I find it's hard to reasonably switch careers once you get to a high earning position in web development. I've long had a big interest in lower level stuff: I've done a minimal OS in high school (boot sector in assembly, first-fit malloc and round-robin scheduler on 32-bit x86 in high school — I remember bringing a bootable 3.5" floppy into my graduation project presentation with teachers being surprised: "you've got something running, too?"), and while I've always strived for a more direct-to-hardware job, I don't trust I can apply for any of the relevant positions and expect anything but a junior-ish salary.

I do believe that I'd easily pick it up (eg. I can easily spot potential races and common problems with async code in other people's code, which is usually the trickiest problem though I'd expect hw bugs to be even worse in low-level stuff), but I am not sure I can sell myself well enough to get a position that matches my skills (since experience is limited).

Other than spending time away from work (which I lack because of the family), do you have any other tips on how to break into the field?

Remote from a EU timezone a requirement :)

It's easier than you'd think to make the transition if you're willing to go into embedded development. Pretty much any demo of competence can get you hired as demand is high and the work is challenging.

Pick up a Nucleo or mbed board and make something cool!

> Pick up a Nucleo or mbed board and make something cool!

That's currently in conflict with my life circumstances ;-)

The number of "projects" I wish I could do sitting on my shelves already surpasses the time I can find to spend on them.

Basically, I want to be paid to "learn," and I think I'll be fair value in a month or two. So the question is how to get there? ;-)

Another way of putting this is, you choose to let available opportunities shape your future career.

You can do that, or you can choose to exert some control over the process.

If you're not willing to spend ~20-40 hours getting an Arduino-class object to, say, talk to a MMC/SD/SDHC card using only your own code, no libraries (this is something I can do easily as a rusty hybrid EE-FW guy who is now mostly EE), then I don't know what to suggest.

Thank you for conflating "not willing" with "unable". Also on suggesting how a 20-40h project will make me appear as an expert in embedded programming.

> Also on suggesting how a 20-40h project will make me appear as an expert in embedded programming.

That was actually my real point. For many smaller companies, it will. General programming experience plus any honest signal, even small, of low-level qualification will get you attention. We get lots of generalist candidates for our embedded positions and the #1 easiest high-signal filter for us is "how do we know they're actually interested in embedded?" Pass that, and things can open up for you.

Cool, thanks: that is useful feedback!

I haven't applied for a lower level dev so far, but it gives me some encouragement to maybe try next time I want to switch positions (though I did work or get offers on some embedded dev shops, but on the web side of things).

> That was actually my real point. For many smaller companies, it will.

Just an observation, but I've almost never seen job postings for entry/junior level engineers in the embedded/systems world. Only senior-staff level roles (I get the feeling that a lot of early career talent in these domains is sourced from local university pipelines). This has been my observation across both small companies and large corporations. Are these shops really considering people who's only experience is some contrived side projects at that level?

So, um, are you hiring? And where are you located?

Seattle, and, no, not for firmware engineers (we have a pretty solid firmware team!).

> It's easier than you'd think to make the transition if you're willing to go into embedded development.

for which salary tho. just checked a bit the current offers and in my country, senior embedded engineer is 60k€ / year at most, and I saw a fair bit around 40k€...

In theory I could deep dive into my Debian machine, but there are just so many things. Just think of the USB protocol compared to eg. a wanna-be implementation of RS232. There is no way I could get deep understanding of the whole system.

That said, I think you are correct in that there are less magic than you think when looking at the surface.

> but underneath that is just regular old computer programming, just like the Vic20.

Yeah, unfortunately I thought that I could easily understand modern computers after having played around with the 6502 family a lot. Only to learn that even at the lowest level there's a lot of legacy cruft and decades worth of added abstractions.

As a thing, OS development requires some UI to interact with low level things, .. And for me most satisfying - put reward aside , as I'm not interested in material part -, thing is Game Development, tools to see parts - debug lights bounce with a terminal - of render process ( Some may check Unreal Engine, or any other game engine UI's ), Even I don't fill comfortable enough with blueprint kind of low level UI's as oppose to text programming ( double d = 10.0 is easy for me to drag and drop a variable ) Material always have many faces. UI is one of them.