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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I remember in 1999 thinking "Damn! The world's moved on to Java and I'm still writing in C! I won't last much longer..." Then I got a job writing C code for those wireless credit card doohickies (a nasty mess of Z80s with crazy paging schemes to access 2mb of memory, but I digress).

A few years later I actually started working in Java and Python, and then iPhone came along and I was right back in C land again!

Then in 2016 I got a job writing in Go, which lasted 2 years - aaaaand now I'm back to writing C (and C++) again - 25 years after my C-career crisis.

It's not like I'm actively seeking C jobs - I'm a polyglot and can handle pretty much anything. But again and again these C jobs just keep coming out of the woodwork... And I can command premium salary because there just aren't many skilled C developers anymore.

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Perhaps a biased view but fter teaching students from colleges I feel that most who are "born in the high level" world float comfortably without needing to understand fundamentals (memory, OS interfaces, arch, drivers, crashes, ..).

As soon as something basic goes down or when you have unexpected dives into low level stuff, the fair weather pilots are suddenly out of their depth.

I started with C, eventually moved into business roles and honestly wasn't even that good a dev. But looking at the uncertainty ahead in the world from a climate point of view, I sometimes worry about the future of tech talent.

We are losing tech veterans at a high rate and gaining a lot of chatgpt devs. I once remember a stackoverflow outage from my dev days and a large part of team went on vacation in the second half as we were so used to asking and copying.

Any fragility to modern infra will make us fall so hard on our faces I fear and hope I am wrong.

It's been like this for a long time already.

I still remember a colleague complaining to me in 2001 about a crash they were having in the data entry app (written in Java) that was wreaking havoc in the bank's check clearing department. The stack trace would go to JNI, into a vendor's .so and then SIGSEGV with an address of 0. The trouble was, nobody knew anything below Java.

I tracked down the issue after examining the crash report over lunch for shits and giggles. It failed in memcpy because it was trying to copy a null pointer. I disassembled the vendor's .so and checked the offsets to see where the code was going, and it turned out that the fingerprint reader code would return a null if it failed to scan properly (and the library had no null check). The vendor refused to fix it, so I patched the .so with a few nops, an xor and a je to work around it.

Everyone looked at me like I was some kind of god who commanded the very chips themselves.

Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do...

"Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do..."

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Maybe now's the right time to start the cult of the machine wizards and secretly pass on your wisdom about disassemblers. I'm only half joking because reality already passed the point where regular people pray for the machine to respect their wishes. And make sure you price your Java exorcism correctly. I'd say a little church covered in gold is fair.

Instead of a church, how about 383k followers on YouTube? Joe Grand is flamboyantly that level of hacker, and that's the currency of today. In the GP's story theres no bitcoin wallet at the end of the rainbow, but that kind of knowledge is out there for those who look. It's even gamified at http://microcorruption.com. It won't be mainstream, but there's always going to be a culture of hackers that know how things actually work. the existence of stack overflow/ChatGPT programmers is the field widening, not the core shrinking.

Joe Grand and $3M of Bitcoin: https://youtu.be/o5IySpAkThg

>Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do...

The current generation of addy addicted highschoolers posting anticheat bypasses on unknowncheats will grow into the job market and take up the mantle.

"As soon as something basic goes down or when you have unexpected dives into low level stuff, the fair weather pilots are suddenly out of their depth."

Then they just jump jobs and get a 50% raise after enduring the "poor work environment" at their previous job.

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