I love electronics and circuit building. I’ve been told that the compensation is shockingly poor compared to that of software engineers. This didn’t affect my college experience, as I was already well into my SE career when I finished my degree. As I recall though, the course load was harder and the opportunities fewer.

Incidentally, I had a friend who was an EE who went on to become a Patent attorney. He told me he did so because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life maintaining a print server design.

Even firmware development in C is lower paid than almost any Java/JS conventional development role in Sydney. Having done both, the C one is much harder due to being in a much more resource limited environment.

The only real electronics roles I see outside the occasional advert for some of the bigger names maybe once every six months are uni roles paying 1/4 of the salary outside of unis (always boasting 18% Super/RRSP LOL)

>I doubt I could afford a comfortable life with a house and family in a major city like Sydney

I don’t think there’s any disagreement here, but it’s because you layered on an important constraint regarding location. Similarly, there are very few jobs that could support living in Manhattan or on a yacht, but that’s not really the larger point. The larger point being, the posts focused singularly on money. Like your location, if we narrowly constrain the problem, of course it means there are only a few options that make sense. If all I care any is money, there are only a handful of acceptable job prospects.