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I would recommend everyone who retires from programming to get into the maker world. 3D printed, embedded programming - it’s great fun and just feels different from the day to day programming grind.


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


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


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.


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




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