The easiest way to make money is to find a business need and provide a solution. Games, first of all, are not a business need. They are entertainment. Except at

The easiest way to make money is to find a business need and provide a solution. Games, first of all, are not a business need. They are entertainment. Except at high scale, entertainment typically does not make a lot of money. Embedded development is a specialized field. It does make a lot of money, but only if one is highly skilled so as to do applicable low level dev. I wouldn't say it pays lowly; simply that it is hard to get into it truly at all, so many of those who are "in" embedded dev just say that to make the stuff they do sound cooler. Web programming, also, does not necessarily pay more than anything. "Web Programming" is a very generic term. It is easy to setup a website that has no dynamic nature, that has poor layout, and cannot be properly updated by large groups of people under different permissioning rules. Doing all of those things is no small task. Web programming, at the level that people tend to get paid well for, can be very complex when considering the full stack of components and interdisciplinary skills involved. Basically, you are comparing very generic job descriptions that don't take into account the years of experience that are necessary to accomplish things. There is not a high demand for "kernel and hardware engineers". Why? Because the few that we have are quite sufficient. Hardware and low level software engineering is a somewhat working area. In comparison, the higher layers of software development are horribly incomplete and constantly changing.