IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

alavaz

alavaz

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I've done some hacking around in various firmwares (usually for security cameras or UAS) and these days it seems like most of them run a linux kernel along with custom C programs.
 
Foler

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alavaz said:
I've done some hacking around in various firmwares (usually for security cameras or UAS) and these days it seems like most of them run a linux kernel along with custom C programs.
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Ya I mean people aren't writing in assembly most of the time thankfully. There's a number of RToS kernels out there that aren't Linux based. NuttX is pretty popular ATM and is posix/Ansi standards with unix-like API so if you know Unix ur good to go.
 
ShakyJake

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Sounds boring to be brutally honest. But, hey, if it floats your boat (and pays the bills) then all the power to you.
 
Noodleface

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I wrote UEFI firmware and "BIOS", people will give me shit if I say it was UEFI BIOS but that's what we called it so people knew what it was. I also wrote UEFI POST, as well as drivers. I've also written legacy BIOS and legacy drivers/oproms.

It is boring to some people, and to others it's awesome. It's probably because my degree is in computer engineering so I love low level stuff. When I interned at EMC I got an internship in the Firmware department and I went "ugh this is exactly like what we're learning in school, this is so boring." But I'm an aspie so it spoke to me. It's the one job I regret leaving because I enjoyed the work so much. It's not easy finding UEFI/firmware jobs around here, in my experience.

I have written some legacy BIOS in assembly and that's really boring. We had some assembly gurus on the team and I couldn't ever even hope to come close to that skillset. I did do a log of assembly level debugging though. Very cool stuff.

On my current work I'm taking a DSP course offered by UMass because they're trying to get more DSP engineers in the company. Pretty sure this will lead to really good opportunities. Really low level stuff with a lot of math
 
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alavaz

alavaz

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I've always been interested in low level computing. I find a lot of the higher level stuff requires more "artsy" thinking than mathematic thinking and I'm just not that great with (or interested in) it. I'm definitely more wozniak than jobs.
 
wormie

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I always imagine that embedded parallel shit like GPUs must be awesome to code.
 
Deathwing

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I don't miss having to remember what combination of bit flags 0xE2 represents.
 
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Deathwing

Deathwing

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Noodleface said:
Bit manipulation was my favorite part. I noticed new kids out of college seem to have no concept of it
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It's a neat concept and I still use it rarely in higher level languages. But it does not lend itself to readable code most of the time.
 
wormie

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Speaking of bit manipulation, I think everyone should read Hackers Delight at least once in their life.
 
Noodleface

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Deathwing said:
It's a neat concept and I still use it rarely in higher level languages. But it does not lend itself to readable code most of the time.
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Depends what you're doing but most engineers would have plenty of #define for the hex/bit values
 
Noodleface

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How is

C: 
#define SOME_REGISTER



...



read(SOME_REGISTER, buffer);

A code readibility issue?
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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I would happily throw that benign baby out with the bath water if meant to I could be rid of such evils as SOME_REGISTER actually preprocessing to a multiline platform-dependent function call that your debugger can't resolve.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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Or you use stuff like local, object, class, or even global(ugh) variables instead. Allowing preprocessing in your language is essentially kicking the can of worms down the road.
 
Neranja

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alavaz said:
I find a lot of the higher level stuff requires more "artsy" thinking than mathematic thinking
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It's not that the higher level stuff is more "artsy", it's just that most high level language jobs have migrated to languages and frameworks that promise to achieve goals with the least amount of work. All at the cost of really understanding what is happening at a low level. After three metric tons of libraries and abstractions and APIs you get: "An error has occured."

Programming has evolved into a "finish something quickly and iterate from that" model (fueled by the Buzzword du jour, like Agile, DevOps, Scrum), because obviously the customer doesn't even know what he wants. So pick something, we'll have to rewrite it anyways.
 
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alavaz

alavaz

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Preprocessing is just a way to save memory and was probably pretty cool when you only had like 16kb to work with.
 
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