Programming

I'm an embedded software engineer, and IMO embedded software has the benefit and curse of being not-very-sexy, in comparison to web developers or database engineers or backend engineers. That is to say, it's really easy for front-end engineers to describe their work, because it'll be something that people have seen (eg a website, or a service like Netflix). And even for backend engineers, they can analogize to fields that are well-known, such as administration or utilities (ie everything goes to poo if the sewers fail).

But embedded engineering is a tough one to explain, and that also means prospective employers might not even know that they need an embedded engineer for their Whizz Bang 3000. It's not at all intuitive to most folks that there's a separate set of skills necessary to program a screen-less, keyboard-less, network-less tiny CPU that might not even run an OS.

On the flip side, it means that the job is fairly specialized and thus valuable. Most software engineers could probably figure out how to program a microcontroller using C, but the most talented embedded engineers can achieve the same in the smallest memory footprint, thus saving hardware costs. To shave off $1 off the cost of a product that will sell hundreds of thousands, that's something that companies will pay for.

Embedded is diametrically opposite of application development: basically everything is under constraints (eg RAM, CPU time, I/O, interfaces) and we just have to deal with it. At its core, the occupation seeks to do the most number of things with the fewest resources. Not everyone has to skills to optimize this hard, to strip down software to only its abject requirements.

I can't speak as to what any particular job markets looks like right now for embedded engineers. But given that the need for embedded software does not ramp up during hype cycles, I think it tends to be a fairly stable occupation. The trick is that it's not a huge market everywhere, so moving for work might be necessary.

TL;DR: embedded software is a small but stable occupation, IMO.