I agree that it's hard to find low-level work with equivalent pay to web development/frontend/etc. I think this is a reason that the "learn to code" movement fo

I agree that it's hard to find low-level work with equivalent pay to web development/frontend/etc. I think this is a reason that the "learn to code" movement focuses on Javascript and Python rather than C. From my limited experience, big companies (Google, Facebook, etc) are a good place to do low-level programming with good pay. Additionally, a lot of the programming in the financial industry (particularly high frequency trading) is very low-level work, and the pay is significantly better than the standard "Bay area web company".