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Comment by evocatus | Hacker News Reader

Bootcamps and anti-intellectual sentiment spreading through the software development community have convinced newer developers that web APIs and other high-level frameworks/languages are actually the bedrock of abstraction, and that nothing important lies beneath (if they even recognize there IS something beneath). Nothing ever breaks down there, anyway. And if something does, it's not my problem to fix.

16 weeks at a bootcamp is enough to get you up to speed with the important parts of a rigorous 4 year education into the foundations of computing. No one needs to know CS or computer engineering anyway. It's just like math - useless.

I'm a software developer. How does software work, you ask? Uh...

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Plenty of graduates specifically don't work in systems engineering for different reasons - its not like there is a dearth of people with degrees. The jobs in say embedded programming are fewer, harder to get, and tend to pay worse unless you're at the top of the market.

If you're at Meta making an OS for VR, you're at the top of the market and getting paid very well. If you're at Cisco making router firmware, or F5 making DNS boxes, you're likely getting paid far worse than at equivalent experience to say a web dev - for which there is a lot more work. Employment mobility is far far lower when doing embedded work.

Short term, yes, there's lots of demand for front-/back-end web developers and the lower barrier to entry makes it a solid choice. Long term, though, it's a race to the bottom as more people flood in and eventually web developers become easily replaceable commodities.

(Don't take that the wrong way; it's not criticism of web development. It's just what generally happens when there's an oversupply of anything in a marketplace. We've been in a boom for web developers for a long time and what goes up must come down.)

But embedded engineers are treated more like commodities nowadays already (except at the top or in specific niches like legacy banking software or HFT), because the industries that drove their day are also commoditized and outsourced. It’s relatively easy to hire.

Yes eventually web devs will be eventually commoditized, but that doesn’t mean the return of low level programmers persay.

My take (and sorry if I hadn't articulated it well) was that it's better to be a commodity in an area that one enjoys working than to become a commodity in an area that one went into just for the career prospects and be trapped there later on if circumstances change. Beyond that, the effects of commoditization seem likely to be significantly worse for web development than systems engineering given that the barrier to entry is lower.

It’s my firm belief that NLP will eat all software engineers; web, backend, mobile and eventually even the ML engineers themselves. Embedded programmers are simply translating business requirements ( natural language ) into architectures at the end of the day. To prepare for this don’t think in terms of “I’m an X engineer”, think in terms of “I can solve problems using X, or Y and unknown Z”, because, very soon, Z is coming to make both X and Y obsolete.

It's my firm belief that anyone reading this post will be dead and gone before Z actually arrives and makes X and Y obsolete.

For folks that hate webdev they shouldn't do webdev unless they're not privileged enough to be able to pick and choose. Its a relatively good market and people are paid and treated well overall compared to most other industries as a whole.

The deal with embedded is that it's inherently associated with a business that has to actually make something. That entails a much higher headcount for all of the additional jobs needed for procurement, manufacturing, test, and more. You don't get to be a prima donna rock star in such an environment.

> Long term, though, it's a race to the bottom as more people flood in and eventually web developers become easily replaceable commodities.

Long term doesn’t seem too great for low level stuff either. It doesn’t seem like a lot of new people are entering the field and getting up to speed on the radically complex hardware we have now

We need a better blended system. I'm the only person I know that's written a compiler, an emulator and written my own kernel modules (for fun really), but my degree was not really worth the paper it was printed on because all the tech we actually learned how to use was 10 years out of date.

As an adverse opinion, I worked at a FAANG company as a software engineer for several years and not once did I ever have to implement one of those fancy data structures or algorithms that are taught at universities around the world.

There are of course outliers, but the vast majority of CS jobs out there are simply shuffling data around. They even call it “shuffling protobufs” at Google.

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