I've always felt attracted by low-level systems and I'm currently one of many students in Comp. Sci. For the moment all by love goes to all kinds of bare-metal stuff, optimization tricks etc. I'd like to go all the way through it but being about more abstracted development (although the term looks unproper to me, since being able to grasp a machine's ways is a valuable effort of abstraction itself) seems like what is and will be expected of me.

So I'm asking : career-wise, are the optimization ghettos (video games, embedded systems, critical systems etc.) all that one could expected when refusing to code and manage projects around buzz-words or is there actual innovation / change and a shiny future to come for bit nerds ?