When I Googled about it recently, I saw one post at Apple and maybe one at Google. But even then, WASM was just listed as a nice-to-have on top of other job specifications.
Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#2I mean, webassembly bascially is a technology on top of others, either being a compile target for or an input to software that needs additional skills to write.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#3I mean, webassembly bascially is a technology on top of others, either being a compile target for or an input to software that needs additional skills to write.
is it "a technology on top of others"?
Would you say the same about LLVM? How is it any different? I've never heard anyone say anything like "oh, well LLVM is a technology on top of ..." They're both compile targets that run within a VM right?
Now, I'd agree that there aren't many jobs "in LLVM". There are just a handful of folks working on LLVM compilers and VMs. For the same reason I wouldn't expect any jobs "in WASM" any time soon, other than ones working on compilers targeting the format or enabling other language runtimes to consume it.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#4I mean, webassembly bascially is a technology on top of others, either being a compile target for or an input to software that needs additional skills to write.
is it "a technology on top of others"? Would you say the same about LLVM? How is it any different? I've never heard anyone say anything like "oh, well LLVM is a technology on top of ..." They're both compile targets that run within a VM right? Now, I'd agree that there aren't many jobs "in LLVM". There are just a handful of folks working on LLVM compilers and VMs. For the same reason I wouldn't expect any jobs "in WA…
Well, a web browser is a pretty big thing to be built on top of.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#5I mean, webassembly bascially is a technology on top of others, either being a compile target for or an input to software that needs additional skills to write.
is it "a technology on top of others"? Would you say the same about LLVM? How is it any different? I've never heard anyone say anything like "oh, well LLVM is a technology on top of ..." They're both compile targets that run within a VM right? Now, I'd agree that there aren't many jobs "in LLVM". There are just a handful of folks working on LLVM compilers and VMs. For the same reason I wouldn't expect any jobs "in WA…
Well, LLVM is a specific project, so "working on LLVM" is a lot clearer than "working on WebAssembly" (which would be spec work I guess).
And e.g. if we're talking about improving WebAssembly support in LLVM, I'd primarily consider that an LLVM job: Familarity with LLVM, compilers, ... is probably more important than knowing WebAssembly. If you work on a project targeting WebAssembly in the end, knowing the source language (and if targeting the browser, browser APIs) is probably the primary part.
I agree that "on top of others" wasn't the best wording. Another attempt at describing what I meant: You're unlikely to be a "WebAssembly developer", in the same way that you won't a be a "LLVM IR" developer, and "x86 assembly" developers are rare. Way more commonly, knowing about those lower-level things are an add-on to the primary label, e.g. useful things for a C++ developer to know. I don't think WebAssembly is big enough that a specialist role of e.g. "WebAssembly on $platform performance expert" would be a job description yet, even if there's maybe already a few people being effectively that.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#6These guys might have wasm related work.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/wasmerio
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#7I've been wondering the same thing since I've been focusing on UI development lately, but AFAIK most frontend development is currently Angular/React/Vue and a bit of Svelte
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#8Kitware is currently working to use WebAssembly to deliver our open source C++ medical image analysis library (ITK) in the browser as itk-js. By looking at the commit history of that repo, https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/itk-js/graphs/c... , you can see that no one at the company works full time in WebAssembly, but a decent number of us touch on it fairly regularly.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly?
#9All of these are pretty good points. It makes sense that there aren't many jobs specifically focusing on WASM yet or that anyone working on it now is still seen as a Front End Developer who just does the WASM stuff.
Thanks everyone!