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Becoming a compiler engineer

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Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#101

Post by _mocha »

This is honestly one of the worst blog posts I've ever read, and probably does a disservice to representing MIT grads (who shaped my entire career 20-30 years ago). Anyways, as someone who was in this space, my 2 pieces of advice are: 1) either get a PhD in the field (and Apple would pick you up relatively easily) 2) have a small history of contributing to languages like rust, go or be prominent on the clang committees, llvm, ghc.

At least up until 5 years ago, the bar to join compiler teams was relatively low and all it required was some demonstration of effort and a few commits.

(Disclosure: am retired now)

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#102

Post by 1718627440 »

sarchertech wrote: post #65
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not saying this or making this argument. I just don't see how this could possibly work - how would slapping Harry Potter in the middle of the book your writing work

Instead of slapping Harry Potter in the middle of your book wholesale, imagine you lifted a few really good lines from Harry Potter, a few from Lord of the Rings, and more from a handful of other books. Read the evidence document another poster linked for actual examples.

To me as a dumb reader, that would be fine, maybe the author could have mentioned that he likes these authors and takes them as inspirations. Also you can't really forbid books to never have references to pop culture. And at some level of famous-ness passages and ideas loose their exclusive tie to the original book and become part of the list of common cultural sayings.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#103

Post by epolanski »

amelius wrote: post #100

It's even harder to become a Compiler Rockstar. I know only three, Stallman, Peyton Jones and perhaps that guy from Svelte.

Hejlsberg too (Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript).

There's probably hundreds of other brilliant engineers more with insane impacts that never got any popularity.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#104

Post by silcoon »

amelius wrote: post #100

It's even harder to become a Compiler Rockstar. I know only three, Stallman, Peyton Jones and perhaps that guy from Svelte.

Guy Steele, Rich Hickey, James Gosling, Kernighan and Ritchie, Guido Van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup.

Harder because the bar is really high.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#105

Post by 1718627440 »

vatsachak wrote: post #51
anon291 wrote: post #29

I've been in compiler engineering now for almost a decade. No grad school, just moved into the field and did a lot of random projects for my own entertainment (various compilers for toy languages, etc). It takes a particular type of person who cares about things like correctness. It is a very bizarre subsection of people with an improbably high number of transgender people and an equally high number of rad trad Catho…

Rad trad Catholics makes sense because Catholic theology involves a lot of logic

True, the scholastics were an effort to derive theology from philosophy and logic and are how Asian and Greek philosophy and culture became part of the Western world, which then evolved into Western logic, Math and Philosophy.

The cultural importance of education in Jewry, the preservation of that in Christianity and that Christians can never take any understanding of something for granted and always need to question everything, because the Universe (being created by God) will always be more complex than any current knowledge of it, is the origin of the Western concept of Empirism and formalized (Natural-)Science, even if a lot of modern Atheists like to sweep that under the rack.

A lot of early and also late scientists researched as a part to understand the world their God created, meaning they understood it as a approach to worship God.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#106

Post by 1718627440 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #18
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm desperately looking forward to, like, 5-10 years from now when all the "LLMs are going to change everything!!1!" comments have all but completely abated (not unlike the blockchain stuff of ~10 years ago). No, LLMs are not going to replace compiler engineers. Compilers are probably one of the least likely areas to profit from extensive LLM usage in the way that you are thinking, because they are principally concer…

I'm screenshotting this, let's see who's right. Actually, your whole point about LLMs not being able to detect correctness is just demonstrably false if you play around with LLM agents a bit.

A system outputting correct facts, tells you nothing about the system's ability to prove correctness of facts. You can not assert that property of a system by treating it as a black box. If you are able to treat LLMs as a white box and prove correctness about their internal states, you should tell that to some very important people, that is an insight worth a lot of money.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#107

Post by MatejKafka »

tiu wrote: post #64

The comments are wildly fragmented in this thread. I agree with @torginus, the article has less and less of anything useful to people that want to get into compilers. Anyways, the "Who .. hires compiler engineer?" section is fairly vague in my opinion, so: AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Google definitely hire for compiler positions. These hire fairly 'in-open' so probably the best bets all around. Aside from this, Jane S…

Microsoft also has many engineers working on compilers, with open positions - MSVC, C#, F#, CLR, rustc and other projects.

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#109

Post by tmtvl »

silcoon wrote: post #104
amelius wrote: post #100

It's even harder to become a Compiler Rockstar. I know only three, Stallman, Peyton Jones and perhaps that guy from Svelte.

Guy Steele, Rich Hickey, James Gosling, Kernighan and Ritchie, Guido Van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup. Harder because the bar is really high.

Nickles Worth (or Niklaus Wirth if you prefer to call him by name rather than value).

Re: Becoming a compiler engineer

#110

Post by wakawaka28 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #49
wakawaka28 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 d…

>How do you know this? Just because some people have written dissertations on compilers and didn't find work?

Yes, I said exactly that. It's because virtually nobody who studies compilers ever has a job doing that, and this is a girl literally from MIT we're talking about. It's not as much about expertise as about the hiring end of things IMO. I could be wrong but I'm just connecting dots and making educated guesses here.

>OP seems very talented.

As a human being, or perhaps even as a generic new grad, sure. She might also be more studious than I'm expecting. She said she wrote a novel, which is cool. How much time did she spend doing that versus actually studying compilers? I'm comparing her to the kinds of people I would expect to be doing compiler work.

>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")

There's always an exception to the rule. For what it's worth I would not expect you to be a competent compiler engineer either, especially without a degree or killer experience. I might believe it if given enough evidence but first impressions say no.

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