> most of the folks doing this sort of security research are probably worse programmers than your average senior dev, or at least not noticeably better. Hard d

> most of the folks doing this sort of security research are probably worse programmers than your average senior dev, or at least not noticeably better. Hard disagree. Maybe you can argue that they might not have skillset/experience of writing good quality code but they need to know the very in depth of each of the component from javascript to kernel. It's not a separate skill. It's the same skill as what senior dev do only the folks who write exploit need to understand allocations in bit level detail in each layer of the machine in which code is executed. eg I would recommend seeing the coding episodes of geohot who was a hacker and look how fast he could write the "ordinary" code like setting up website and other things.