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Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

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Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#51

Post by randallsquared »

samBergeron wrote: post #29
CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

You're taking a very specific case and generalizing it like crazy. The CS industry isn't all Electron apps and simple jobs. The most obvious example would be the video game industry were you're not straying very far from C++ anytime soon. Performance, speed and native compatibility are a big deal there. There's definitely a valid career path there.

Games programmers are notoriously poorly paid, are they not? More fuel for the GP's fire, I think. :)

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#52

Post by throwaway777836 »

CalChris wrote: post #33

Don't go there. There's really not a lot of work. But if you must, low level is more a calling than a learned skill. You probably shouldn't be learning assembler. First, compilers are really quite good. Yes, it's possible to beat them (I do) but generally not by much. And not by much ain't gonna put bacon on the table. You can probably get what you need from gcc inline asm() calls. Take a look at the linux sources an…

As an embedded programmer, I wholeheartedly second this.

I'm in an area where there are relatively few opportunities to do close to the metal work. The ones that do, don't pay any more than backend web developers make. In fact I've come to assume that they can offer less due to either the intrigue of the work, or because you often compete with computer/electrical engineers who aren't expecting outsized developer salaries.

Likewise, while I have loved the skills I've learned in embedded and low-level work, working at an embedded shop has taken a lot of the joy out of the learning. You trade off an inherent rewarding development environment with the realities of developing against hardware, where project cycles are long, you're often dependent on horrible vendor APIs and support, and where everything moves much slower.

The counter to that is the type of work I believe you're describing, which sounds like HFT optimization on Intel. I got into embedded because I wanted to eventually end up there, but again, it's an extremely limited market. And as someone who has indeed dabbled in the Fog optimization manuals, you quickly learn to realize how much the ROI of assembly isn't worth it. The future of speed isn't going to be going lower down the programming stack. It's going to be in new hardware: FPGAs and ASICs, writing RTL for system specific CPUs. And that is highly exciting, though it necessitates a pure programmer has to learn hardware at a deep level as you imply.

As for me, I concur with the statements others are making about using my skillset for security research and reverse engineering. Working in embedded development has bored me to tears, and taken the magic out of learning to love the skills themselves. I'd much prefer to work at a pace that isn't limited by the pace of a cross functional team of software and hardware engineers.

Learn the skills, yes, completely. The knowledge is worth it. But for the love of God, don't get expect to get joy out of working in it.

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#53

Post by kerny »

okatsu wrote: post #23
CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

Please don't spread generalizations like these. I'm sorry about the job situation in your area but I live in a Canadian metropolis where 1) there's no shortage of low-level work and 2) they will pay much more than your average PHP consulting shop. In fact, I maxed out very early what someone can hope to earn at my level of experience. My point is that your job market is not representative of the whole world and you'r…

Which metropolis are you talking about?

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#54

Post by pdelbarba »

In this thread there's a lot of FUD about there being no job market. One place to look is to your undergraduate electrical engineering brethren. You'll basically always be following them around to wherever they go (though often in slightly higher demand given that board design is typically faster than the software development phase). Also worth noting that in recent years there has been an emphasis on FPGA skills for a lot of jobs in the space. It often helps to have some familiarity, especially if you like working for smaller companies that wouldn't want to hire a specialist for that role.

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#55

Post by herewego »

CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

Myself and my colleagues do a lot of work in finance and machine learning where low level C++ is king, and we are highly paid for knowing the language intimately. You can generalize this across many parts of the finance industry in my experience (I own a mid-sized ML consulting firm).

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#56

Post by herewego »

CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

Myself and my colleagues do a lot of work in finance and machine learning where low level C++ is king, and we are highly paid for knowing the language intimately. You can generalize this across many parts of the finance industry in my experience (I own a mid-sized ML consulting firm).

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#57

Post by cookiecaper »

bogomipz wrote: post #26
cookiecaper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, unfortunately there are people behind the scenes pumping out a whole lot of BS and aggressively manipulating the dev ecosystem with VC dollars. You have to wonder what percentage of devs are jumping on these trains out of naivete and what percentage are jumping on out of cynicism, as both are good explanations. The explanation that rarely applies is "this is the best way to solve our problem". None of us should…

>"Yeah, unfortunately there are people behind the scenes pumping out a whole lot of BS and aggressively manipulating the dev ecosystem with VC dollars" Can you elaborate on this? This intrigued me but I didn't follow your arguments after. Can you give a concrete or specific example?

