Second that. In my life I did everything from programming in pure machine codes (big device control, data processing an presentation system) to modern firmware

Second that. In my life I did everything from programming in pure machine codes (big device control, data processing an presentation system) to modern firmware to desktop apps with multimedia and high performance graphics to back end enterprise grade middleware like business process servers, publish subscribe, NoSql, etc. etc, To me they were not that different in difficulty. Just different scope techniques and tooling. For example by concepts message passing part in that machine code system and large publish subscribe looked very close.