Makes sense, it's interesting to see this discrepancy between fields.

Could you elaborate what specialized skills though?

I write software systems to control devices in buildings in the context of energy savings, like hvac and charging cars, and also control attached distributed energy resources, like batteries or solar.

A friend started working in this space last year. It seems like the usual story here is smaller companies giving you lottery tickets in the form of pre-IPO options. And large established companies paying a bit below market rates.

See when people say "tech" colloquially it means website and app developers, not us embedded dev hobos.

Eh, embedded and sensor-fusion devs are making bank working at Waymo, or VR at Apple or Meta. It's less about the field itself and more about big-tech salary-leveling (and insane profits)