Ask HN: How difficult (or possible) is it to get into low level development?

by jamesmp98 on 6/25/2019, 2:44:52 PM with 3 comments
I currently work doing the typical line of business web app development and I'm so disallusioned with it. Web development (and really business app development period) just bores me and I feel like I'm just doing different variations of the same thing.

I've always been interested, as a hobby in doing more low level type stuff. Think OS development, device driver development, firmware etc., but I don't think there's really any market demand for those type developers anymore and I imagine it would be extremely competitive (especially as I have no formal education)

Is there any real way to break into this field? I'd be willing to go back to school and such, I just doubt the existence of such jobs

  • by rootshelled on 6/25/2019, 2:57:52 PM

    https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs216/guides/x86.html

    https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page

    There, all for free on the web no need to go back to school.

    As for the type of work; most of it is writing the 1000th driver, making sure some mainframe doesn't keel over on a new version.

    Also even the lower level stuff often escape to higher level languages after initial setup.

    You'd still be writing code to make the hardware do stuff, just more work to achieve the same. So it might not be that exciting after a while.

  • by tjr on 6/25/2019, 3:11:56 PM

    If you'd be okay with low-level development on platforms other than typical desktop computers, there's a lot to do in aerospace-related fields. In my observation, you would probably be expected to have a bachelor's degree in some related subject (CS, math, physics, electrical engineering, etc.), but for an entry-level job they wouldn't expect actual low-level experience. Good knowledge of C or C++ in general would help.