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Ask HN: Who is replenishing the Operating Systems talent pool?

14 points by alistproducer2 ↗ HN
I've been studying up on how OS's work and how to develop them . It appears to be a massive undertaking to even gain a basic proficiency in the subject.

Given the amount of effort involved, I'm curious who is taking the time to learn this dark art and is it enough folks to replenish the old heads as they die off in the coming years?

7 comments

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zerohp
University students are still studying it. They graduate and go to work for companies that develop operating systems.
stuffaandthings
At my school there was always a small group of students who went down the OS path in Computer Science. A lot of people stuck around til some fun C stuff but then stopped when it got to writing compilers, kernels, and entire OS's.

Seemed like a small niche that really got into it though. I have a few friends that went that route and seem pretty competent

percept
Perhaps new platforms also help drive this, such as the investment in mobile operating systems by a number of companies over the past ten years or so, and next IoT.
k__
Yes, I think the diversification of hardware platforms in the last years will bring us many new OS devs. Maybe even some try and tackle the old school PC platform ;)
Artlav
People who do it for fun?

Writing an OS [0] was one of my first programming projects, 17 years ago, and things were kind of revolving around it like planets around the sun ever since.

Naturally, it's not something you can earn any money out of, or something that can ever be practical. But it does allow you to learn a lot and shape your coding approaches.

As a result i tend to have a continuous idea of the whole stack of tech, from the app on the top, more or less down to the transistors below.

[0] http://orbides.org/aprom.php

wayn3
"Naturally, it's not something you can earn any money out of"

Says who? Ask any hedge fund manager how they beat the other funds to the exchange. Modded Linux Kernels (among many other reasons of course). Those guys are remunerated through the roof.

Don't assume something doesn't make money because its not built on top of rails.

The more expensive a computer, the more likely it is that it runs on a custom operating system written by really expensive operating syetem experts.