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Makes me glad I work in a specialty (data storage) which provides the parts and tools the plumbers need. Sure, there's a shared grab-bag of techniques etc. that

Makes me glad I work in a specialty (data storage) which provides the parts and tools the plumbers need. Sure, there's a shared grab-bag of techniques etc. that we all use, but it's far from plug and play. While the market for people like me will never grow anywhere near as big as the front-end plumbing stuff, demand and pay have been much more consistently good for the last couple of decades and are likely to remain so for a while. My advice to new software engineers is to get into one of the more "boring" specialties. You might not be in the lottery for the really big bucks, but you probably weren't going to win anyway. There will still be plenty of interesting and fun challenges, with greater stability and (TBH IMO) more mature coworkers.

jaiprabhu 8y ago
Genuinely curious - can you give me some examples of these specialities where one can go deeper? In am in this boat now where I have worked on pretty much on all layers of the software stack and I want to now narrow down my focus.
- notacoward 8y ago
  Some of these map to classes you might have taken in college - compilers, databases, AI, etc. I'd divide operating systems into more than one part: * Core kernel (schedulers, memory management, virtualization) * Drivers * Filesystems * Networking Then there are some specialties that cut across more than one of these - high performance computing, financial tech (not even counting blockchain stuff), security engineering, performance engineering. Then there's a whole world of embedded stuff, from teeny-tiny microcontrollers up to high-performance medical imaging or genomics, plus large distributed systems to control things like military equipment or nuclear power plants. Really, there are so many different kinds of computing that we just never even hear of on a site like this. It's really the web/app/mobile front-end stuff that's a niche technology-wise. (On my less charitable days I'd call it a ghetto.) It's a hugely profitable niche, to be sure, but to me it still seems to get a disproportionate share of attention and funding compared to other stuff that's just as hard, just as fun, and just as important.

jaiprabhu 8y ago

Genuinely curious - can you give me some examples of these specialities where one can go deeper? In am in this boat now where I have worked on pretty much on all layers of the software stack and I want to now narrow down my focus.

notacoward 8y ago
Some of these map to classes you might have taken in college - compilers, databases, AI, etc. I'd divide operating systems into more than one part: * Core kernel (schedulers, memory management, virtualization) * Drivers * Filesystems * Networking Then there are some specialties that cut across more than one of these - high performance computing, financial tech (not even counting blockchain stuff), security engineering, performance engineering. Then there's a whole world of embedded stuff, from teeny-tiny microcontrollers up to high-performance medical imaging or genomics, plus large distributed systems to control things like military equipment or nuclear power plants. Really, there are so many different kinds of computing that we just never even hear of on a site like this. It's really the web/app/mobile front-end stuff that's a niche technology-wise. (On my less charitable days I'd call it a ghetto.) It's a hugely profitable niche, to be sure, but to me it still seems to get a disproportionate share of attention and funding compared to other stuff that's just as hard, just as fun, and just as important.