I started about a year before you. I went into embedded rtos stuff. At the time it was comparable to the beat SV offers and by the time SV recovered enough to start offering double or perhaps triple embedded rates, I had learned i actually liked it an felt the amount of domain specific knowledge i had aquired was a good investment. I'm not sure that was the case, but at 40 having never changed jobs from that original corporation, I think I at least got stability and fun work out of it.