I mean... no? I've worked on chips for basically my entire career, and I get paid a more than when I briefly worked in web stuff. Not sure where this idea has come from. My previous startup I worked for just got acquired for 10s of billions of dollars, which is a higher valuation than my friends who have gone through acquisitions in the web-dev / SaaS space

I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff, but there's an entire industry of deep tech software and the payouts are excellent.

When I lived in the northeast, every time I saw an opportunity for embedded work, or traditional UI work (Qt, etc., almost invariably for things like screens on medical or scientific equipment and almost never for desktop applications) it paid 1/2 to 2/3 the going rate for a midlevel webshit engineer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.