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> I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system.

by mojuba 13y ago

> I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. Glorious times! You might be given bare metal and full freedom to create new operating systems, invent languages and write compilers/debuggers/editors for them. Nothing can ever make a software engineer happier than this. In my view anyway. Will this ever happen again?

nknighthb 13y ago
Rose-tinted glasses. New bare metal just means an all-new set of hardware engineer droppings to work around. It gets old real fast.
- mojuba 13y ago
  I'd prefer to deal with some hardware engineer's bugs, whose office is next door (considering it's the 1980's) to some brainfucked, overengineered API produced by a hypergiant software corporation today.
weland 13y ago
It does, especially in the embedded world. I spent a good portion of my two last years working on an operating system for very resource-constrained devices. The web kids get all the rage, we get all the fun.
- sanderjd 13y ago
  How did you get into that line of work?
  - weland 13y ago
    I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and computers, old and new. Other than that, after finishing university, I applied for a job, went to the interview, got the job and so on. Nothing special. One thing that probably did help me was that, while still being a competent enough programmer (working part-time included), I got my BSc in Electrical Engineering, so it was especially easy to get into the embedded world (being able to go from reading a schematic to writing the driver, while being able to debug stuff with the logic analyzer and the oscilloscope are good assets). But that's not a rule, I was the only one in my team with a degree in something other than CS/CompEng, and I'm still in a minority everywhere I go. Edit: oh, yeah. The other thing is, I started at a small company. A lot of companies nowadays tend to overspecialize even their fresh-out-of-school junior programmers. It doesn't happen everywhere, but where it does, it's a disaster. I worked on a lot of stuff in my first year, from various peripheral drivers to factory test routines.

by mojuba 13y ago

nknighthb 13y ago

Rose-tinted glasses. New bare metal just means an all-new set of hardware engineer droppings to work around. It gets old real fast.

mojuba 13y ago
I'd prefer to deal with some hardware engineer's bugs, whose office is next door (considering it's the 1980's) to some brainfucked, overengineered API produced by a hypergiant software corporation today.

weland 13y ago

It does, especially in the embedded world. I spent a good portion of my two last years working on an operating system for very resource-constrained devices. The web kids get all the rage, we get all the fun.

sanderjd 13y ago
How did you get into that line of work?
- weland 13y ago
  I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and computers, old and new. Other than that, after finishing university, I applied for a job, went to the interview, got the job and so on. Nothing special. One thing that probably did help me was that, while still being a competent enough programmer (working part-time included), I got my BSc in Electrical Engineering, so it was especially easy to get into the embedded world (being able to go from reading a schematic to writing the driver, while being able to debug stuff with the logic analyzer and the oscilloscope are good assets). But that's not a rule, I was the only one in my team with a degree in something other than CS/CompEng, and I'm still in a minority everywhere I go. Edit: oh, yeah. The other thing is, I started at a small company. A lot of companies nowadays tend to overspecialize even their fresh-out-of-school junior programmers. It doesn't happen everywhere, but where it does, it's a disaster. I worked on a lot of stuff in my first year, from various peripheral drivers to factory test routines.