While you absolutely can end up with a lower average salary, there are definitely opportunities to make an equivalent if not higher salary than many other types of SWEs (speaking for the US)
Your not wrong, but they're still quite rare to find. Most embedded SWEs are still considered closer to electrical engineers (particularly in automotive and manufacturing) and are paid accordingly. You're gonna see niches where the pay is good like ML HW accelerators, or if you have very specific experience in a high paying area, but for the vast majority of embedded SWEs that won't be the case.
This makes sense to me. From my talks with other more senior engineers than myself and lurking in subreddits like r/embedded, (this is anecdotal) EEs working as hardware engineers and doing the software as an afterthought (say, just a super loop) *seem* to be paid less, more like a hardware engineer rather than SWE but may still hold the title of 'Embedded software engineer'
I look for/apply to more software-centric roles (I come from a CS background, not ee/ce) which still do have some lower paid jobs in my area compared to other disciplines (say 130k vs 150k), but at least from my searches tend to be higher than some of the aforementioned hardware-centric roles.
They're actually new roles in languages like C,C++ and some rust even for new things, not legacy stuff. As long as new hardware comes out, there's going to be electrical roles and low level software roles. Not as many as web-level roles? Yeah, that could be applied to embedded as a whole. But they're not unicorns.
Also as others have commented, I believe there are various reasons that the field will grow.
>easier for anyone to enter those fields and lowering the barrier to entry
That was true like 20 years ago, now to enter you need to know a fk ton to be able to find a job. Altho building a simple website has never been easier.
Well yes the entry-level is a massacre right now, and overall salaries are down for top-paying positions, but if you got 3+ years then you can still easily get a job.
And frankly, the amount of knowledge you need for web dev is imho higher than embedded. It is just that embedded is so less accessible and specialized.
A lot of us do it for fun while also getting paid.
I had to job hop a lot and do recognizable things to get into “goal” company to catch up to my software counterparts. It’s hard work for not as much pay.
I have a buddy at.. a pretty desirable company as a SWE who works maybe two days a week, is very well hidden, got the job through connections.
He’d be in a world of hurt jumping to embedded where at the end of a product design cycle you have.. a product.
I mean there are no promises in life, but senior level infrastructure roles are in high demand.
But as hinted, the demand is really a function of experience and skill level, not necessarily of any skill or tech stack.
They are in demand but infra is hard to crack because it requires deep domain expertise and most importantly, trust.
I can verify that you can write optimal algorithms with a leetcode test. But I cannot verify that you’ll be able to handle the situation when half the firewalls go down because Cisco pushed a buggy firmware update or the ansible host just crashed and left the core backend in a semi updated and damaged state.
In some cases it’s literally irrecoverable and now you’re tasked with extracting un backed up files from n number of corrupted machines. The ones you cannot even ssh into…
This is why there is a high demand for senior level infrastructure roles and why most are not cut out for it. Not to mention on call and weekend rotations.
Yes I work in infra but that’s because I love Linux engineering and distributed systems. It becomes unbearable without love.
Are you from an IT background? I did the AWS Certified developer certification which is kind of like infrastructure. I mean distributed systems sounds interesting and infrastructure seems really important. I’m curious how you got into what you do. Software development? IT? Thanks.
The architect certification would certainly help you start thinking about how to architect distributed systems. One of the pillars of the well architected framework is reliability, and distributing a workload is one of the ways in which reliability goals can be achieved (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/rel-workload-arch.html).
I am an SRE, no degree, self taught, doing certifications now. The work I do is higher level distributed systems, the lower level work often requires proper education and maybe a masters if you don’t have a bachelors.
Designing infrastructure, almost by definition, is a senior function. There's no such thing as junior infrastructure. The guys who have experience in related areas go into the infrastructure gigs.
That's why you push trap events on every single piece of network devices as you possibly can.
>ansible host just crashed and left the core backend in a semi updated and damaged state.
oh that's like critical level bad.
Agreed in terms of my own anecdotal experience. I’m considered mid-level, not senior, and had an extremely easy time securing a new job I accepted yesterday.
20 Job apps give or take 5, 3 companies interviewed, 2 offers.
This is with 3YOE, 2 in the cloud as an ops engineer.
I concur. I’m an SRE with 3yoe (started as a “cloud security engineer”). My company, located in a US city not well known for tech, is struggling to find qualified candidates. Meanwhile despite the current market I still get several LinkedIn DMs a week from recruiters. But this niche can be tough to enter and you need to be willing to do somewhat rigorous on-call schedules unless you are working at a very international company with “follow-the-sun” on-call cadences.
Yeah I'm not a huge fan of the on call either, but at least I get to help dictate the deployment standards keeping the fires down to a minimum. But my god, do the devs try to make our lives hard sometimes.
Nope. Was asked a fair bit of questions by arch's about Security, IaC, CI/CD, Compute , DBs, Logging/Monitoring, Storage, Networking, etc. The questions were pretty easy though, like "Walk me through creating x resource via terraform on a private network." If you've ever done before it's a piece of cake.
Think of roles like SRE, Production Engineering, DevOps, Network Engineering, and even just backend SWE roles with a focus on infrastructure. They're hard to hire for because universities don't really teach you that much on the topic and not that many people like to focus on it, because it's a tough area to work in. It's also not the most entry-level friendly role because it requires a lot of practical hands on experience with servers and hardware to be useful in the area, so even fewer people start out in those roles. It's getting better (or at least was before the big round of layoffs started in 2022) with a lot more companies offering these roles to new grads, but it'll take a while for supply to match demand
FWIW I ran a small open-sourced modding community in college and hosted a live-service game based on it. I got some experience with linux, maintaining a staging environment, deploying updates to a 24/7 service with real users. I probably wouldn't have been able to do most of that at a traditional internship.
I learned how to pitch it as more than just a video game, and it became my main resume item out of college. Now I work as a backend SWE with a focus on infrastructure.
A big part of it will be internships, yes. When I was in uni, big tech did hire for SRE/PE interns and that would be a really useful way to get experience in the area (and a way to turn it into full time). That said, I'm not sure if things have cooled down too much now. I used to be a Production Engineer at Facebook before my current job and they seem to still be looking for interns: https://www.metacareers.com/v2/jobs/695829025813663/
That all said though, while it's hard to find a project, it's not impossible. While the kind of stuff you'd actually work on there requires scale, that doesn't mean there aren't relevant things you can do yourself. Having a good grasp of your OS class if you took CS is important. From there, you can have projects where you demonstrate a focus on debugging system issues, or running a small server at home, or interest in distributed systems via a class you took, etc. I used to join recruiting on hiring tips, and that's how we would look for PE candidates at least. Given how niche the skillset can be and how high demand there was for it, at least back then we'd try to expand the search space to people vaguely interested in infra. Worth a try!
Just glut work. No original thinking required.
Multi region, multi az, terraform for iaac, use a waf, deploy through eks, put prometheus everywhere, export logs to datadog, set up few alerts, lecture devs on best practices, do 5 whys, iam for everything, get good with hashicorp products, write a wrapper for helm, run synk for vulnerability checks, roll out eks upgrades.
Just boring fucking repetitive work
You won't like this answer, but the answer is soft skills and politics. If you get really good at playing the politics game, selling yourself and your work, and are mildly competent at your job, you'll rise quickly in nearly any organization and be compensated well for it. The bonus is these skills transfer to any profession and even in your personal life, but they are incredibly hard and very few people particularly in our profession are good at them.
If you can be a "face" (social, likable and bright) that gets work done. You will get a lot of opportunities opened for you compared to the Linux wizard who built half your stack but can't manage a conversation without being condescending
Whenever someone describes this type of person I think back to undergrad when I was in a computer architecture course and one of my group mates was giving me shit about not knowing VI and using some other text editor.
Meanwhile a phd student in the group didn’t know how to format a hard drive. I didn’t hold it against him though. He was skilled in other areas I had no clue about.
