There may be a bit of a filter here on HN: it's very startup web dev heavy, so you won't see many people wasting their time (yes, it would be a waste of time fo

There may be a bit of a filter here on HN: it's very startup web dev heavy, so you won't see many people wasting their time (yes, it would be a waste of time for them) going down to the hardware level. Try working in a more applied domain, such as industrial, where real-time low-level hacking is a daily occurrence, and you will find many extremely competent low-level programmers, who don't work insane hours, because it's more important to get the code right (lives depend on it), than it is to keep to some market driven schedule. Sure, it's not as glamorous, but it pays the bills. It also doesn't very often have the challenges of maintaining one codebase across multiple platforms, but you learn pretty quickly when each new project is a whole different architecture, with a different assembler, IDE, buses, memory model, register layout, etc, etc. On top of which you have to know your domain at least well enough to get requirements from your users . . .