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Regarding what others earn - I've already asked the ones that I know, and on average it's 20-30% more (mobile dev & security... advisor, you could say). About the concern of not having a more senior person around - true. I was (and still am, as a good measure) scared of that bit, what I pretty much did was dig in everything that I could find on the subject before development of my part (and the ones that I'm linked to - not writing a software driver ;) spinned up. That pretty much meant scouring the books (windows internals, Oney's WDM, MS's WDF one, except for the UMDF part), MSDN/linked "whitepapers" (let's say that there are some holes), any sample code that I could find, and most helpfully, NTDEV discussions/linux drivers docs and guides (yes, it is very relevant :)/osdev wiki&forums... and whatever else I've stumbled upon that seemed even remotely connected. As a consequence, I had a slight burnout during my part-time period (school&work) - I'm nowhere near as exhausted now (8/day) as I was during that period (3-4/day) :) The other defense mechanism against being alone is that documents and code reviews are common in the company, and I'm steadily documenting / teaching others (who have significant linux drivers experience) the concepts of windows drivers, so it's not entirely without scrunity. Perhaps the biggest issue there is converting people from the "windows sucks/linux rules" mindset (well, it's not so bad, but there are some cases in which I feel it approaches that set in stone mentality). Also, a mindset of "making the thing work somehow" for kernel programming (driver or otherwise) doesn't strike me as proper ;) |
As to "making things work somehow" - don't we all suffer through drivers that are the consequence of that? Also, I'm definitely not commenting on some of my own company's kernel-/bare metal code here...