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by souprock 1994 days ago
Why settle for an average job? Assembly is fun. I work with it nearly every day. I've done assembly at every employer for the past two decades.

Those "kids took it very seriously" would get hired, not you.

Some people take padding classes like graphics programming, game programming, AI, Java, and web junk. I've seen more use for PL/M, Pascal, and Ada. Of course the worst padding is the mandatory non-major stuff. No employer has yet asked me to produce Marxist literary analysis or to analyze a poem, yet that was required in college.

If you want to go beyond the basics of CS, take some of the EE classes. You may need to communicate with an EE. It's good if you don't need to rely on somebody else to hook up and use your equipment. Practice with a logic analyzer, JTAG debugger, and oscilloscope. Learn to solder tiny things.
1 comments
MeinBlutIstBlau 1993 days ago
Firstly we didn't have a choice, secondly the kids who took it seriously aren't exactly being taught assembly in a useful manner to learn more on their own.

Plus, I highly doubt anybody in HR is gonna kid the kid with advanced skills in assembly the time of day when they need to know how to use ASP.NET or Javascript and kubernetes.

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souprock 1993 days ago
In two decades I have never dealt with ASP.NET, Javascript, or kubernetes. Those are not on the checklist that HR will use.

No assembly skills? REJECTED

It's literally in the interview. Most of the interviews that I've had, including all of the ones that led to employment, included questions about assembly. Even when I interviewed on-site at Amazon in Seattle, they asked about assembly.

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MeinBlutIstBlau 1991 days ago
What specifically is the position? Also how in depth do you get?
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souprock 1990 days ago
At one place, fresh out of college, I quickly found myself tracing trough about 1000 lines of assembly code for trap/exception/interrupt handling. That job was to develop an embedded supercomputer OS kernel. (for use in aircraft and submarines)

Amazon wanted me diagnosing Linux kernel "oops" reports. That would involve looking at hex dumps and register dumps, then mapping that back to C source code to determine the problem.

There was a place that would have had me writing bare-metal software to generate high-volume network packets for testing network gear.

One place had me port some Linux kernel changes, including assembly code, to x86_64.

Currently I mostly write emulators for undocumented hardware. I use IDA Pro as my disassembler. I keep that running all the time. I can spot a security vulnerability as I look at the binary executable in the disassembler; this is an expected part of the job. Sometimes I need to write assembly code or even raw hex bytes in order to demonstrate how things can happen. At one point I had to write assembly code such that the 16-bit checksum of the binary code didn't exceed 0xffff, not counting the last 2 bytes. Another time I had to write code that didn't have any 0x00 bytes in it; this required modifying the instructions in a hex editor.

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