I almost tripled my salary by moving from what the person your replied to is looking for to the web. AND it's easier. AND I can work remotely.

I don't blame them. But they'll be more and more desperate to attract people. The democratization of remote web jobs after COVID is another nail in the coffin. They pay less, 99% of the time you have to be in office. It's a losing battle.

Doubtful. If anyone is having a hell of a time finding electrical engineers or embedded developers, then by definition that means the field isn't lucrative enough for people to stay in it. That's exactly the case I've seen repeated in every post in this thread.

I had a hell of a time getting a wage close to watch SWEs make. Hence I am no longer an embedded developer.

It's a no-brainer decision.

It's easy to think that you're just competing against the other EE job offers of $120k total comp, but you're actually also competing against the software positions those EEs could get with $300k total comp.

In my opinion that is essentially almost the same problem, though depending on the university/courses followed. To be able to program bare metal one needs some knowledge of bare metal, which is what an EE has. To be able to program one also needs some programming knowledge, which most EEs have. However if you take a 'standard' software engineer then they often only have a clue about the latter.

Most of the CS grads rarely touched C, and never ASM.

Not interested though because after 9 years of sensor experience software just pays triple my best pay in those years with easier deliverables. Never again.

There was so much low-level microcontroller dev work in the past, but perhaps that has mostly moved overseas now?

I used to do that work and I am not working at present, but I’ve moved up the stack a long way since then, so my pay and working condition expectations are probably ridiculous. And I don’t want to move from New Zealand!

So I've been doing higher-level work for a long time now.