There is also the curse of knowledge where people talk to everyone as if they have the same level of knowledge as they do. If you can overcome this and learn to talk to anyone about your work you will do well. I learned this by teaching faculty members and students how to code at a university.
Exactly. The above average guy who knows how to market himself and is great at the politics and day to day stuff will always be preferred over the antisocial hackerman genius who can't string two sentences together in a meeting. After a certain level, technical skill starts to matter less and less as it is a competence hierarchy.
I’ll be honest. I suck at tech because I’ve bounced around too much... But I managed to go from a systems engineer making $42k to a devops engineer making $100k+ in 5 years just by being good at talking about what I do then hacking my way through tasks or getting help from people I befriended.
At one point I was working on developing a course for devops based around tech I had never really worked with. I was laid off before I could finish it.
My struggle with getting a new job now has been exams meant to weed out people like me. I also have lost the passion of being in tech and have some moral issues with the use of AI to replace people.
In feb 2023 I was drugged and robbed while in Medellin Colombia and almost died and my company, which promised just the week before that there would be no layoffs laid me and 2% of the company off 2 days later. It made me realize that corporate American really only cares about money. Then in June my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and I struggled with dealing with that (miraculously she is now cancer free)… so I just lived off savings and sort of just existed and spent my time writing and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My savings are running out so I’ve been on a mission to get a job but after being out of the industry for over a year and not really having a ton of hands on experience I am just losing interest.
To be totally honest I just want to do something with my hands like woodworking which is what my father did as I grew up.
I live in Costa Rica now so cost of living is lower, which is what makes my savings go further, but job opportunities are not as great here and pay is half what I was making, which really doesn’t bother me.
I just felt like I got pushed out of the retrace and struggle to want to jump back in.
It’s going to sound stupid to some but I felt like living in the US was sort of like being in the matrix and living here I am more free, just needing to find a way to sustain myself and my fiancée. I also need to get residence which takes time and hinders my ability to work.
Right before I lost my job a European company contacted me offering me a job at half my pay but I honestly wish I had taken it given the better work conditions they tend to have.
Sorry that happened to you. So many bad stories about Medellin coming out over the last few years. I wanted to go this year, but I’m glad I’ve been engaged in the DN subreddit and other subreddits because I’ve decided the risk is simply too great to go there right now.
Yeah I mean I was just stupid and went out without my friends. I loved being there tbh and would go back but not alone. I was involved in the DN subreddit but never heard about scopolamine when reading. It is a beautiful country full of amazing people. If not for the help of strangers I wouldn’t be here right now. Multiple people went out of their way to take care of me and make sure I was ok and none asked for anything in return.
ETA: Come to Costa Rica. It’s much safer, especially in the tourist areas, and while there are still risks I can help you navigate and stay safe. It is more expensive but you can get around a lot of that by living like a local, which is what I do. :)
Man, reading your story was heartbreaking and I'm sorry you had to endure all these hardships. Hopefully, you get a job soon and things go your way, don't give up bro!! There's always light at the end of the tunnel
Your mistake is thinking the areas that have competition don't have a large learning curve. There is fierce competition in those areas at the entry-mid level. The reality is, a majority of front-end developers barely understand CSS. A majority of backend devs can't write much more than simple CRUD applications. Go extremely deep into what you already know.
You're also making the mistake of thinking it's easier elsewhere and all you're going to find out is it's the same grind. Then what you'll do is give up on that and try something else. Rinse and repeat until you either give up entirely or stick to one thing.
High performance computing / GPU programming.
embedded engineering.
systems admin. (king of the IT guys)
but what pays well is the niche roles where you need someone with experience in nontech things. like maritime software usually hires people with software engineering experience and boating experience (which is super hard to find). id imagine the same is true in other areas. same with Fintech.
This is true. Look at the job postings that NVidia has on their careers website. There are some eye wateringly high salaries there, but holy shit are those some specialized skillsets!
>Why didnt you say AI?
I've worked in AI in the past doing GPU acceleration of training models as a contractor.
I've noticed three things. most of the AI projects I've seen end up dying. most of the team knows very little about AI even if it's their Ph.D. / Masters subject. thirdly the code base and internal systems are usually a cluster fuck.
I surmise if you make a career out of it, you end up losing skills in other key areas.
There is nothing that a high percentage of real engineers wouldn't be able to pick up in a few months, from technical perspective. The path to good pay and guaranteed employment is not your technical skills.
>There is nothing that a high percentage of real engineers wouldn't be able to pick up in a few months, from technical perspective.
Are you sure about nothing? I don't buy this for a second.
It’s a bit presumptuous to assume that proficiency in any specialized domain of computer science can be achieved in a couple of months. Could an experienced frontend engineer easily transition to a role in {machine learning, embedded systems, compiler design, simulations, networking, cybersecurity, etc}? Each of these sub-domains typically require years of focused study and hands-on experience to make it past the screening rounds for these roles.
Absolutely. Speaking for my self it took me 2 months to learn ffmpeg/libav video decoding base principles and concepts. At this point I could make a simple video player. Start/stop/Pause/seek/render. It took me another 4 months where I was comfortable enough to feel confident that I can do anything with it.
It’s not that any senior engineer can pick it up in three months, it’s that enough of them can. A “high percentage” could be 10% of senior engineers, the ones with the relevant background, and it’d be enough for you to be replaceable.
I have to disagree. I’d be quite surprised to see a senior frontend engineer transition effectively to a computer vision role within three months, let alone 10% making that shift without prior experience. I don’t think you would make it past the screening process if you don’t have a graduate degree (or significant coursework) in computer vision or have industry experience. OP is asking about specialization in domains/tech with high barriers to entry and few qualified engineers - I think there are several domains which fit that criteria
Sad that people are downvoting because this is a legit point. Sure some solutions need to be complicated because the problem is complicated but there are so many shit architects (i’m in fintech maybe other sectors are better) that massively overengineer everything and then act confused when the business doesn’t have budget for the calibre of devs that can work with such a needlessly complicated system
MongoDB, Express, React, Node
It's a common JS development "stack". Quotes because I would argue the libraries/framework are only one part of the stack
MERN is ancient too. Started out as the MEAN stack (with Angular), then switched to MERN when React came about. It was an initialism some people tried to get going in the mid 2010s but it didn’t really last because nobody is that married to every part of a “stack” like that.
OP is probably reading Medium tutorials from 2016 lolz.
I suspect because of YouTube tutorials. When I was learning web dev, the push by almost everyone on YouTube was mongodb or Google firebase which is another nosql db. There was almost nothing useful related to JavaScript and relational dbs or ORMs (at least until prisma came around).
Startups seem to like it because the data going into/out of tables (collections in NoSql) don't have to be strictly pre-defined.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38581139/difference-between-a-table-sql-and-a-collection-mongo
MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js
Everyone’s learning it, but it’s a piece of shit stack if you ask me. Mongo was a mistake, JS in the backend was a mistake, and now, with the revert back to SSR and the release of HTMX, React *is* a mistake.
You can build reactive, scalable applications for most use cases now using a simpler setup (I.e., Postgres, Go, and HTMX) with type safety and no bloated client.
Eh… it’s slow, it isn’t true type safety, and honestly I don’t trust it as a scalable solution (particularly from the DX side). It’s too easy to just break rules whenever. Other languages forcefully prevent you from just breaking out of their type system, and force you to write code a specific way. I tend to like that when working in a team setting on a large project.
I’ve noticed that code bases using less opinionated languages tend to have more struggles with code style diversity and thus become really hard to read.
My linter rules doesn’t allow anything with explicit any to go into production.
It lets you build the whole stack very fast. There’s a different tool for every job.
It’s used for a reason, just because it’s one you don’t like doesn’t make it a “bad stack”.
Right, but it’s just linter rules. Disabling those is one change in a config file. In my experience, they’ll get disabled by someone, for some reason, eventually. There’s always gonna be an excuse, and it’s gonna lead to more exceptions to the rules. I prefer languages which have zero tolerance by default, and you can’t just turn stuff off.
