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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

I have a path to avoid: embedded programming. Its low level c and being increasingly marginalized due to moores law. Its a field dominated by accidental complexity and wheel reinvention on its path to irrelevance.

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I could see C replaced with something like Rust, but I don't see it disappearing just because hardware gets faster. Companies will just make devices smaller, and it makes sense to write things in C once if that means everyone gets a faster experience. However, I sure don't want to maintain all that code!

I am paid to work at a higher level (Go, PHP and JS) I take any opportunity to write a little C, in fact I would say that I romanticize the chance, the challenge is great.

Are you currently in the embedded field, is it your experience that it is getting phased out?

Yes, I am. I made the mistake of equivocating hard, complex == valuable. Classic engineering mistake. Higher level languages, in the end, will always be in more demand than lower level ones because those levels of abstraction allow for newer possibilities. New possibilities lead to new money lead to better career paths. There will always be a need to set up registers and clocks, but once that's done by 1 or 2 programmers, the real work begins. The intentions/vision of the application come into focus, and, in the end, reap the rewards. In short, embedded is an increasingly automated dead-end; the smart skill investment is moving up the stack.

> embedded is an increasingly automated dead-end

as someone who's new in the industry and interested in embedded, what do you mean exactly? who is automating it and making it a dead-end?

I mean that a lot of low-level setup for embedded is done by tools now; for instance, Freescale has a set of design tools that let you design peripheral drivers by picking options from a pull-down list rather than writing code directly. Embedded is bottom-of-the-stack coding that is very repetitive. By all means, if you are interested, study low level programming. It's good for any developer to know those things, but in terms of career growth its probably better to develop higher level programming skills to rest on. Buy a beaglebone board to hack embedded stuff but don't invest your core skills there.

Thanks for the tip, I'll be wary about going down that route then!

No prob, please do!

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