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Comment by pickledcods | Hacker News Reader

Say you master this knowledge, how would you go around finding a fitting job?

I'm starting a new chapter in my life and find it impossible to find a position that matches the collection of abilities, and the rare ones available responded with excuses ranging from too old to too mediocre. It is so bad that I'm now looking into switching to education, specifically gifted youngster where my knowledge and insights might rub off, guide, inspire and motivate. But even that is proving to be difficult.

Background: I'm an 70ies wizz-kid, Europe (NL), have an ATW-800, 9 years computer science education including hardware and software, through bad college advice was dis-advised to take the academic path, OS-design (linux, medical, HPC) in 90ies, small single-board computers in 00ies, fractal logic and calculating with structures in 10ies. My handicap: I'm too shy to stand in a spotlight or in front of a camera.

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Finding someone willing to pay for properly efficient code means finding a place where that code runs a lot. Either because it's running on your data centers (faster=>lower energy cost) or because it's going to run on a lot of computers (browser engine).

I like the libraries that ship with toolchains for using this stuff. Anyone shipping silicon will have toolchain(s), either built in house or via consultancies.

Cutting cycles off integer divide is a waste of time for one application and a serious win if it's the integer divide the compiler injects into all applications.

Further from the machine you get language runtimes (e.g. libc, libm) then application libraries (blas, lapack, mpi) where it starts to merge with ML or HPC tooling.

It also saves battery on mobile.

I've been doing consulting for that kind of thing for running cost as fast as possible on "embedded" (raspberry pi-level) hw

It’s more than ‘where it runs a lot’ - it’s also where someone can make money by it being more efficient.

So for instance, JavaScript interpreter in a browser is meh unless the person doing the work is hired by someone who needs their SPA to run faster.

So a mega corp looking for someone with a lot of experience making their software more efficient (think a large operator like MS Azure , Google, AWS), especially if there are supply chain issues making it hard or expensive to scale up their existing hardware. Also high frequency trading where nano seconds matter.

Or older legacy systems (folks still using mainframes?) where the costs of switching to a new system in compliance and interoperability mean they’re trying to wring ever cycle out of the existing system.

In my experience, the kinds of use cases for this level of optimization tend to be in fields where computers are used as actual computing devices. So think physics, biology, etc. I'd guess most jobs in the HPC space would allow you to get pretty close to this kind of work in practice, although your job title might still just be 'software engineer' or whatever.

Located in .nl, the oil and gas industry surely has some work that benefits from these kinds of optimizations. ASML probably does enough simulation as well. I'd guess there are probably a handful of financial firms operating on these time scales. Outside of those, the various universities will have groups in this space. I doubt that's an inclusive list, just some areas where I'd expect to find heavily optimized code for specific hardware.

Not all knowledge you mastered could help you finding a job. But some of them will help you to become a better engineer.

I used to learn clarinet for several years when I was yong. And I learned to code a simple CPU core with VHDL and FPGA when I was in college. And now I’m writing C# in healthcare industry. I may never write such kind of experience in my resume. But that helps me when I write projects on waveform editing, or to understand what is “parallel”.

So I separate my knowledge for two part. One is something I need to get a job, the other is something I interest in. Which may helps you in future or not. But you enjoy the time in it.

As for this book, it is useless especially when you are writing some stupid web server in a programming language like Java or C#. But just my interest about optimization.

Amsterdam is good for options market making, most of the techniques in this book come up a lot in trading

If you're not fixated on this particular skill set but use it as your edge, then you will have a lot more options. You can find a company or a team that has a demanding problem to solve. Note the keyword is _problem_ instead of technology. You may not get to immediately apply your expertise, but you will spot plenty of opportunities fairly soon. Software engineers are really in an extraordinary time when many problems are screaming for efficient solutions and capable engineers.

Something that surprised me is that there apparently a lot more money in sustainability that I assumed. Large companies signing big checks. The market pressure is coming from long-term investors, government regulation, and a generally increasing awareness around sustainability issues.

It's a _very_ wild guess but there might be opportunities in that general area for a software engineer that has deep practical knowledge around performance.

There are plenty of trading companies in NL: Flow, Optiver, IMC - check them out

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