible for the platform, but working on recipes and kernel mods is only 10% of my work, and by the end you're not touching it at all. If you're making kernel and rootfs changes in validation you have a serious problem. I'm not sure what projects need someone that is hacking recipes 40 hours a week.

SteeleDynamics 4y ago

Totally agree. I did some Yocto work and it was really rewarding, just not monetarily rewarding. So I haven't done that work since. But it's nice to get hardware working with the correct Yocto config.