don't do it as a profession, embedded programming grind is worse than conventional cloud/web programming grind

Would you say the same thing considering oncall responsibilities in conventional cloud/web programming?

I work in an IoT company and we have embedded and cloud devs, embedded is a huge pain in the ass because we can't OTA update our devices willy nilly (regulations and client's demands) and supporting older hardware creates a rats nest of backwards compatibility problems

In the cloud I can press deploy to update the servers, fixing a software problem in an embedded of a fleet with thousands of individual devices is a huge undertaking and can take months. Fixing a hardware problems usually means workarounds in software.

Heck a lot of that complexity leaks into the cloud code to fix bad design decisions made years before. Lots of "if deviceHardwareRevision <= X && deviceSoftwareVersion <= Y do Z" in the cloud code

We don't have huge amounts of traffic in our cloud so it is usually pretty reliable even though we don't even enforce a lot of best practices and patching a problem is relatively easy

Can't concur. As an embedded dev turned to web, the grind of the web dev was way stressier than the tasks as an embedded dev.

I do embedded and it's fantastic. I could never do the cloud/web grind.