Because salary is rarely about how difficult a job is. In this particular case, there are 2 factors at play: 1. supply of programmers vs. demand for programme

Because salary is rarely about how difficult a job is. In this particular case, there are 2 factors at play: 1. supply of programmers vs. demand for programmers 2. rich companies can pay more than poor companies The second explains why a web programmer at Facebook or Google or Twitter makes more than almost any kind of programmer at almost any other company. Embedded programming, on average, doesn't pay well because embedded programmers usually work for hardware companies that have much lower margins and culturally don't necessarily value programmers as much as hardware people. Or to put it another way: there are much more rich pure software web companies than hardware-software companies that typically employ embedded programmers. However, I wouldn't generalize it to all web programmers. Web programming is a dominant in our industry so while there are plenty of rich companies that employ web programmers, there are even more not-so-rich companies that also employ web programmers so maybe you have selection bias (i.e. you only look at high salaries for web programmers (which exist) while ignoring even bigger number of low salaries for web programmers). Supply vs. demand explains relatively low wages for game programmers. Almost all programmers are also gamers and many glamorize game development, seeing it as more attractive than other kinds of programming which makes it possible for game companies to hire people for less than other kinds of software companies. To re-iterate: it has nothing to do with how hard a job is. To understand business, look at market forces.