> 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...