Re: What software engineering jobs make the most money now?

From: Randy Howard (randyhoward_at_FOOverizonBAR.net)
Date: 08/07/04 

Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2004 23:23:25 GMT

In article <87ekmkgr9s.fsf@benpfaff.org>, blp@cs.stanford.edu says...
> Randy Howard <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> writes:
>
> [regarding low-level software development being outsourced to e.g. India]
>
> > Recent posts in this newsgroup and others imply that both students and
> > employees in several of those companies can not even *obtain*, much less
> > *afford* to buy modern textbooks on the few areas of this type of system
> > work that have information published on them.
>
> I'm not sure how much difference that should make. I've been
> doing a lot of hacking on very low-level stuff lately, e.g. IDE
> drivers, emulation of various kinds of hardware, etc., and
> there's not much need for books because you can find all of the
> info you need online.

While that may be true for released hardware, the game is considerably
different when both the hardware and the software are changing daily,
I.e. pre-production proto stages, particularly with first-generation
designs. Talk to anybody that's worked on early PCI-Express
implementations for horror stories, once the NDA binders come off.

Also, the really high-end equipment is complicated and often employs
solutions which are very involved, and not published, even informally
on the web, as they are often treated as trade secrets, not "howto"
documents. As you no doubt already know Ben, the knowledge to do the
really hard stuff can't be easily by just reading about it on the web, you
have to *do it*. I haven't seen a lot of source code examples floating
around for RAID controller firmware for example, or FC protocol analyzers,
to name a couple minor examples. 

-- 
Randy Howard
To reply, remove FOOBAR.

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