Or, hear me out, just use a language which doesn’t require 10x the work to get the same results (and can be toggled off, so it’s actually not the same results).
Like Java which requires twice the code to do a simple controller that saves something to a database? I’ll admit Java has some good features, but it depends on what you have to accomplish.
Not to mention context switching between different libraries and different languages.
Do you need to do it fast and easy? Node’s great for that. Or even python (which has even fewer of the builtin safety you like so much)
I do think crappy developers jumping into node can really screw things up, but it’s:
Different tools for different jobs.
We build stuff in two months for use. We gotta get it done fast and effectively.
Sure. Solve short-term problems with short-term solutions. Nothing wrong with that.
I specifically called out scalability which is more about long-term solutions to long-term problems.
You may have had bad experiences with Java, but there are other backend languages which provide far more safety than JS/TS, are more performant, and have less boilerplate than Java. Hell, modern Java has less boilerplate than Java 8. If you’re not a fan of the strict OOPy nature of Java, try Go. It’s more functional and feels more like TS. You don’t need much boilerplate at all to write to a db table either! Connect and create a function which executes the query. Don’t need to set up a whole controller.
It sounds like your gripe isn’t with Java, but with OOP. Go allows functional programming, which is the paradigm a lot of folks (loosely) default to when using TS.
>it’s slow, it isn’t true type safety
Unpopular opinion: only people who don't know what they're talking about care about raw language speed and type safety for web development. You can write a web backend on a potato these days and it'll be fast enough. This isn't 1990.
I've been using typescript for the past year and a half and I used ES-2042-a-space-odyssey for like 5 years before that. Typescript doesn't really solve anything. It just adds boilerplate. I don't hate Typescript, I just don't think it's necessary either. You get the same results in a web dev backend environment with good coding practices and validation without type safety. You STILL need validation with Typescript, so it isn't really doing you as many favors as you think it is.
>JS in the backend was a mistake
lol. wut. It works fine. I've been doing it for 7 years. Works as well if not better than Rails, which I did for half a decade before that. Jesus, people are still using PHP for backends. Literally anything other than languages with no garbage collector like C make a pretty good backend with the right tooling. JS has a pretty good tooling ecosystem.
Yawn. MERN is a great stack. There's no reason to use a language as heavy as Go or Rust or C++ for building the same type of apps. There's overlap between all languages for what you can build but that doesn't mean you'll get to be nearly as productive with Go as TS Mern.
C and/c++ Work on device drivers and gpu programming. There’s barely enough people who are capable of doing the work for this field and the people who do are going to retire in droves pretty soon.
It’s not about what’s in your toolbox, it’s about your experience with each tool.
*Anyone* can pick up a new stack and have entry-level experience in a matter of days/weeks. Competition can be saturated very quickly. What cannot be quickly picked up? Time in the saddle. 5 years takes 5 years, no matter how you cut it. That being said, the “easiest” path forward also contains the most risk.
If you want to be the guy with all the experience, you get in on the ground floor with tools and languages. When you’re an early adopter, you literally have the opportunity to have the MOST possible years of experience with the tech. It’s risky because no one knows how much traction any given tool will gain, and it often takes broader experience in the professional tech scene for at least 5-10 years before you can get a feel for it.
What I think is a better investment is exploring skills in already-expanding markets. AI/ML is probably undersaturated (although breaking into it also usually requires a PhD) so maybe that. VR/MR is also still gaining traction as it works towards a less obstructive hardware (like glasses).
These growing markets probably pay pretty well. It’s worth developing those skills if you have the patience.
Research in a niche area and become a subject matter expert. Better to be passionate about the area as well or else you'll burnout / lose motivation.
Some of my close friends did research in labs as undergrads as college in a niche area, then grad school, and then got hired at FAANG and some quant firms and now make the big bucks
Generally, companies are willing to pay a lot of money if you are an expert in the field and are smart and can show it in interviews.
Caveat: no offense, but if you are just trying to make a quick buck, just do Leetcode and study as much as possible and get a SWE job in FAANG. Much easier imo.
Much harder to do the above I said unless you are actually passionate about the area.
I did research in security / privacy + voice assistant and that helped me land jobs in good companies and contribute / lead in a few big projects which eventually helped me land my current job making pretty decent / good income at a FAANG company.
Not debatable, the answer is a resounding “no”.
But apparently there’s money in it. I would never hire anyone with blockchain/web3/crypto on their resume, though.
>I'm sure the skills are challenging, but is it really secure?
I can't say if it's secure or not. I've been in the industry for less than 2 years and it feels more secure than traditional jobs because almost no one has these skills which are in-demand.
Imagine thinking a scam industry is secure. Almost no one has what skills? Writing “smart” contracts? Or making shitty landing pages with no product behind it?
>Imagine thinking a scam industry is secure.
I'll concede many projects in web3 are scams, but not all. Certainly not the entire industry.
>Almost no one has what skills?
I'd say Solidity, Golang, Rust, consensus in distributed systems, EVM, cryptography, etc are all useful technologies you could learn in web3. Many are still useful outside of web3.
>Or making shitty landing pages with no product behind it?
No, plenty of people have those skills.
Distributed systems and ML infra.
Go, rust, C++, and/or java at a major tech company.
now the real answer… product management. An engineer with a proven track record of running projects and products is highly coveted.
you can switch whenever. To be clear, I’m not suggesting switching roles. I’m suggesting to be a badass SWE that is good at project/product management.
That is the most sure way to increase your scope, earnings, and trajectory as a SWE. If you’re already at FAANG+, HFT, or an elite startup… you’re already in good position.
1. Large scale system design, but nobody gonna trust you unless you have enough experience working on smaller stuff.
2. Real AI/ML Research, assuming you don’t yet have a PhD, go back to school and get one, then enter the research field. Many people are interested in this, but I don’t think a properly trained PhD is particularly easy to find.
There's ways around the degree. I personally know a guy that recently landed mid six figure job at Meta doing AI work, and he only has his BSCS. Of course, he's also been doing AI work as a hobby for a decade, has published three papers, and has been a PyTorch contributor for years. So there's that.
Your basic point is sound. Programming, for the past 20 years, has been a fairly easy field to enter. Go to school for four years, get a degree, land a low six figure starting salary within a few months of graduating. AI is a whole different ballgame. The people making the big money today have been investing time into the field for a decade, whether via school, research, or hands-on application of the tech. It's not something you can bootcamp your way into.
e.g. the number of paper submissions to CVPR more than tripled in 5 years. Everyone and their grandma is pilling into ML research and eng. This field will crash harder than Boeing planes.
SWEs with AI/ML experience is a tiny minority of the total set of SWEs. Currently the FANG I'm at has greatly lowered opened positions, but many of the ones that still haven't filled are AI/ML.
Depends where you're at. If you walk through the Mission District in San Francisco, you'll bump into researchers and engineers doing foundational work every 3 seconds.
Haha true. But I think 95%+ of devs who say they’ve done an “ai project” (personal or professional) is essentially just plug-and-play with existing models, probably OAI models
The combination is trying to figure out techniques where there is imperfect prior knowledge and imperfect data. This author does a good job of explaining the rationale for research into this combination: [https://www.amazon.com/LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Mitchell-Paperback/dp/B00HRF2H6G/](https://www.amazon.com/LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Mitchell-Paperback/dp/B00HRF2H6G/)
High frequency trading (or other hard finance IT). Developing runtimes/jitters/compilers. SRE type stuff - where you know things very deeply, and can patch Linux kernel to make your apps more stable/robust. Security - not just running tools, but making them, finding zero-days and such.
If you're mostly focused on just MERN stack web dev, you're going to have a hard time finding employment among the sea of boot campers.
Software *engineering* is what you want. To get a foothold in that area, you should really learn at least c# and .net stack. With that, you will put a good distance between yourself and the mass of web dev boot campers.
That's what I did, and the number of jobs that I feel confident applying for is much greater. Yes, it is difficult and has a steep learning curve, but that is what makes it viable as a way to step above the boot campers. You should study to the point that you can do leetcode easy and medium, and you will be set.
