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Comment by skaevola | Hacker News Reader

What does systems-oriented mean in this sentence: "It’s the systems-oriented software engineer who understands concepts like power management, radio signals, network communication for small devices" ?

He's not talking about operating systems or embedded systems type stuff, right?

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Based on the context I would assume he means someone that has a deep understanding of which parts of the system can be powered down during certain events, can figure out what the system bandwidth requirements are going to be and how to balance that within the power constraints of the device. I have worked on SoCs (System on Chips) for a decade and a half and there is always at least one person who's soul responsibility it is to make sure all the parts of the system gel.

Systems-oriented software engineer, to me, means a developer who can venture into realms of the system not normally granted a lot of attention; someone who understands the code around the drivers doing all the work for some of the system component modules, for example, or who can formulate a good understanding of the behaviour of the system as a whole, sum total of its parts, and knows those parts well. Whereas a non-systems programmer sees a file-descriptor they can read from, a systems-programmer sees the driver, the cache management, the block and other layers underneath it all that make it work. i.e. not an Application developer, who assembles blocks, but rather a Systems developer, who makes blocks and destroys them at will.

Right, to me my first thought was "That's any embedded hardware/software engineer, not a special flavor of CS graduate".

But I think he means someone with the same skill set but a traditional CS background. Not that I quite see what that buys you.

I think the author IS talking about plain-old embedded systems engineers. Finding a competent one is apparently rather rare. From what I've heard, most firmware engineers are EEs with only a rudimentary grasp of software engineering practices and CS concepts.

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