Distributed systems programming has stalled

I saw comments about embedded development, which I have been doing that for a long time, just want to make a point here: the pay has upper limits, you will be paid fine but will reach the pay limit very fast, and it will stay there for the rest of your career. they can swap someone in with that price tag to do whatever you are working on, because, after all, embedded devel is not rocket science.

The problem with embedded is its proximity to EE which is frankly underpaid.

But it's also more that the "other" kind of SWE work -- "backend" etc is frankly overpaid because of the copious quantities of $$ dumped into it by VC and ad money.