[seethishat]

Large well-regarded CS schools still have 'systems' and other traditional CS specializations. I would encourage looking at those programs.

Experience is still needed too. You can't just blindly trust AI outputs. So, my advice is to get experience in an old-fashioned CS program and by writing you own side projects, contributing to open source projects, etc.

[kypro]

> Experience is still needed too. You can't just blindly trust AI outputs. So, my advice is to get experience in an old-fashioned CS program and by writing you own side projects, contributing to open source projects, etc.

The issue is you can't blindly trust humans either, and increasingly you're better off asking an AI than a human.

[koakuma-chan]

What is "systems"? What do "systems engineer" people do?

[klibertp]

Drivers, kernels, firmwares, low-level networking, the likes. Some higher-level infrastructure, like compilers, interpreters, runtime systems (Qt/Glib-like code).

I'm not sure where the question comes from? The divide between systems and app programming is almost as old as coding itself; it's not some distinction without difference - it's the difference between writing a TypeScript microservice for handling CRUD on some tables versus contributing to the TypeScript compiler, Node runtime (eg. uv), and PostgreSQL query planner.

Both kinds of programming are needed; both require specific (diverging in places) skills to do well. FWIW, I don't think systems programming is any safer (maybe a little bit) from AI than making apps, but the distinction between the two kinds of programming is real.

[wreath]

I dont think parent was questioning it, sounded they were more curious but thanks for explaining because i wasnt sure myself.

Re: safe from LLMs, id imagine the level of rigor in sys engineering is higher so maybe people are more wary of LLM produced code?

[klibertp]

I'm not sure. You'd have to define "level of rigor". TypeScript has a vastly more expressive type system than C, for example, so given their respective prevalence in their domains, you could easily say that coding apps nowadays is actually more rigorous. There's Rust, but somehow people write lots of apps in it. And so on.

I don't think systems programming is inherently harder than writing apps. You deal with different sets of problems (users stubbornly misusing your UI vs. hardware vendors notoriously lying in the manuals; hundreds of dependencies vs. endemic NIH syndrome; etc.), but coding is, for the most part, the same thing everywhere. IME, the "level of rigor" (as in "kinds and pervasiveness of actions taken to ensure correctness") depends much more on actual people or organizations than on the domain.

[koakuma-chan]

You're probably talking about cases when systems engineers develop apps. In my experience, when app developers develop apps, it's a mess.