Comparison between software engineer and firmware engineer (systems engineer)?

A Firmware Engineer works close to the hardware on which their software is running. Because of this, a Firmware Engineers tends to have more intimate knowledge of digital circuit design, hardware clock signals, timing diagrams, and other such things. A Firmware Engineer can often be identified by the type of tools found around him ie an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, a BDM or ICE etc. A Software Engineer with a degree in Computer Science tends not to have the electronic / electrical training and therefore is a step removed from the hardware on which the software will run. Software Engineers tends to write application software which runs on PC's or mainframe operating systems. Web Developers can also be classified as Software Engineers writing web applications and creating complex websites. Firmware Engineers are not more valuable then Software Engineers as a matter of the fact the opposite is true. There are far more opportunities in business, industry, telecommunications for Software Engineers and therefore better pay and career progression than Firmware Engineers. Having said that the demand for Firmware Engineers worldwide is increasing rapidly driven by the Internet of Things and M2M computing. In the future Firmware Engineers will be in par with Software Engineers in worth.

I've spent the majority of my working life in the embedded software industry (mainly automotive and aerospace). From this background I would tend to call the role "Embedded Software Engineer" rather than "Firmware Engineer". In embedded, there seems to be a "demographic timebomb", in that there seem to be many more embedded software engineers who are aged 40+. So it's fair to say that there will be increasing demand and opportunities in this area. We find recruiting new engineers for embedded depends a lot on: The details of the degree they've got - some universities spend some time looking at the "nuts and bolts" of computers - which is essential: you've got to understand what's happening at the CPU level, rather than (say) just the Java VM level. Personal interest. If someone has spent lots of time on projects with PICs or Atmel development boards, that's likely to be a really good sign for us. Will it earn you more money? It depends. If you go into the financial world, I'm sure that there are plenty of people earning way more than embedded engineers. On the other hand I would suspect that on average, embedded engineers earn more than "general" software engineers. Plus embedded projects can be awesome: writing code to control rockets, planes and automobiles is great!