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Comment by atlih | Hacker News Reader

I find web developers in general more knowledgeable. Sure they are not working in low level programming, but those that are working in low level programming often don't know what DNS, FTP or SQL is.

Remember that those who work in low level programming had nothing to do with writing the language or building the compilers. They just got a degree and started working.

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but those that are working in low level programming often don't know what DNS, FTP or SQL is

That's a very baffling statement that doesn't reflect any of my experiences (I don't think you realize just how big FTP is/was). How are you defining "low-level programmer" here?

Basically anything that has to do with non-web and non-mobile apps. The app for your nearest ATM machine for example.

Your definition is completely worthless, then. Someone writing Java EE apps is then a "low-level programmer", which is totally wrong.

In fact, ATMs these days more often than not have full operating systems like Windows CE with the software being a Java app that communicates over some standardized XML-based middleware to access ATM system and transaction mechanisms.

Not much left for low-level programmers to do then :)

Kernel hacking, drivers, virtualization, FPGAs/ASICs, compilers/linkers/toolchains, bootloaders, firmware, debuggers, databases, shells, process managers, etc. etc.

There's plenty. Generally if you don't have to worry too intimately about VMM semantics, you probably aren't doing low-level.

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