At least for many common use cases that is absolutely true.
IMO other tools mostly excel at special tasks. Be it having a good component library, or less rocky integration with external tools, for example for FPGA/ASIC configuration or layout, so the stuff that is heavily driven by commercial interest in increasing an engineer's speed or lowering defect rate.
(Disclaimer: Haven't been doing electronics for two years, though, as I switched to Software.)
I'm a generalist with a degree in computer science and physics, experience in science (a little), software and electronics engineering, and a lot more non-technical stuff. While I'm certainly a lousy software engineer, it's more than enough to get hired in and around Munich.
Technically it's embedded, but the products are sufficiently complex that my day-to-day work involves everything from the usual embedded stuff (hardware set-up, FPGAs), managing devices, web development (Most devices have a reasonably modern SPA web interface using different frameworks) and signal processing. A lot of the work needs to scale from small embedded SoCs to bigger "appliances" and further. I'm pushing very much for modern techniques, such as shipping virtual units as containers for evaluation or development against our device APIs, which our customers quite like. While a lot of it is in C and C++, I'm generally also pushing for newer languages, for example a lot of the tooling I build is nowadays in Rust.
(If you're interested, feel free to have a look at the careers page. If you plan to switch and are a good fit otherwise, I'm certain that could be accommodated. In case you choose to apply, drop a note that you have a recommendation from an employee, it should speed things up. We are definitely looking for many new engineers as we're growing quickly. ;) )
I'm in a similar position (EE doing embedded programming with experience in Python C and C++ and a bunch of other stuff) and also thinking about switching to higher level stuff (web-apps, business apps, whatever). Also in Europe.
My motivation: the higher level stuff seems easier with up to twice higher hourly rates, but most importantly: it seems way easier to get fully remote jobs in the higher level programming areas. I would even take a pay-cut in exchange for fully remote: it's my nr 1 motivator to switch to something else.
What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
>What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
Same. Mostly the possibility of WFH which is absent if you ever need to touch lower level HW. Pay I can take it or leave it.
> the higher level stuff seems easier
It's not really easier though. I had a 3 month stint doing some backend contract work and the amount of framework fuckery and the speed of development on live web systems that customers use, can be crazy stressful compared to embedded.
It's like changing the components of a car, while driving it. Shit breaks much more often. Embedded felt much less stressful since any of my commits to production didn't instantly impact thousands of customers at once like on the web, with the risk of fucking their data or experience.
IMO other tools mostly excel at special tasks. Be it having a good component library, or less rocky integration with external tools, for example for FPGA/ASIC configuration or layout, so the stuff that is heavily driven by commercial interest in increasing an engineer's speed or lowering defect rate.
(Disclaimer: Haven't been doing electronics for two years, though, as I switched to Software.)