[chubot]

Very interesting and informative!

I'm a bit shocked that it would take significant effort/creativity for an MIT grad with relevant course/project work to get a job in the niche

I would have thought the recruiting pipeline is kinda smooth

Although maybe it's a smaller niche than I think -- I imagine compiler engineers skew more senior. Maybe it's not a common first or second job

I graduated at the bottom of bear market (2001), and it was hard to get a job. But this seems a bit different

[munificent]

> I'm a bit shocked that it would take significant effort/creativity for an MIT grad with relevant course/project work to get a job in the niche

That bit was heartbreaking to me too. I knew the economy was bad for new grads but if a double major from MIT in SF is struggling, then the economy is cooked.

[verandaguy]

While the economy's definitely in a shitty spot (and IMO heading towards shittier), I wouldn't necessarily take this specific line as a sign of the times. The author does outline reasons why demand for compiler engineers (and junior ones in particular) is likely low in her post.

Compiler development is (for better or worse) a niche that favours people who've got real-world experience doing this. The traditional ways to get in have either been through high-quality, high-profile open-source contribs, or because your existing non-compiler-dev job let you inch closer to compiler development up until the point you could make the jump.

As the author noted, a lot of modern-day compiler work involves late-life maintenance of huge, nigh-enterprise-type code bases with thousands of files, millions of LOC, and no one person who has a full, detailed view of the entire project. This just isn't experience you get right out of school, or even a year or two on.

Honestly, I'd say that as a 2023 grad with no mentors in the compiler dev space, she's incredibly lucky to have gotten this job at all (and to be clear, I hope she makes the most of it, compiler dev can be a lot of fun).

[ekidd]

Yup, I have been a junior compiler engineer at three(!) different jobs early in my career, before moving on to other stuff.

It has never been a huge niche. It's fun work if you can get it. There were often MIT grads around, but I don't think it made you an automatic hire?

Once in a blue moon, for old times' sake, I send a bug fix PR for someone's optimizer, or build a small transpiler for something.

[laidoffamazon]

Also I’m 99% sure she had another job full time before this

[laidoffamazon]

Elaborate on this. Is it not sad when a UIUC Or Perdue grad can’t get a compiler engineer job out of undergrad? What does it mean to be cooked?

[david-gpu]

Rephrased: If a graduate with relevant coursework from a top institution struggles to find a job in a particular field, what sort of chances do the rest of the graduates from less known colleges have?

It makes sense now, doesn't it?

[laidoffamazon]

UIUC and Perdue are not lesser known than MIT. Big state schools are roughly as known they just don’t have the same signal for being a superhuman.

[david-gpu]

Well, at least I tried.

[achierius]

It's definitely a pretty small world, and to make things worse there are sub-niches -- between which there's certainly cross-pollination, but that's still a barrier to people looking to change jobs. Frontend language semantics (where most PL papers focus) vs. middle-and-back end optimization and hardware support; AoT compilers vs. JITs; CPU targets vs. a blossoming array of accelerators, etc.

Beyond that, I've definitely interviewed people who seemed like they could have been smart + capable but who couldn't cut it when it came to systems programming questions. Even senior developers often struggle with things like memory layouts and hardware behavior.

[wat10000]

I’d expect it to be a pretty small niche. How many companies need compiler engineers? Some big tech companies have compiler groups, but they’re a small part of the business. Most software companies are consumers of compilers, not producers.

[aidenn0]

I'm not familiar with the current job market (There is a lot of uncertainty throughout all of the US hiring departments in all fields right now), but it certainly wasn't that hard a couple of years ago.

Compilers are just programs like anything else. All the compiler developers I know were trained up by working on compilers. Just like people writing B2B ecommerce software learned how to do so by working on B2B e-commerce software and embedded software developers learned how to do so by working on embedded software.

Heck, a typical CS degree probably covers more of the basics for compilers than B2B ecommerce software or embedded software!

[vidarh]

But there are magnitudes more B2B ecommerce software than compilers for people to get experience on.