Comment by Mike-at-Ac28R | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mike-at-Ac28R | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t focus on low level software and hardware. I believe that opportunities in these areas will shrink over time as hardware gets cheaper and newer tools allow people to work at a higher level of abstraction.

Think of how assembly language has become niche, or how web tools help you put together simple UI’s that would previously have taken days. Or relational databases with SQL that killed off the previous generations. We are working on tools that substantially reduce the coding/testing burden, and I’m sure we are not the only ones.

If you focus more on the skills that a CS degree will help you develop you can’t go far wrong, no matter what the future holds.

Somebody has to write and maintain the tools that support those abstractions. Then there is the frequent requirement to optimize systems which putting on another layer of abstractions won't solve.

Most of the fresh opportunities lie in the area of atoms, real hard tangible problems that software can't solve.

This is exactly where I’m at with my CS career. I am tired of abstraction. I want to be able to strip it away and work at the lowest levels of the stack. I’ve worked in embedded real-time environments before and found working with the system constraints to be highly rewarding. Yes there are tools that can write and test code for us now, but it’s also true that someone still has to build the low level high performance stuff.

What opportunity do you see in the realm of atoms?

One huge opportunity is in the electrical energy space. With renewables our transmission systems and the control of those many resources is lagging. From control systems point of view having a small number of well controlled sources of energy, aka power stations, it was simpler to manage the load and distribution. Now we have millions of capricious generators of which hundreds are very large, e.g. wind farms and solar farms. Even with grid scale batteries it is like herding stray cats.

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