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I lead a PL/VMs/compilers research group and the number of organisations interested in hiring people in this area keeps growing and growing. Now, that's not to
by ltratt 7y ago
I lead a PL/VMs/compilers research group and the number of organisations interested in hiring people in this area keeps growing and growing. Now, that's not to say that there are ever going to be hundreds of thousands people working in this field, but it turns out that lots of organisations have realised they have pressing language needs. It varies all the way from those wanting to make mainstream language implementations perform better on their codebases to those wanting to reimplement a major internal language in a modern fashion.
At the moment -- and I expect for the foreseeable future -- demand quite significantly outstrips supply. Because of that, organisations are often quite flexible in how they view potential hires in this area. Simplifying a bit, there are two main ways to get in to the field: obtain specific training in the field (e.g. a PhD); start / contribute to a project (not necessarily OSS) that shows expertise (e.g. if you start filing high quality PRs against Rust or LLVM, people will fairly quickly realise you know what you're doing).
Best of luck -- it's a really fun field, with lots of interesting challenges, and a good group of people!
- Jhsto 7y agoAny comment on the salary in these positions? Are they higher than for the average software developer, and if so, by how much? I am wondering since to my experience, the application and development of logics and verification procedures to be used in programming language development requires vastly different and more rigorous personality and working methods than in your average web developer gig.
- ltratt 7y agoI don't pretend to have a total picture of all the possibilities, and there's quite a bit of not-always-explainable variation in what I do know, but I think it would be fair to say that people in this field are quite some way from going hungry. It tends to be better remunerated than a typical software gig but it's certainly possible to earn more in AI/ML. A lot also depends on whether you want to be a "normal" engineer or are willing/capable of taking on managerial responsibility.
- bakery2k 7y agoI wonder if it's similar to embedded software development (which also requires "rigorous working methods"). Salaries for embedded are generally lower than for web development because there's much less demand for embedded skills.
- mohankumar246 7y agoEmbedded software development has improved over the past years reasons being more silicon/asics in vehicles and other places, autonomous driving needs, robotics in supply chain, IOT, smart home. There are lot of opportunities for embedded sw these days.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoI worked as a compiler engineer at a big tech company in SV and lived very comfortably, was able to put a lot of money aside. The demand outstrips the supply, it's hard to hire qualified people, so the salaries have to be high to attract those qualified. Tangentially, I think the supply is small because compiler engineering is not a fashionable field of study. Everyone wants to do "AI" these days.
- logcrater 7y agoI hope am not being pushy but could you please say how much you made and in which company? Thanks
- sequoia 7y agoI'm not a compiler engineer, but I'm willing to venture that the lower bounds of a "competitive salary" for an engineer in silicon valley is somewhere between 200 & 250k. Compiler engineers may make much more, I don't know, but it's unlikely they make less than that. Perhaps that answers your question?
- bakery2k 7y ago> an engineer in silicon valley Good point. The biggest factor that determines an engineer's salary is location, followed by years of experience. Not whether they work on compilers/embedded/web/whatever.
- kick 7y agoNot whether they work on compilers/embedded/web/whatever. Not true! See: salaries for people who know kdb+, that embedded engineers almost always get screwed on comp.
- monoideism 7y ago> salaries for people who know kdb+ If you are suggestingn that kdb+ salaries are extremely high, like I often read here, I disagree. I did some research in this area, and despite the rumors, found lots of kbd+ jobs posted with very mediocre salaries. It seems unlikely that such jobs would been filled if salaries are as high as people have suggested on HN. For example, here's a senior kbd+ deb job in Manhattan (high cost of living) that pays 165-185,000/year. I make almost that much as a senior dev in a low cost of living area. I'd expect to make at least $250,000/year in NYC or California.
- antoyo 7y agoWould you consider implementing the first part of the Tiger book as enough expertise to start in the field? This includes, in my case, generating x86-64 assembly and writing a register allocator.