I'm a former embedded software guy and I can explain a bit more. Hardware is extremely capital intensive, takes a long time for any return, and the margins tend to be pretty mediocre. Around the mid-2000s many embedded developers wound up getting siphoned off into mobile development (back to around Symbian times) which was far higher up the stack than doing anything with micro controllers, RTOS, etc. The embedded software community is mostly a bunch of electrical engineers that learned software second and this can be a small handicap against pure software people that learned hardware far later. Absolutely there are still great engineers doing embedded work in the US, but it's a shrinking market in a lot of ways and very regionally concentrated (not just _any_ metro area will do for stable employment - places in Texas or outside Boston were dominant).

I left embedded dev because I saw this coming and I'm just a slow developer that wouldn't have cut it with the demands of mobile software emphasizing cranking out stuff faster when that's just not how I work.

And not only that. Even if there is money on the table or lives at stake, many companies choose to outsource embedded development instead of increasing salaries to attract top talent. Just recently Boeing software practices were heavily criticized concerning the 737 Max fiasco [0]. Sadly it has become a tendency not only in the avionics industry.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/boeing/comments/c6tknw/boeings_737_...

Out of curiosity, what do you do now? Did you get out of software entirely? (I'd say I'm kind of slow too.)

I get the impression embedded is still a somewhat slow market. Or has that slowness meant it's dried up really badly?

I was young and am a mere hardware and server nerd at heart so I wound up down the cloud / DevOps / SRE or whatnot path unfortunately a little too early and it's been quite fun.

Embedded has been consolidated into a bunch of huge multinationals like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, etc. and they're doing alright financially. It's just a very innovation-lacking industry compared to software, so you have a chicken-egg problem with investors. It'd be like trying to start a CPU company now when we've got Intel, AMD, IBM, and maybe one or two more boutique makers teetering on the edge of bankruptcy constantly.