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Comment by afr0ck | Hacker News Reader

Not so many employers. Very few places/teams in this world care about cache coherency or memory ordering in the go-lang runtime on ARMv9 CPUs. You can count them using one hand fingers. The entry barrier is also too high; you need too many years of serious CS education, usually a PhD. And then find a place at Google or Meta Kernel/Compiler teams, which is obviously super competitive.

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> The entry barrier is also too high; you need too many years of serious CS education, usually a PhD.

School taught me none of that(the opposite with more of a focus on big-o and ignore the constants), all the good systems engineers I know either learned it on the job or were self taught.

It certainly requires a lot more skill and patience than web development. I don't think you need an graduate degree, but i think in fields that are time consuming and complex the graduate study experience is generally helpful. Ofc there are plenty of people without the degrees who have the skill and patience.

Definitely not just one hand (ex: HFT), but perhaps you can count them using 3-4 hands. The nature of most compiler work is that you're pushing the boundary of what's been done, which in academia is almost exclusively done by the top 1% researchers. And HFT is obviously winner take all, which further favors top performers.

A PhD is definitely not required to work on this kind of stuff.

But maybe it is to get hired ?

Definitely not.

> Very few places/teams in this world care about cache coherency or memory ordering

A lot of HFT shops definitely care about those things.

I've been employed for a variable mix of system design and low level performance work my whole career... except for Google. There are definitely more than five firms that would pay reasonably well for my expertise, and my PhD was in mathematical optimisation.

> There are definitely more than five firms that would pay reasonably well for my expertise

There are definitely more than five firms that would pay reasonably well for an ex-Googler with a "whole career" and a PhD, yes. The barrier to entry is too high for the rest of us.

Google and Meta certainly aren't the only people employing compiler engineers. Even if other compiler users outsource everything to consulting companies like AdaCore, well, that's where they are.

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