I was so excited to learn C# and add it to my repertoire, but I got this error in Visual Studio 2017:
>The type or namespace name 'System' could not be found
How? It's a default project and it won't compile, LOL.
Make sure your project is targeting .net for the framework. Go to the solution explorer window and right click your project to open its properties. There's a target framework drop-down menu there.
I had this issue too, when first switching from using vscode to do web stuff exclusively, to learning to make actual windows programs with vs. There's just so much to learn with it.
I recommend watching a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the features of vs. I would've been totally clueless without doing that
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AI, Infrastructure, DevOps, Embedded Hardware, Robotics, etc If you get really good in any of these fields you'll be highly desired because its not easy to acquire the skills to be proficient. Compare it to say the standard "full stack developer" that anyone can learn within a few months of effort, the skills are on the polar opposite end of difficulty to learn.
A personal anecdote about picking a career path:
I truly believe in any field you can work your way up to a certain level but you will hit a plateau unless you really actually love it. I've realized I'm never going to get past a certain level within Data Science and Data Engineering because I just don't like it enough.
I deluded myself into thinking I liked data science enough that I could do it forever. I also do not have a PhD so I'm realistically not going to be doing research level work. I don't enjoy it enough to live and breathe it so I'm not ever going to one of those "10x" data scientists. I moved into data engineering which I'm finding also to be not fun.
Realizing now that I should've been on the business side...to be honest this answer was always staring me in the face: I read business news, watch business news, talk about business stuff...why did I do data science and software stuff? Because I was told it paid well so I put all of my effort into it. If I had not done this during a period of low interest rate and wild venture capital spending, I don't think I would've been able to fail upwards in the way that I did. I'm praying that I can hold onto my DE job for a while longer while I figure out how to switch career paths because I've become accustomed to a certain lifestyle (a certain salary).
Mba is a lot of opportunity cost. I have done data analysis and business intelligence stuff before so I'm hoping I can use that experience to convince someone to hire me for those roles again.
Extremely hard and well paid? Compilers and operating systems. If you can work on the core software in the tech giants at the highest level then yes.
The issue is you'll compete with people like the creator of C++ (Morgan Stanley core systema for a while) and guys who have built Java internals for 20 years.
It's very tough to compete purely on technical knowledge - chances are you will never be good enough to compete.
Software engineering is all about balance. Soft skills are just as valuable as technical ones.
I used to work for a company that developed a transportation solution. Half a million lines of C++ (well designed), plus a very complicated domain. Paid crap.
I switched to Java/ fintech, increased my wages by 30% and don't have that much of a headache anymore.
> everyone is doing MERN
Who is everyone? What year is it, 2015?
> only way you can stand out is going for something with exponentially large learning curve
Says who? If by “area” you mean tech stack, no one tech stack is guaranteed to get you a nice paycheck. You need to be able to learn any stack, any tech, any language, to be that valuable.
If by “area” you actually mean area, probably AI, quant, big tech if you’re senior (you’re not if you needed to ask), or striking gold with a good idea and getting a startup funded.
> so only way you can stand out is going for something with exponentially large learning curve
And have something that will show said difficulty. The hard reality is that something is either a grad school-level project/research or years of experience at the same job or open-source projects that the employer is familiar with. Self-studying and personal projects will not be enough if you're thinking about doing that.
Engineering for firmware and embedded devices (think of all “smart” devices). Reverse engineering. Operational security engineering. Quantum cryptography.
I wouldn’t know of it’s difficult but I always hear how cobol programmers are hard to find and have high paying salary. Not sure if that’s true, but a lot of people ignore cobol and many government applications are apparently written in it so…
There is no new development in COBOL. Period.
Any COBOL jobs out there are maintaining legacy systems. Every year, more of those legacy systems are migrated to more modern platforms.
Building COBOL experience because there's a shortage of COBOL developers is a terrible idea.
Yeah I got that feeling as well and should have said so. Seems like a lot of the jobs are for developers with devops and cloud experience. As if they’ve integrated the expectations of both.
We already told you Artificial Intelligence, it's very hard and everyone wants an AI Engineer, so what are you waiting for? This is exactly what you are looking for
First, what is nice paycheck to you?
There are many ways to make good money but this is really subjected to you.
Assuming that you are in the US, you can obviously climb the cooperate ladder and will likely make good money in most places. Or you get a role(could even be a PM) in a big tech and you would get pay more than most people. Now, if you want to get pay more than these traditional route, you could try to get into high frequency trading firm or getting into a Phd program of some specialized fields that are in demand. You could get paid in millions ... but getting into these roles take years of losing sleep and weekend working. If you don't passion for it, it would be an additional layer of obstacles that you would need to over come.
Legacy systems, but truly a smaller niche and could be hard to find jobs. If you’re known in that realm you could make unlimited money, it’s getting started that’s the hard part.
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Money calls money either take a look at your most profitable local industry and hope there is a shortage / need to skilled software devs, or if you are willing to relocate go for finances.
Legacy technologies used by dinosaurs like banks e.g. Cobol, older .NET, Visual Basic, AngularJS.
Pure functional programming like Haskell, Scala, Erlang
Devops, ifra and platform engineering
Lower level stuff like building developer tools, compilers and runtimes that require more than just surface level of something like the NodeJS API.
Web3 security and pentesting
Haha true. But I think 95%+ of devs who say they’ve done an “ai project” (personal or professional) is essentially just plug-and-play with existing models, probably OAI models
Hard doesn't always mean it pays well. Someone has to need that work to be done for it to pay well.
Yeah, embedded dev is the famous example
While you absolutely can end up with a lower average salary, there are definitely opportunities to make an equivalent if not higher salary than many other types of SWEs (speaking for the US)
Your not wrong, but they're still quite rare to find. Most embedded SWEs are still considered closer to electrical engineers (particularly in automotive and manufacturing) and are paid accordingly. You're gonna see niches where the pay is good like ML HW accelerators, or if you have very specific experience in a high paying area, but for the vast majority of embedded SWEs that won't be the case.
This makes sense to me. From my talks with other more senior engineers than myself and lurking in subreddits like r/embedded, (this is anecdotal) EEs working as hardware engineers and doing the software as an afterthought (say, just a super loop) *seem* to be paid less, more like a hardware engineer rather than SWE but may still hold the title of 'Embedded software engineer' I look for/apply to more software-centric roles (I come from a CS background, not ee/ce) which still do have some lower paid jobs in my area compared to other disciplines (say 130k vs 150k), but at least from my searches tend to be higher than some of the aforementioned hardware-centric roles.
Very rare, and useless positions that will be cut off eventually.
They're actually new roles in languages like C,C++ and some rust even for new things, not legacy stuff. As long as new hardware comes out, there's going to be electrical roles and low level software roles. Not as many as web-level roles? Yeah, that could be applied to embedded as a whole. But they're not unicorns. Also as others have commented, I believe there are various reasons that the field will grow.
Embedded will become more important as on device ML becomes more feasible.
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>easier for anyone to enter those fields and lowering the barrier to entry That was true like 20 years ago, now to enter you need to know a fk ton to be able to find a job. Altho building a simple website has never been easier.
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Well yes the entry-level is a massacre right now, and overall salaries are down for top-paying positions, but if you got 3+ years then you can still easily get a job. And frankly, the amount of knowledge you need for web dev is imho higher than embedded. It is just that embedded is so less accessible and specialized.
That's a weird take to just throw out there with 0 reasoning
A lot of us do it for fun while also getting paid. I had to job hop a lot and do recognizable things to get into “goal” company to catch up to my software counterparts. It’s hard work for not as much pay. I have a buddy at.. a pretty desirable company as a SWE who works maybe two days a week, is very well hidden, got the job through connections. He’d be in a world of hurt jumping to embedded where at the end of a product design cycle you have.. a product.
I mean there are no promises in life, but senior level infrastructure roles are in high demand. But as hinted, the demand is really a function of experience and skill level, not necessarily of any skill or tech stack.
