IMHO, that experience from the 70's has a lot of value. How to optimize, how to talk to hardware; all are forgotten skills now days. Not to mention the sheer v

IMHO, that experience from the 70's has a lot of value. How to optimize, how to talk to hardware; all are forgotten skills now days. Not to mention the sheer value of remembering how things were done and why. The explosion of young, inexperienced programmers that refuse to acknowledge the triumphs and failures of the past put the profession into an infinite loop of rediscovering, re-implementing, and re-learning the lessons of the past. Those 1970's skills map directly to embedded work. They map to kernel and systems level programming. Guess what ? The same problems we had on a PDP-11 we have today. The scale is a bit different, but the fundamentals are not. Can you pass the fizz buzz test ? You would be amazed at the number of applicants that can talk "singleton observer model view controller association class" all day, and can't do fizz buzz. Or compile hello world from the command line. Or know the difference between a compiler error and a linker error. Focus on what you do best. I think you will find there is a demand for those skills.