[itsokimbatman]

So I can only speak for myself, but I've been exclusively working in low level C type work for the last 9 years. Think embedded, kernel dev, reverse engineering, etc. type stuff. I'm good enough at it, but hardly an expert.

I can't say I've ever lacked for work and I make $125k in a very low cost of living area, and if I wanted something new I could have interviews arranged tomorrow both where I currently live and pretty much any major US city.

It's probably not on the same scale as web dev, but there's also a lot fewer of us working on this side of things.

[branchless]

Do you have a background in electronic engineering / good understanding of hardware issues beyond cpu caching ? Just trying to understand what $125k requires in this space.

[itsokimbatman]

My degree is in Computer Science and my hardware skills are mostly nil. I mean I know how to read data sheets and talk to hardware through memory mapped IO or ports, but as far as circuits, hardware design, etc. nothing more than a rudimentary understanding.

I wound up in this field doing a co-op during college with an employer that had a variety of different job types. I have always liked C so I went with more low level jobs during my co-op rotations.

My primary skill set is being comfortable developing on bare metal or in the kernel, reverse engineering, and debugging painful problems. One of my first tasks was porting part of a custom OS to hardware that didn't have JTAG (it wasn't our hardware... someone else made it and we were tasked with getting our OS on there.)

The only thing I had to debug with were memory dumps in raw hex. It was painful but a lot of fun. It's not so much that I'm particularly bright but I'm too dumb to know when to give up.

[branchless]

Interesting, thank you.

[itsokimbatman]

Actually now that I think about it, being too stupid to know when I'm in over my head and being willing to dive into an impossible task are probably the most valuable skills I have.

[neal_jones]

dumb enough to jump, smart enough to not die... the secret to success.

[phlipski]

Sounds like the tag-line to one of those fake movie trailers on SNL. I like it!