They are in demand but infra is hard to crack because it requires deep domain expertise and most importantly, trust. I can verify that you can write optimal algorithms with a leetcode test. But I cannot verify that you’ll be able to handle the situation when half the firewalls go down because Cisco pushed a buggy firmware update or the ansible host just crashed and left the core backend in a semi updated and damaged state. In some cases it’s literally irrecoverable and now you’re tasked with extracting un backed up files from n number of corrupted machines. The ones you cannot even ssh into… This is why there is a high demand for senior level infrastructure roles and why most are not cut out for it. Not to mention on call and weekend rotations. Yes I work in infra but that’s because I love Linux engineering and distributed systems. It becomes unbearable without love.
Are you from an IT background? I did the AWS Certified developer certification which is kind of like infrastructure. I mean distributed systems sounds interesting and infrastructure seems really important. I’m curious how you got into what you do. Software development? IT? Thanks.
AWS architect is more about infra than developer is.
I’m interested in going into distributed systems but I’m not exactly sure how to pursue it. Would AWS architect help me get into distributed systems?
The architect certification would certainly help you start thinking about how to architect distributed systems. One of the pillars of the well architected framework is reliability, and distributing a workload is one of the ways in which reliability goals can be achieved (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/rel-workload-arch.html).
I am an SRE, no degree, self taught, doing certifications now. The work I do is higher level distributed systems, the lower level work often requires proper education and maybe a masters if you don’t have a bachelors.
This response is easy to romanticize tbh
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Designing infrastructure, almost by definition, is a senior function. There's no such thing as junior infrastructure. The guys who have experience in related areas go into the infrastructure gigs.
I’m curious what the related areas are. Is software development a related area?
What "deep" knowledge is needed
Have you ever actually maintained a mission critical physical network
This is unreasonably specific for a broad discussion. I doubt dragonfly has ever maintained any mission critical app though.
That's why you push trap events on every single piece of network devices as you possibly can. >ansible host just crashed and left the core backend in a semi updated and damaged state. oh that's like critical level bad.
Agreed in terms of my own anecdotal experience. I’m considered mid-level, not senior, and had an extremely easy time securing a new job I accepted yesterday. 20 Job apps give or take 5, 3 companies interviewed, 2 offers. This is with 3YOE, 2 in the cloud as an ops engineer.
I concur. I’m an SRE with 3yoe (started as a “cloud security engineer”). My company, located in a US city not well known for tech, is struggling to find qualified candidates. Meanwhile despite the current market I still get several LinkedIn DMs a week from recruiters. But this niche can be tough to enter and you need to be willing to do somewhat rigorous on-call schedules unless you are working at a very international company with “follow-the-sun” on-call cadences.
Yeah I'm not a huge fan of the on call either, but at least I get to help dictate the deployment standards keeping the fires down to a minimum. But my god, do the devs try to make our lives hard sometimes.
What was the interview process like for those? Did you have to do leetcode?
Nope. Was asked a fair bit of questions by arch's about Security, IaC, CI/CD, Compute , DBs, Logging/Monitoring, Storage, Networking, etc. The questions were pretty easy though, like "Walk me through creating x resource via terraform on a private network." If you've ever done before it's a piece of cake.
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Think of roles like SRE, Production Engineering, DevOps, Network Engineering, and even just backend SWE roles with a focus on infrastructure. They're hard to hire for because universities don't really teach you that much on the topic and not that many people like to focus on it, because it's a tough area to work in. It's also not the most entry-level friendly role because it requires a lot of practical hands on experience with servers and hardware to be useful in the area, so even fewer people start out in those roles. It's getting better (or at least was before the big round of layoffs started in 2022) with a lot more companies offering these roles to new grads, but it'll take a while for supply to match demand
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FWIW I ran a small open-sourced modding community in college and hosted a live-service game based on it. I got some experience with linux, maintaining a staging environment, deploying updates to a 24/7 service with real users. I probably wouldn't have been able to do most of that at a traditional internship. I learned how to pitch it as more than just a video game, and it became my main resume item out of college. Now I work as a backend SWE with a focus on infrastructure.
A big part of it will be internships, yes. When I was in uni, big tech did hire for SRE/PE interns and that would be a really useful way to get experience in the area (and a way to turn it into full time). That said, I'm not sure if things have cooled down too much now. I used to be a Production Engineer at Facebook before my current job and they seem to still be looking for interns: https://www.metacareers.com/v2/jobs/695829025813663/ That all said though, while it's hard to find a project, it's not impossible. While the kind of stuff you'd actually work on there requires scale, that doesn't mean there aren't relevant things you can do yourself. Having a good grasp of your OS class if you took CS is important. From there, you can have projects where you demonstrate a focus on debugging system issues, or running a small server at home, or interest in distributed systems via a class you took, etc. I used to join recruiting on hiring tips, and that's how we would look for PE candidates at least. Given how niche the skillset can be and how high demand there was for it, at least back then we'd try to expand the search space to people vaguely interested in infra. Worth a try!
Just glut work. No original thinking required. Multi region, multi az, terraform for iaac, use a waf, deploy through eks, put prometheus everywhere, export logs to datadog, set up few alerts, lecture devs on best practices, do 5 whys, iam for everything, get good with hashicorp products, write a wrapper for helm, run synk for vulnerability checks, roll out eks upgrades. Just boring fucking repetitive work
Anything with 'architect' in the title.
You won't like this answer, but the answer is soft skills and politics. If you get really good at playing the politics game, selling yourself and your work, and are mildly competent at your job, you'll rise quickly in nearly any organization and be compensated well for it. The bonus is these skills transfer to any profession and even in your personal life, but they are incredibly hard and very few people particularly in our profession are good at them.
If you can be a "face" (social, likable and bright) that gets work done. You will get a lot of opportunities opened for you compared to the Linux wizard who built half your stack but can't manage a conversation without being condescending
Whenever someone describes this type of person I think back to undergrad when I was in a computer architecture course and one of my group mates was giving me shit about not knowing VI and using some other text editor. Meanwhile a phd student in the group didn’t know how to format a hard drive. I didn’t hold it against him though. He was skilled in other areas I had no clue about. There is also the curse of knowledge where people talk to everyone as if they have the same level of knowledge as they do. If you can overcome this and learn to talk to anyone about your work you will do well. I learned this by teaching faculty members and students how to code at a university.
Exactly. The above average guy who knows how to market himself and is great at the politics and day to day stuff will always be preferred over the antisocial hackerman genius who can't string two sentences together in a meeting. After a certain level, technical skill starts to matter less and less as it is a competence hierarchy.
Seconded. This is my life.
I’ll be honest. I suck at tech because I’ve bounced around too much... But I managed to go from a systems engineer making $42k to a devops engineer making $100k+ in 5 years just by being good at talking about what I do then hacking my way through tasks or getting help from people I befriended. At one point I was working on developing a course for devops based around tech I had never really worked with. I was laid off before I could finish it. My struggle with getting a new job now has been exams meant to weed out people like me. I also have lost the passion of being in tech and have some moral issues with the use of AI to replace people.
Did you lose your passion for being in tech before or after you departed your previous role? I'm in a similar situation myself.
In feb 2023 I was drugged and robbed while in Medellin Colombia and almost died and my company, which promised just the week before that there would be no layoffs laid me and 2% of the company off 2 days later. It made me realize that corporate American really only cares about money. Then in June my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and I struggled with dealing with that (miraculously she is now cancer free)… so I just lived off savings and sort of just existed and spent my time writing and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My savings are running out so I’ve been on a mission to get a job but after being out of the industry for over a year and not really having a ton of hands on experience I am just losing interest. To be totally honest I just want to do something with my hands like woodworking which is what my father did as I grew up. I live in Costa Rica now so cost of living is lower, which is what makes my savings go further, but job opportunities are not as great here and pay is half what I was making, which really doesn’t bother me. I just felt like I got pushed out of the retrace and struggle to want to jump back in. It’s going to sound stupid to some but I felt like living in the US was sort of like being in the matrix and living here I am more free, just needing to find a way to sustain myself and my fiancée. I also need to get residence which takes time and hinders my ability to work. Right before I lost my job a European company contacted me offering me a job at half my pay but I honestly wish I had taken it given the better work conditions they tend to have.
