It's one of the fields with a brutal learning curve that a lot of people don't make it over. My best guess is it's the difficulty of writing code that manipulat

It's one of the fields with a brutal learning curve that a lot of people don't make it over. My best guess is it's the difficulty of writing code that manipulates other code, usually with quite different semantics and behavioural goals. There's also a lot of folk wisdom and general noise in the field. That makes compiler teams especially keen to hire people who have already spent ages building compilers. However that obviously has a bootstrapping problem so the larger teams also hire graduates who look like they might make it over that curve. That's roughly how I got into it. If you're experienced in general but not with compilers, the obvious play is to join a company doing whatever you're used to which happens to also have a compiler team, which roughly maps onto "largish software company", and aim to move laterally.