Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

Low-level hacker roles are hard to fill. For example, my posting on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)" thread is this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057016

We get a little bit of luck with people who started hacking back when it was normal to care about assembly language. For example, somebody on our team used to write cartridge-based games for the Atari 800XL computer, which was an 8-bit home computer system. There are not a lot of people like that though, and many of them don't want to move because they have settled down with houses and family.

We get a little luck with people fresh out of high-end engineering schools like Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech. Those schools still prepare students for dealing with low-level hacking.

I think much of the trouble is that many people entering college have a focus on games, web sites, and phone apps. Writing low-level code (hypervisor, emulator, exploits, boot loader, OS kernel, compiler back end...) isn't something that seriously enters the mind of the typical student. People pass (or avoid?) their "Computer Architecture CS351" course with MIPS code, and their "Operating Systems CS302" course with Minix, and then they forget that stuff as fast as they can.

Your advert sounds pretty awesome, I used to do a lot of low-level coding back in the day (first z80, then intel), and now I'm rediscovering my love after starting to develop hardware-based projects with Arduinos and ESP8266 devices.

One thing that jumps out is that I know many of the tools you list, but I'm basically AVR + Intel these days, so seeing all the architectures listed is a bit overwhelming.

When I see posts like that though I always imagine it comes down to location and salary. For the right price many people would move, if they're not local.

I've seen too many adverts where people want the kind of skills you'd learn over 20+ years of industry employment, with a salary a teenager could live off, and its not too hard to understand why the same jobs get posted year-in, year-out. (Not that I'm accusing you of that, but it's a slippery slope, and filling "impossible" jobs gets easier every time you increment the salary.)

The more of those things you can deal with, the better. We certainly don't require a person to know about them all. We're trying to redundantly cover all those skills with a few hundred people.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm scaring people off.

For example, we'd hire somebody who is fully focused on x86 if they are good at that. The sort of level we'd be looking for is a person who can recognize the common string.h functions in bare x86 assembly code.

The Arduino usually uses a ATmega8 CPU. I just encountered that CPU, not in an Arduino, and might soon be dealing with it. Adaptability is really desirable; this is a CPU that I've never dealt with before and I'm not about to wimp out.

The ESP8266 has a core based on the Tensilica Xtensa, which I've dealt with.

I think I heard somebody around the office dealing with a Z80, but I'm not sure if I remember that right. Chances are, we've done Z80 work.

It's kind of fun to encounter a new CPU. It's especially neat to encounter one for which step 1 is to write a disassembler.

I certainly do post the same jobs year-in, year-out. That doesn't mean we got nobody. We need more than one person.

Lots of people really won't move. Maybe for a $million they would... but only "maybe"! It is particularly hard to convince people on the west coast that there is civilization elsewhere. There is a fear of being stuck if the job doesn't work out, yet here I am in a city with at least half a dozen large defense contractors and a whole bunch of cyberwar-related startup companies and even some space program work.

I suspect you might find more applicants if you focused on family - e.g. look for an x86 hacker, then a powerPC person, then a microcontroller person.

I'm not sure about American, but the Z80 was very very popular in the UK and Europe, being at the heart of the ZX Spectrum and other 8-bit home computers in the eighties (which is when I first got started, hacking games for infinite lives, and removing protection systems).

But either way good luck, it sounds like you're doing fascinating things though your niche is going to struggle it shouldn't be impossible. I know local people who comparable levels of low-level work A/V companies, and malware analysis.

As a web dev who writes compilers in his spare time for fun, this is fascinating to me. I'd love to have access to more low level work, but I don't know how to find it or "make the leap." It seems like a need that's under-served for both employers and job-seekers.

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