I liked much of your critique, but you completely lost me with your last para. Systems programming is about adjudicating contention for system-constraints and

I liked much of your critique, but you completely lost me with your last para. Systems programming is about adjudicating contention for system-constraints and system constrained resources. It's about creating relatively clean interfaces to relatively thorny problems. It's only lost apparent pertinance because of the explosion in numbers of people "coding" web front ends or other things at the top of the stack, and because the code that solves some of these problems is well understood and complete. But underneath all what we do in the various userspaces is the same and even greater complexity of problems which require maintenance and development/porting to new architectures as they get developed