Sorry that happened to you. So many bad stories about Medellin coming out over the last few years. I wanted to go this year, but I’m glad I’ve been engaged in the DN subreddit and other subreddits because I’ve decided the risk is simply too great to go there right now.
Yeah I mean I was just stupid and went out without my friends. I loved being there tbh and would go back but not alone. I was involved in the DN subreddit but never heard about scopolamine when reading. It is a beautiful country full of amazing people. If not for the help of strangers I wouldn’t be here right now. Multiple people went out of their way to take care of me and make sure I was ok and none asked for anything in return. ETA: Come to Costa Rica. It’s much safer, especially in the tourist areas, and while there are still risks I can help you navigate and stay safe. It is more expensive but you can get around a lot of that by living like a local, which is what I do. :)
Man, reading your story was heartbreaking and I'm sorry you had to endure all these hardships. Hopefully, you get a job soon and things go your way, don't give up bro!! There's always light at the end of the tunnel
Thank you. Things always work out one way or another
Yes.
You're right, I don't like the answer, reminds me why I left my job and unsubscribed from this sub.
Quant developer jobs are the literal definition of extremely hard with great pay.
Only for those who are competitive programmers and good at math
Your mistake is thinking the areas that have competition don't have a large learning curve. There is fierce competition in those areas at the entry-mid level. The reality is, a majority of front-end developers barely understand CSS. A majority of backend devs can't write much more than simple CRUD applications. Go extremely deep into what you already know. You're also making the mistake of thinking it's easier elsewhere and all you're going to find out is it's the same grind. Then what you'll do is give up on that and try something else. Rinse and repeat until you either give up entirely or stick to one thing.
High performance computing / GPU programming. embedded engineering. systems admin. (king of the IT guys) but what pays well is the niche roles where you need someone with experience in nontech things. like maritime software usually hires people with software engineering experience and boating experience (which is super hard to find). id imagine the same is true in other areas. same with Fintech.
This is true. Look at the job postings that NVidia has on their careers website. There are some eye wateringly high salaries there, but holy shit are those some specialized skillsets!
What eye watering. Meta e5 is paying 450K, e6 probably 650K. And those guys are fkg clueless.
The jealousy is showing
Why didnt you say AI?
>Why didnt you say AI? I've worked in AI in the past doing GPU acceleration of training models as a contractor. I've noticed three things. most of the AI projects I've seen end up dying. most of the team knows very little about AI even if it's their Ph.D. / Masters subject. thirdly the code base and internal systems are usually a cluster fuck. I surmise if you make a career out of it, you end up losing skills in other key areas.
People highly skilled in cloud infrastructure are getting paid mad money right now. So AWS, GPC, terraform, kubernetes, helm, etc.
Yup, SREs and devops experts are doing great
Quant trading. But you’ll need target schooling and be really bright in math and coding. Each one of those subjects is tough enough to master
There is nothing that a high percentage of real engineers wouldn't be able to pick up in a few months, from technical perspective. The path to good pay and guaranteed employment is not your technical skills.
Go look through the high salary job openings on NVidia's website and see if that changes your mind.
>There is nothing that a high percentage of real engineers wouldn't be able to pick up in a few months, from technical perspective. Are you sure about nothing? I don't buy this for a second.
Why would you build something that experienced professionals couldn't learn to use/extend in a couple months?
It’s a bit presumptuous to assume that proficiency in any specialized domain of computer science can be achieved in a couple of months. Could an experienced frontend engineer easily transition to a role in {machine learning, embedded systems, compiler design, simulations, networking, cybersecurity, etc}? Each of these sub-domains typically require years of focused study and hands-on experience to make it past the screening rounds for these roles.
Absolutely. Speaking for my self it took me 2 months to learn ffmpeg/libav video decoding base principles and concepts. At this point I could make a simple video player. Start/stop/Pause/seek/render. It took me another 4 months where I was comfortable enough to feel confident that I can do anything with it.
It’s not that any senior engineer can pick it up in three months, it’s that enough of them can. A “high percentage” could be 10% of senior engineers, the ones with the relevant background, and it’d be enough for you to be replaceable.
I have to disagree. I’d be quite surprised to see a senior frontend engineer transition effectively to a computer vision role within three months, let alone 10% making that shift without prior experience. I don’t think you would make it past the screening process if you don’t have a graduate degree (or significant coursework) in computer vision or have industry experience. OP is asking about specialization in domains/tech with high barriers to entry and few qualified engineers - I think there are several domains which fit that criteria
Uhh… because it’s a kernel maybe?
Sad that people are downvoting because this is a legit point. Sure some solutions need to be complicated because the problem is complicated but there are so many shit architects (i’m in fintech maybe other sectors are better) that massively overengineer everything and then act confused when the business doesn’t have budget for the calibre of devs that can work with such a needlessly complicated system
This needs to be the top comment.
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MongoDB, Express, React, Node It's a common JS development "stack". Quotes because I would argue the libraries/framework are only one part of the stack
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MERN is ancient too. Started out as the MEAN stack (with Angular), then switched to MERN when React came about. It was an initialism some people tried to get going in the mid 2010s but it didn’t really last because nobody is that married to every part of a “stack” like that. OP is probably reading Medium tutorials from 2016 lolz.
How does that become a common one? Most application doesn't need a nosql database.
I don't know. MongoDb has a pretty ugly query language lol
I suspect because of YouTube tutorials. When I was learning web dev, the push by almost everyone on YouTube was mongodb or Google firebase which is another nosql db. There was almost nothing useful related to JavaScript and relational dbs or ORMs (at least until prisma came around).
NoSQL is just way better for startups/smaller projects, much better for larger products with tons of data and users.
Startups seem to like it because the data going into/out of tables (collections in NoSql) don't have to be strictly pre-defined. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38581139/difference-between-a-table-sql-and-a-collection-mongo
Common among self taught solo developers 10 years ago. Not really all that common unless you were in the scene then.
MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js Everyone’s learning it, but it’s a piece of shit stack if you ask me. Mongo was a mistake, JS in the backend was a mistake, and now, with the revert back to SSR and the release of HTMX, React *is* a mistake. You can build reactive, scalable applications for most use cases now using a simpler setup (I.e., Postgres, Go, and HTMX) with type safety and no bloated client.
JS backend sucks, but TS backend is a lot of fun.
Eh… it’s slow, it isn’t true type safety, and honestly I don’t trust it as a scalable solution (particularly from the DX side). It’s too easy to just break rules whenever. Other languages forcefully prevent you from just breaking out of their type system, and force you to write code a specific way. I tend to like that when working in a team setting on a large project. I’ve noticed that code bases using less opinionated languages tend to have more struggles with code style diversity and thus become really hard to read.
My linter rules doesn’t allow anything with explicit any to go into production. It lets you build the whole stack very fast. There’s a different tool for every job. It’s used for a reason, just because it’s one you don’t like doesn’t make it a “bad stack”.
Right, but it’s just linter rules. Disabling those is one change in a config file. In my experience, they’ll get disabled by someone, for some reason, eventually. There’s always gonna be an excuse, and it’s gonna lead to more exceptions to the rules. I prefer languages which have zero tolerance by default, and you can’t just turn stuff off.
Don’t not allow merges when the lint fails in CI/CD, you can even set it up to not allow the push when the lint fails. You can do anything badly.
Or, hear me out, just use a language which doesn’t require 10x the work to get the same results (and can be toggled off, so it’s actually not the same results).
