[notauser]

There are people here with all sorts of backgrounds - I'm pretty sure there are some folks from Intel who read HN, as well as some I know from Nokia.

I did some low level work (and most of my degree was EE), and to be honest I don't think moving up and down the stack is that insurmountable provided you are willing to spend the time (re)learning a chunk of stuff each time.

[sax]

My undergrad background is in EE and good amount of research work with compilers in grad school. I am apprehensive about working on low-level software because the state-of-art in commercial OS development in smart-phones always lags a few years behind desktop or high-end systems. The software problems have already been solved by other folks.

Example, Low-level software is poorly designed from a software engineering point of view and its problems plainly evident over multiple hardware product cycles.