Behind the scenes activity is rarely so overt that one can point to "concrete" examples, and there's a lot of plausible deniability. Surely many people are just trying to cash in on the fad (cynics as above), and they hire developers or engineers (more likely naive than cynical), and both parties end up throwing fuel on the fire, as they're both now invested in it both monetarily and emotionally. These people are, partially unwittingly, doing most of the dirty work.

I think the zeitgeist is manipulated by large players like Google and Amazon to promote their cloud offerings. They know everyone is going to follow them wherever they go head first. Thus, they focus on driving the industry toward rented hardware that they can sell at a large markup, and gives them many other ancillary advantages, not the least of which is making large swaths of the internet's infrastructure dependent on themselves, a very powerful position to be in.

There are even articles that freely admit Google released Kubernetes to get more people on its cloud [0], and they run industry groups like the CNCF ("Cloud Native Computing Foundation") to promote the idea that running your own hardware is the devil, and why don't you just let Google handle it all for you, OK sweetheart? You wouldn't want people to call you a philistine, would you? Google is cutting-edge, and you're just a working slob.

Nevermind that a lot of people are adopting k8s only because cloud servers are so expensive, and they're looking for a way to consolidate that expense. Amazon should be trying to counteract Google here and stress the high labor costs associated with running a k8s cluster and the pre-requisite conversion of apps to work well on one.

Most people don't need something like k8s and, for that matter, most people don't need something like TensorFlow. Google releases these things because they have one big positive net effect: a lot of people paying a lot of money for cloud servers.

There is no reason to run a real database like PgSQL on Kubernetes. None. If you want to do this, you are a victim.

VCs are looking for a similar type of influence, just on a smaller scale, by getting into dev tools. Dev tools are the key to platform dominance; they are, after all, the root from which the software which will keep people on your platform arises.

Microsoft understood this, which is why they were crapping themselves when Java picked up steam in the mid-90s, why they had to supplant NetScape, and why Steve Ballmer had a conniption yelling "DEVELOPERS!" not too long after that [1]. It's why they've continued to pour billions and billions of dollars into .NET and Visual Studio down to this day.

It's also why they're making moves into new platforms like TypeScript and hiring away major k8s contributors: they hired k8s co-founder Brendan Burns [2] and their acquisition of Deis was announced just this week [3]. They want to retain as much platform influence/control as possible.

Once you have the developer, and by extension the user, on your platform, there are many ways to trap them and make them give you money. Lock-in has always been the holy grail in software because it's the best way to make money. Lock-in is gained by platform control.

We need to watch our butts here and be careful about what we're willing to believe. There are many vultures looking to get a piece; I've seen this amp up ridiculously over the last 10 years, and I don't think we're even at critical mass.

---

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/06/google-kubernetes-says-future-... ; Google's PR has been meddling here, the title used to read "Google open-sourced Kubernetes to boost its cloud", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9693853 (from 672 days ago)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

[2] http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300081316/microsoft-hires-goog...

[3] https://deis.com/blog/2017/deis-to-join-microsoft/

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#58

Post by itsokimbatman »

CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

So I can only speak for myself, but I've been exclusively working in low level C type work for the last 9 years. Think embedded, kernel dev, reverse engineering, etc. type stuff. I'm good enough at it, but hardly an expert.

I can't say I've ever lacked for work and I make $125k in a very low cost of living area, and if I wanted something new I could have interviews arranged tomorrow both where I currently live and pretty much any major US city.

It's probably not on the same scale as web dev, but there's also a lot fewer of us working on this side of things.

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#59

Post by zerr »

pdelbarba wrote: post #50
zerr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly true for remote jobs.

Yea, it's hard to work remote when you occasionally need $100K in test equipment to do your job

Embedded/devices aside, regular/high-level C/C++ jobs are scarce as well, in REMOTE space.

Re: Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer

#60

Post by nickpsecurity »

CliffyA wrote: post #6

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs. If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

I went to college with a guy who did industrial, embedded stuff you see in factories. One of his projects he told me about was a robot that cut the glass windows or something like that at a Volvo plant. Anyway, he wrote the software for sensors, control, etc. Integrated it into GUI tools or backends. I said something kind of like you said to him.

He replied that he'd have better job security than any of us in IT doing stuff like PHP or Java. He said the reason is he had to be on-site to do his work. Impossible to out-source. When I pointed out in-sourcing (H1-B, etc), he said they preferred people with both strong command of English (avoid costly misunderstandings) and experience (avoid costly mistakes). The experience often comes from working locally in colleges or companies.

So, I definitely encourage people to explore coding in C and C++ for local, embedded systems at the least. There's other jobs that don't require local or embedded where those languages are used. They're not outsourcing-proof w/ consistently good pay, though. ;)

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