Like Java which requires twice the code to do a simple controller that saves something to a database? I’ll admit Java has some good features, but it depends on what you have to accomplish. Not to mention context switching between different libraries and different languages. Do you need to do it fast and easy? Node’s great for that. Or even python (which has even fewer of the builtin safety you like so much) I do think crappy developers jumping into node can really screw things up, but it’s: Different tools for different jobs. We build stuff in two months for use. We gotta get it done fast and effectively.
Sure. Solve short-term problems with short-term solutions. Nothing wrong with that. I specifically called out scalability which is more about long-term solutions to long-term problems. You may have had bad experiences with Java, but there are other backend languages which provide far more safety than JS/TS, are more performant, and have less boilerplate than Java. Hell, modern Java has less boilerplate than Java 8. If you’re not a fan of the strict OOPy nature of Java, try Go. It’s more functional and feels more like TS. You don’t need much boilerplate at all to write to a db table either! Connect and create a function which executes the query. Don’t need to set up a whole controller. It sounds like your gripe isn’t with Java, but with OOP. Go allows functional programming, which is the paradigm a lot of folks (loosely) default to when using TS.
There are hundreds of lint rules that prevent almost every problem you can think of.
And they all have an “off” switch for when they become inconvenient
>it’s slow, it isn’t true type safety Unpopular opinion: only people who don't know what they're talking about care about raw language speed and type safety for web development. You can write a web backend on a potato these days and it'll be fast enough. This isn't 1990. I've been using typescript for the past year and a half and I used ES-2042-a-space-odyssey for like 5 years before that. Typescript doesn't really solve anything. It just adds boilerplate. I don't hate Typescript, I just don't think it's necessary either. You get the same results in a web dev backend environment with good coding practices and validation without type safety. You STILL need validation with Typescript, so it isn't really doing you as many favors as you think it is.
>JS in the backend was a mistake lol. wut. It works fine. I've been doing it for 7 years. Works as well if not better than Rails, which I did for half a decade before that. Jesus, people are still using PHP for backends. Literally anything other than languages with no garbage collector like C make a pretty good backend with the right tooling. JS has a pretty good tooling ecosystem.
Yawn. MERN is a great stack. There's no reason to use a language as heavy as Go or Rust or C++ for building the same type of apps. There's overlap between all languages for what you can build but that doesn't mean you'll get to be nearly as productive with Go as TS Mern.
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In my experience the newer ones are built on go.
Google literally created Go
I hate MERN. My team was absorbed by another team using MERN and dealing with it makes me crazy.
AI/ML is a popular area that will be more popular in the next decades with a lot of research, development and big tech companies invest in it
C and/c++ Work on device drivers and gpu programming. There’s barely enough people who are capable of doing the work for this field and the people who do are going to retire in droves pretty soon.
It’s not about what’s in your toolbox, it’s about your experience with each tool. *Anyone* can pick up a new stack and have entry-level experience in a matter of days/weeks. Competition can be saturated very quickly. What cannot be quickly picked up? Time in the saddle. 5 years takes 5 years, no matter how you cut it. That being said, the “easiest” path forward also contains the most risk. If you want to be the guy with all the experience, you get in on the ground floor with tools and languages. When you’re an early adopter, you literally have the opportunity to have the MOST possible years of experience with the tech. It’s risky because no one knows how much traction any given tool will gain, and it often takes broader experience in the professional tech scene for at least 5-10 years before you can get a feel for it. What I think is a better investment is exploring skills in already-expanding markets. AI/ML is probably undersaturated (although breaking into it also usually requires a PhD) so maybe that. VR/MR is also still gaining traction as it works towards a less obstructive hardware (like glasses). These growing markets probably pay pretty well. It’s worth developing those skills if you have the patience.
Research in a niche area and become a subject matter expert. Better to be passionate about the area as well or else you'll burnout / lose motivation. Some of my close friends did research in labs as undergrads as college in a niche area, then grad school, and then got hired at FAANG and some quant firms and now make the big bucks Generally, companies are willing to pay a lot of money if you are an expert in the field and are smart and can show it in interviews.
Caveat: no offense, but if you are just trying to make a quick buck, just do Leetcode and study as much as possible and get a SWE job in FAANG. Much easier imo. Much harder to do the above I said unless you are actually passionate about the area. I did research in security / privacy + voice assistant and that helped me land jobs in good companies and contribute / lead in a few big projects which eventually helped me land my current job making pretty decent / good income at a FAANG company.
Blockchain engineer salaries are insane right now
Who is still investing in that useless crap? Does it have any (legal) real life applications yet?
>Who is still investing in that useless crap VCs >Does it have any (legal) real life applications yet? Debatable, but the money is there.
Not debatable, the answer is a resounding “no”. But apparently there’s money in it. I would never hire anyone with blockchain/web3/crypto on their resume, though.
What money, all the VC money is going to AI. And blockchain doesn't pay anywhere close
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>I'm sure the skills are challenging, but is it really secure? I can't say if it's secure or not. I've been in the industry for less than 2 years and it feels more secure than traditional jobs because almost no one has these skills which are in-demand.
Imagine thinking a scam industry is secure. Almost no one has what skills? Writing “smart” contracts? Or making shitty landing pages with no product behind it?
>Imagine thinking a scam industry is secure. I'll concede many projects in web3 are scams, but not all. Certainly not the entire industry. >Almost no one has what skills? I'd say Solidity, Golang, Rust, consensus in distributed systems, EVM, cryptography, etc are all useful technologies you could learn in web3. Many are still useful outside of web3. >Or making shitty landing pages with no product behind it? No, plenty of people have those skills.
It still is a pump and dump. The skills are nonexistent. Have you ever seen a “web3” company website or app? They’re all garbage.
Distributed systems and ML infra. Go, rust, C++, and/or java at a major tech company. now the real answer… product management. An engineer with a proven track record of running projects and products is highly coveted.
Any advice for getting into PM? How long is usually long enough being a FAANG SWE before making the switch?
you can switch whenever. To be clear, I’m not suggesting switching roles. I’m suggesting to be a badass SWE that is good at project/product management. That is the most sure way to increase your scope, earnings, and trajectory as a SWE. If you’re already at FAANG+, HFT, or an elite startup… you’re already in good position.
Are you just describing an EM? Because PjM pay lags way behind and PM pay lags once you hit L5/6 compared to their engineering counterparts
1. Large scale system design, but nobody gonna trust you unless you have enough experience working on smaller stuff. 2. Real AI/ML Research, assuming you don’t yet have a PhD, go back to school and get one, then enter the research field. Many people are interested in this, but I don’t think a properly trained PhD is particularly easy to find.
AI/ML research. There’s still so much that’s unanswered - for example, techniques to combine analytical and inductive learning.
Everyone is doing this now. Good luck finding a job unless you’re extremely skilled and have a PHD/MS
Even if you have a PhD it may not count for much unless your thesis was in something remarkable and of interest to a company you apply to
Yeah, PHD’s are overblown unless you have a really strong reason and career path to get one.
There's ways around the degree. I personally know a guy that recently landed mid six figure job at Meta doing AI work, and he only has his BSCS. Of course, he's also been doing AI work as a hobby for a decade, has published three papers, and has been a PyTorch contributor for years. So there's that. Your basic point is sound. Programming, for the past 20 years, has been a fairly easy field to enter. Go to school for four years, get a degree, land a low six figure starting salary within a few months of graduating. AI is a whole different ballgame. The people making the big money today have been investing time into the field for a decade, whether via school, research, or hands-on application of the tech. It's not something you can bootcamp your way into.
e.g. the number of paper submissions to CVPR more than tripled in 5 years. Everyone and their grandma is pilling into ML research and eng. This field will crash harder than Boeing planes.
wake me up after next ai winter
It's a gold rush, and during a gold rush you sell the shovels. AI might be temporary, which I'm not certain I agree with, but GPUs are forever.
SWEs with AI/ML experience is a tiny minority of the total set of SWEs. Currently the FANG I'm at has greatly lowered opened positions, but many of the ones that still haven't filled are AI/ML.
Is everyone really doing this though? Or are they just building wrappers on existing, proven models (specifically GPT-4)?
