Comment by jore

I have thought about this myself. I do not think it is directly related to China. I think it is just not trendy to be an embedded developer. And the reason is that it is extremely difficult to start a hardware company (even more with the chip shortages in the last 2 years) because one needs to take care of delivering components that are rare or not available for months, to create the firmware for the board, to manufacture it and deliver it to the customer. Working from home office is often not possible, because soldering stations are needed, oscilloscopes, power supplies etc. The tools are also often not cheap, a debugger can cost 10-15$, but often for bigger projects the debuggers are 100x more expensive, the compiler could also cost a couple of thousand dollars. Then if there are bugs in the SW (there are always bugs) it is again difficult to update the software (this has improved in recent years with all the connected devices/cars etc., but it is still difficult). And as far as I know there are not that many hardware companies that have big exits. On the other side, being a web developer does not require being in an office, buying expensive hardware and tools, nothing is physically delivered and at the end there is a chance to be part of a big tech exit. Big exits -> big salaries