[ajross]

The knowledge can't go away, because someone needs to write the systems: sure apps might move to managed/interpreted environments exclusively, but those interpreters and language runtimes need to be written first. And they run on a kernel, with drivers for hardware that needs firmware.

I don't lose much sleep at night worrying about my job security as a "systems" programmer. If anything, my skill set is becoming underrepresented and hard to staff.

[ZephyrP]

They just can't write LKMs like they used to.