The thing about embedded is that you can stay in it. I'm 58, and my salary hasn't stopped going up. Sure, it's not at FAANG levels, but it's better than people with 8 years of experience get. In embedded, that extra experience actually is worth more money. It's not the "you don't know this week's web framework? No job for you" world.

Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

What I'll say is that over $100k-ish at non-FAANG, the salaries say more about the company than the person doing the work.

> Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

Embedded goes into hardware, which is mostly a low-margin product. Whereas software products (be it FAANG or startups) either make a ton of money or are perceived by investors to have a potential to make a ton of money, so they can afford to spoil their devs. In the realm of non-product development, enterprise software can deliver milions/bilions in increased efficiency for the enterprise, so it's another field where there's enough money to spoil devs.

Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth. And in a world where a good oscope is $30k, these companies can afford to pay their devs a bit more for the most part too; I've seen their budgets.

I think it's just a market failure where everyone already pays these wages, so no one goes out of their way to pay better. You can see this on the software side with China's "code peasants", or the UK salaries.

> Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth

There's tons of in-house custom enterprise software development where, depending on the skills of the manager leading the project, the idea for the developed solution can be sold to upper management as the second coming of Christ (e.g. we'll spend $10m over two years on developers and potentially earn/save hundreds of millions) and this unlocks a pot of gold for the development budget. The manager will then want to hire good/expensive devs as this increases the chance that the team will deliver what he promised to the upper management. I've seen this multiple times in large organizations I've worked for.

That's equally true of a lot of hardware. I worked on a storage device that could store an exabyte. Went for 10s of millions before even talking about the support contract where the money is.

It doesn't change the underlying equation.

I suspect there's just not enough jobs like that (most is low-margin consumer electronic crap), hence there's little competition (in terms of throwing money at people) for the best people, and the salaries for that skillset don't rise. Meanwhile, all the corporations need millions of Java developers to work on important projects and it creates enough pressure on salaries.

The UK needs millions of Java developers too, and they get peanuts.

https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer...

If you're only after money then be a Quant for financial company. But you probably had to plan that from college.

The other option is start your own companies (plural cause it's unlikely your first several will be "the one").

125k is pretty good, isn't it? 8 years into my career I was at 60k. If you want to earn more then go for it, but you shouldn't feel bad about yourself.

It's great, but I don't see a path higher.

My FAANG total comp was >150k (2015, new grad, major US metro area), and that was just the regular offer they made to everyone if you didn't try to negotiate.

You can definitely go higher, at least once the current coronavirus hiring freezes get lifted.

> ...at least once the current coronavirus hiring freezes get lifted.

FWIW I heard google has slowed down but I know FB is Accelerating hiring and and onboarding new hires virtually.

Where are you located? The numbers are way off compared to total compensation in FAANG. A software engineer in the level immediately above junior (2-3 years experience) earns ~250k at Google or Facebook in San Francisco: https://www.levels.fyi/#

$160K (US Dollars) is definitely on the lower end of FAANG for a software engineer.

My recommendation to folks is work at a FAANG at least for 3-4 years. You won’t be able to afford the kind of home you can get in Houston, Kansas City, Nashville, etc. but the experience and typical scale of problems you’ll work on is well worth it. To be clear, I mean home in terms of Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond pricing. I live in Bellevue, WA.

Source: been at two different big tech companies over the past ~10 years.