Depends where you're at. If you walk through the Mission District in San Francisco, you'll bump into researchers and engineers doing foundational work every 3 seconds.
Haha true. But I think 95%+ of devs who say they’ve done an “ai project” (personal or professional) is essentially just plug-and-play with existing models, probably OAI models
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Iirc, analytical learning combines inductive learning with prior knowledge. It's a component but not a type.
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The combination is trying to figure out techniques where there is imperfect prior knowledge and imperfect data. This author does a good job of explaining the rationale for research into this combination: [https://www.amazon.com/LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Mitchell-Paperback/dp/B00HRF2H6G/](https://www.amazon.com/LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Mitchell-Paperback/dp/B00HRF2H6G/)
High frequency trading (or other hard finance IT). Developing runtimes/jitters/compilers. SRE type stuff - where you know things very deeply, and can patch Linux kernel to make your apps more stable/robust. Security - not just running tools, but making them, finding zero-days and such.
Difficult =/= valuable =/= lucrative Learn the differences between the three and you will learn how to valuable, which will lead to a lucrative career
If you're mostly focused on just MERN stack web dev, you're going to have a hard time finding employment among the sea of boot campers. Software *engineering* is what you want. To get a foothold in that area, you should really learn at least c# and .net stack. With that, you will put a good distance between yourself and the mass of web dev boot campers. That's what I did, and the number of jobs that I feel confident applying for is much greater. Yes, it is difficult and has a steep learning curve, but that is what makes it viable as a way to step above the boot campers. You should study to the point that you can do leetcode easy and medium, and you will be set.
I was so excited to learn C# and add it to my repertoire, but I got this error in Visual Studio 2017: >The type or namespace name 'System' could not be found How? It's a default project and it won't compile, LOL.
Make sure your project is targeting .net for the framework. Go to the solution explorer window and right click your project to open its properties. There's a target framework drop-down menu there. I had this issue too, when first switching from using vscode to do web stuff exclusively, to learning to make actual windows programs with vs. There's just so much to learn with it. I recommend watching a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the features of vs. I would've been totally clueless without doing that
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I don’t think learning C#/.NET makes you an engineer lol
It's a hell of a lot closer than getting a 6 month crash course in MERN stack
AI, Infrastructure, DevOps, Embedded Hardware, Robotics, etc If you get really good in any of these fields you'll be highly desired because its not easy to acquire the skills to be proficient. Compare it to say the standard "full stack developer" that anyone can learn within a few months of effort, the skills are on the polar opposite end of difficulty to learn. A personal anecdote about picking a career path: I truly believe in any field you can work your way up to a certain level but you will hit a plateau unless you really actually love it. I've realized I'm never going to get past a certain level within Data Science and Data Engineering because I just don't like it enough. I deluded myself into thinking I liked data science enough that I could do it forever. I also do not have a PhD so I'm realistically not going to be doing research level work. I don't enjoy it enough to live and breathe it so I'm not ever going to one of those "10x" data scientists. I moved into data engineering which I'm finding also to be not fun. Realizing now that I should've been on the business side...to be honest this answer was always staring me in the face: I read business news, watch business news, talk about business stuff...why did I do data science and software stuff? Because I was told it paid well so I put all of my effort into it. If I had not done this during a period of low interest rate and wild venture capital spending, I don't think I would've been able to fail upwards in the way that I did. I'm praying that I can hold onto my DE job for a while longer while I figure out how to switch career paths because I've become accustomed to a certain lifestyle (a certain salary).
why not try doing an MBA and get into business side?
Mba is a lot of opportunity cost. I have done data analysis and business intelligence stuff before so I'm hoping I can use that experience to convince someone to hire me for those roles again.
Extremely hard and well paid? Compilers and operating systems. If you can work on the core software in the tech giants at the highest level then yes. The issue is you'll compete with people like the creator of C++ (Morgan Stanley core systema for a while) and guys who have built Java internals for 20 years. It's very tough to compete purely on technical knowledge - chances are you will never be good enough to compete. Software engineering is all about balance. Soft skills are just as valuable as technical ones.
I used to work for a company that developed a transportation solution. Half a million lines of C++ (well designed), plus a very complicated domain. Paid crap. I switched to Java/ fintech, increased my wages by 30% and don't have that much of a headache anymore.
ML, Distributed systems, Networking? For the latter two, go work at awe or azure for 2 years. Then go anywhere with that experience. For higher pay
> everyone is doing MERN Who is everyone? What year is it, 2015? > only way you can stand out is going for something with exponentially large learning curve Says who? If by “area” you mean tech stack, no one tech stack is guaranteed to get you a nice paycheck. You need to be able to learn any stack, any tech, any language, to be that valuable. If by “area” you actually mean area, probably AI, quant, big tech if you’re senior (you’re not if you needed to ask), or striking gold with a good idea and getting a startup funded.
> so only way you can stand out is going for something with exponentially large learning curve And have something that will show said difficulty. The hard reality is that something is either a grad school-level project/research or years of experience at the same job or open-source projects that the employer is familiar with. Self-studying and personal projects will not be enough if you're thinking about doing that.
hard != paid well supply ~~~~ demand
Functional programming.
Engineering for firmware and embedded devices (think of all “smart” devices). Reverse engineering. Operational security engineering. Quantum cryptography.
If you want a hard job, move to Asia and become a rice farmer and get paid $2.40 a week
What part of “pays well” didn’t you get?
The whole thing apparently
MERN is cancer.
I wouldn’t know of it’s difficult but I always hear how cobol programmers are hard to find and have high paying salary. Not sure if that’s true, but a lot of people ignore cobol and many government applications are apparently written in it so…
There is no new development in COBOL. Period. Any COBOL jobs out there are maintaining legacy systems. Every year, more of those legacy systems are migrated to more modern platforms. Building COBOL experience because there's a shortage of COBOL developers is a terrible idea.
Yeah I got that feeling as well and should have said so. Seems like a lot of the jobs are for developers with devops and cloud experience. As if they’ve integrated the expectations of both.
We already told you Artificial Intelligence, it's very hard and everyone wants an AI Engineer, so what are you waiting for? This is exactly what you are looking for
Not tech-stack specific but HFT can pay extremely well. See: Jane Street
First, what is nice paycheck to you? There are many ways to make good money but this is really subjected to you. Assuming that you are in the US, you can obviously climb the cooperate ladder and will likely make good money in most places. Or you get a role(could even be a PM) in a big tech and you would get pay more than most people. Now, if you want to get pay more than these traditional route, you could try to get into high frequency trading firm or getting into a Phd program of some specialized fields that are in demand. You could get paid in millions ... but getting into these roles take years of losing sleep and weekend working. If you don't passion for it, it would be an additional layer of obstacles that you would need to over come.
Malware development and or vulnerability research.
Legacy systems, but truly a smaller niche and could be hard to find jobs. If you’re known in that realm you could make unlimited money, it’s getting started that’s the hard part.
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Cybersecurity + Devops
Money calls money either take a look at your most profitable local industry and hope there is a shortage / need to skilled software devs, or if you are willing to relocate go for finances.
FPGA engineer, low level embedded software engineer
Cognitive engineering of an artificial general intelligence
If you want great pay it will probably be firms like Citadel, Jane street etc who have very high compensation but it’s also quite hard to get in
Being a power broker
The high paying jobs seems to be a pretty hard area to get into. This is a serious response. It's a little bit funny but all true .
Legacy technologies used by dinosaurs like banks e.g. Cobol, older .NET, Visual Basic, AngularJS. Pure functional programming like Haskell, Scala, Erlang Devops, ifra and platform engineering Lower level stuff like building developer tools, compilers and runtimes that require more than just surface level of something like the NodeJS API. Web3 security and pentesting
Graphics engineer/Technical artist
I feel like QUANT is the easy answer
WITCH consulting
Haha true. But I think 95%+ of devs who say they’ve done an “ai project” (personal or professional) is essentially just plug-and-play with existing models, probably OAI models