About career, is low level programming job market that small we see in this threads comments ? I want to be C/C++/Rust programmer. This is quite frightening.
It's really quite depressing.
We know the bias against defence contractors, against the south, against the non-urban parts of the USA, and so on. We know we aren't wanted around here.
The jobs can be nice though! My place is looking to hire dozens per year. We do emulators, JIT, hypervisors, stuff like valgrind, debuggers, manual disassembly, and vulnerability research. I've been here 11 years. I've worked with more than 10 different CPU architectures and more than 10 completely different OSes. I don't normally work overtime, and I get paid more if I do. I have extreme flex-time. I never have to worry about outsourcing or H1B people. I'm never expected to take work home or be on call. I get to live in a place with no state income tax, a stand-your-ground law, almost no crime, almost no traffic or commute, and houses that commonly go for $100,000 to $400,000. We're hiring in Florida, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama... totally the dream for SF and NYC people I'm sure!
Email acahalan, at gmail, if this suits you. Be sure to mention this comment.
The next step (for that particular company's work) would be to actually reverse engineer some complex code and write about it on a blog.
If you want to basically guarantee yourself an interview, reverse engineer and find a vulnerability in some software, and write about it. Then apply with that information.
If you're looking for the "easier" way, just apply to DoD in Maryland or Virginia for an ultra-low-paying, but connected job that allows you to learn all this stuff on the job.
Mixing personal projects and work and education...
Some of our people have backgrounds doing driver development and embedded system programming. An excellent background would be compiler development. We have hired people who did assembly back when that was totally normal, getting their first job around 1970. We hire some people straight out of college; Carnegie Mellon University has the best program for this. We don't actually require a degree, but most people have one, and there are a few people with the PhD. Some people have worked on cars, writing software for stuff like airbag deployment (no bugs allowed!) and infotainment stuff. We hired a former Atari 800XL game developer who was kind of famous. I had done Linux kernel development, been an embedded RTOS developer, and written the "ps" program that Linux uses. We hired a guy who wrote a TI calculator emulator. We hired a guy who got himself sued for exposing security holes in a speech at Blackhat or DEF-CON, and almost hired another person who did the same thing. (the one not hired had an awful attitude) We hired a person who wrote code to run hardware that would extract platelets from blood. Some employees have written boot loaders. A few people have done stuff with neural networks. Some have worked on radar. Some have done GPGPU and FPGA programming. We had an employee who wrote a PC demo scene boot sector (512-byte bootable screensaver) that used one of the bytes 3 ways, as data and as two distinct instructions. We have many people who participate in hacking competitions such as ShmooCon's "Ghost in the Shellcode" CTF and DEF-CON's CTF. We have people who got addicted to hand-optimizing code, vectorizing things and counting things like pipeline stalls. We have a person who worked on the JIT for an open source Nintendo emulator. We have some people with math backgrounds who take interest in automated proofs that programs will or will not do various things, and who can figure out how to automatically create program inputs to make the programs excercise various parts of the code. We hired a guy who bought his own parking meter (!!!) and then figured out how to hack into it via the pass/token thing it used. We hired a guy who hacked into a bathroom scale that had WiFi. We hired a person who did Dell's BIOS.
Seems like people have a lot of experience going into that field. Most of my hobby stuff isn't that interesting. I did write a mostly working chip8 emulator lol. Thanks for the info
You might want to see what you can do with an interactive disassembler. Your choices are:
1. IDA Pro freeware version -- this is x86 only and kind of obsolete
2. IDA Pro demo version -- this is wonderful except that you can't save your work and it times out after about an hour
3. Hopper -- this is cheap
4. Binja (binary ninja, from Vector 35) -- mid price
Grab some firmware updates off the web, especially for things you happen to own, or some normal executables. See how well you can understand them with the interactive disassembler. You might need to decompress them; look for magic numbers that indicate compression.
That said, it's obvious to me who you work for but anyone who'd be offended won't know.
I'd love to move to Melbourne, FL to do vuln research but I'd have to convince my family to make the move first.
I happen to like all that, but I'm not the average Hacker News reader and I know it.
To convince your family about the Melbourne, FL area: you can afford 5 acres, or a house on the beach, or a commute of less than a mile, or a huge McMansion. You can surf all year long. I suspect Texas (Austin and San Antonio) and Virginia are pretty good too.
It was pretty great. Just know that it will be horrendously muggy during the summers. I miss it though.
Thank you, though; that is a darned tempting offer.
Maybe that will change down the road but it doesn't look like it right now.