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After decades as a EE / SW Engr, every single person I've known who worked in game dev has told this story. More work, less pay, more irrational management...
by johnea 4y ago
After decades as a EE / SW Engr, every single person I've known who worked in game dev has told this story.
More work, less pay, more irrational management...
After the tens of thousands laid off in SW over the last few months, the sweet spot is in embedded, more than ever...
- habibur 4y agoFew weeks back, others were talking about embedded getting paid less than web app development. What would you say, true? I understand that they aren't getting laidoff, there's a big gap in high demand and low number of experts in this field.
- m-ee 4y agoDefinitely true. You’re not gonna starve, if you doing embedded at $BIGTECH probably 200-300k TC, but there will be a discount compared to the regular software engineers wherever you’re working.
- jacknews 4y agoWhere are 'regular' swe's getting more than 300k? Or even, where are embedded engineers getting 200k+?
- roland35 4y agoI think a lot of big tech companies are getting into hardware in order to diversify and help build a platform to support future online components. Meta has AR and VR, Google has Nest and Fitbit, Apple obviously makes tons of hardware, Amazon with Alexa and warehouse robotics. All of the above make custom servers which require firmware. Even Netflix has some embedded devs working on supporting streaming devices. What’s nice is that embedded swe equals regular swe salaries at these companies! I am an embedded dev at a big tech company and interviewed at most of the FAANGS recently.
- m-ee 4y agoAny FAANG. But take a look at square for example because they’ve posted more reasonable salary ranges than most. Senior android engineer, 222-272k. Expired now but they had a senior firmware engineer for 202-247k. Unclear if those are base or TC, if it’s base then you’d definitely be over $300k with RSUs, but even if it’s TC a good year in stocks pushes that over.
- throwaway5959 4y agoI’d love to write Rust code for embedded systems.
- randmeerkat 4y agoIt’s not a job, but I’m guessing you would like this book: https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/ https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/
- throwaway5959 4y agoThanks!
- m-ee 4y agoThis is the first time I’ve heard someone be optimistic about embedded. Better than game dev or EE but that’s only one step up on the work/pay ladder. I find my work interesting but I would have made a lot more optimizing the search bar on the Facebook android app or whatever.
- theshrike79 4y agoThe stories about embedded I've heard is that they've got outsourcing partners in India and China delivering shit-tier code and hardware that they need to fix themselves, on top of their actual jobs. YMMV though. (Mobile) game jobs aren't a more work less pay environment in the least, the successful ones make so much money that the companies want to keep the teams who made the game at all costs. The companies also recognise that it's the people who make the games, so the pay and bonuses reflect that. And because the successes are so big €€€-wise, most companies can afford to spend time making the next big game instead of forcing people to crunch and sleep under their desks. PC/Console gaming is a whole different world, don't know much about that.
- scruple 4y agoMy experience in embedded was great except for the: more work, less pay, more irrational management part. I doubled my salary moving to web backend services.