&gt; I don&#x27;t know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer.<p>Moore&#x27;s Law slowing down is <i>good</i> for firmware people.  Optimizing, by hand, for 10% matters when you can&#x27;t just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18 months.<p>&gt; I don&#x27;t see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.<p>The embedded space is power and cost constrained.  Power constrained because of batteries and their inability to deal with RF.  Cost constrained because memory now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost.<p>IoT <i>is</i> a lot of hype.  The problem is that IoT is <i>LOW VOLUME</i>, and nobody wants to deal with that.  So, everybody wants you to adopt their &quot;highly scalable&quot; (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real work who are creating and marketing the application device.  And, everybody decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is in the backend so they refuse to play along.<p>The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be the one who stumbles into the high volume application.  Think Qualcomm getting started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.