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Becoming a compiler engineer
41–50 of 160 posts
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#42Step one: no engineering education, just get a job that a company calls engineering. >In 2023, I graduated from MIT with a double major in math and computer science.
Great series about whether programming is “engineering” or not: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#43I'm almost more interested in how a 20-something with no apparent prior pedigree lands a Simon and Schuster debut novel contract!
She lost that contract after being found guilty of plagiarism. That’s why she avoids mentioning her considerable writing career at all
It's fiction what is she plagiarizing
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#44Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#45Very interesting and informative! I'm a bit shocked that it would take significant effort/creativity for an MIT grad with relevant course/project work to get a job in the niche I would have thought the recruiting pipeline is kinda smooth Although maybe it's a smaller niche than I think -- I imagine compiler engineers skew more senior. Maybe it's not a common first or second job I graduated at the bottom of bear marke…
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Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#46Most (all?) of compiler engineering jobs I've seen were about writing glue code for LLVM.
Lol I love these clueless takes. I'm just curious who you thinks actually writes the stuff within LLVM? Chris lattner? Lololol
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#47Very interesting and informative! I'm a bit shocked that it would take significant effort/creativity for an MIT grad with relevant course/project work to get a job in the niche I would have thought the recruiting pipeline is kinda smooth Although maybe it's a smaller niche than I think -- I imagine compiler engineers skew more senior. Maybe it's not a common first or second job I graduated at the bottom of bear marke…
> I'm a bit shocked that it would take significant effort/creativity for an MIT grad with relevant course/project work to get a job in the niche That bit was heartbreaking to me too. I knew the economy was bad for new grads but if a double major from MIT in SF is struggling, then the economy is cooked.
While the economy's definitely in a shitty spot (and IMO heading towards shittier), I wouldn't necessarily take this specific line as a sign of the times. The author does outline reasons why demand for compiler engineers (and junior ones in particular) is likely low in her post.
Compiler development is (for better or worse) a niche that favours people who've got real-world experience doing this. The traditional ways to get in have either been through high-quality, high-profile open-source contribs, or because your existing non-compiler-dev job let you inch closer to compiler development up until the point you could make the jump.
As the author noted, a lot of modern-day compiler work involves late-life maintenance of huge, nigh-enterprise-type code bases with thousands of files, millions of LOC, and no one person who has a full, detailed view of the entire project. This just isn't experience you get right out of school, or even a year or two on.
Honestly, I'd say that as a 2023 grad with no mentors in the compiler dev space, she's incredibly lucky to have gotten this job at all (and to be clear, I hope she makes the most of it, compiler dev can be a lot of fun).
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fiction what is she plagiarizing
What I just said is a fact. Look it up if you like
The similarities are intriging but not compelling.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pPE6tqReSAXEmzuJM52h219f...
Stories of "asian face" actresses with eyes taped back, prominent pieces of anti asian grafitti on walls and drawn in bathrooms are common tropes in asian communities, etc.
The examples of plagiarism are examples of common story arcs, with an educated asian female twist, and use of examples that multiple writers in a shared literary pool would have all been exposed to; eg: it could be argued that they all drew from a similar well rather thn some were original and others copied.
There's a shocked article: https://www.halfmystic.com/blog/you-are-believed that may indeed be looking at more evidence than was cited in the google docs link above which would explain the shock and the dismissal of R.W. as a plagiarist.
The evidence in the link amounts to what is common with many pools of proto writers though, lots of similar passages, some of which have been copied and morphed from others. It's literally how writers evolve and become better.
I'm on the fence here, to be honest, I looked at what is cited as evidence and I see similar stories from people with similar backgrounds sharing common social media feeds.
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
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> Without being too mean-spirited about it, her success is mostly due to luck, reputation, and factors other than expertise such as checking off the right demographic boxes, or being charming in some way.
How do you know this? Just because some people have written dissertations on compilers and didn't find work? OP seems very talented. And doing compiler work for a blockchain is not the most competitive position. I did the same thing for a while, and I don't even have a computer science degree (nor do I "check HR boxes"). And her article has lots of information that would be helpful for someone looking for a compiler engineering role
Re: Becoming a compiler engineer
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs (or LLM assisted coding), if successful, will more likely make the number of compilers go down, as LLMs are better with mainstream languages compared to niche ones. Same effect as with frameworks. Less languages, less compilers needed.
See, I'm coming from the understanding that language development is a dead-end in the real world. Can you name a single language made after Zig or Rust? And even those languages haven't taken over much of the professional world. So when I say companies will maintain compilers, I mean DSLs (like starlark or RSpec), application-specific languages (like CUDA), variations on existing languages (maybe C++ with some in-hou…
Bad take. People said the same about c/c++ and now rust and zig are considered potential rivals. The ramp up is slow and there's never going to be a moment of viral adoption the way we're used to with SaaS, but change takes place.