>"Assembly language, interrupt handlers, race conditions, cache coherence," says Jude Miller, long-time system consultant and industry curmudgeon.
The funny thing about this is that the CS degree I got covered all of these to a fairly decent extent. I wasn't an expert on any of those topics when I graduated, but I had enough of a background working with them that I wasn't completely in over my head when I ran into all of that at work(I work on high-throughput, low-latency financial messaging APIs).
It's interesting work, but it's a very technical skillset, because you do need to understand all the various issues that can pop up.
The funny thing about this is that the CS degree I got covered all of these to a fairly decent extent. I wasn't an expert on any of those topics when I graduated, but I had enough of a background working with them that I wasn't completely in over my head when I ran into all of that at work(I work on high-throughput, low-latency financial messaging APIs).
It's interesting work, but it's a very technical skillset, because you do need to understand all the various issues that can pop up.