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With all this hype about CUDA, I have recently started looking into programming CUDA as a job as I love that kind of challenge, but to my dismay I found that these tasks are very niche. So it is not even that people are routinely writing new CUDA code. It's just that the current corpus is too big and comprehensive for alternatives to compete with.

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That and a massive amount of experience already out there on how to optimize for that particular architecture. NVidia has done well for itself on the back of four sequential very good bets coupled with dedication unmatched by any other vendor, both on the hardware and on the software side. It also was one of the few times that I didn't care if I ran the vendor supplied closed source stuff because it seemed to work just fine and I never had the feeling they would suddenly drop support for my platform.

Specialized skills can have a fairly small job market sometimes. I think a lot of CUDA code ends up being foundational as part of popular libraries, supporting tons of applications that never need to write a single line of CUDA themselves.

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