Its knowledge mainly, my company is covering tuition and I’ve always had a desire to understand computing “all the way down.” If the outcome would be that I’m still working similar jobs, I’d be alright with that. I commented on a different parent about what coursework I’m considering, maybe that would help me break into something lower level and not just be another backend job?
Super valuable advice. The program I’m considering has VLSI design, chip architecture, and FPGA work all at the graduate level. I don’t know if the school has fabs but it’s seemingly well known and well funded so maybe?
As a part of this degree I’ve also selected coursework that is more related to CS. I’m looking at a compilers class, OS class, and neural networks as well.
With a focus on FPGA do you think that’s broadly applicable and evenly distributed geographically? I am prepared to move for certain industries, like working in space technology
Space tech is yet another cool industry. It is most certainly localized in a small number of locales and competition for jobs is fierce.
As for FPGAs, the skills in that area are most in demand by companies producing advanced electronics, e.g. video, networking, some industrial and scientific processes.
I see BioTech / MedTech as being two very high potential areas. Of course, the manufacturers of such equipment are generally located in already highly industrialized areas.
This is exactly where I’m at with my CS career. I am tired of abstraction. I want to be able to strip it away and work at the lowest levels of the stack. I’ve worked in embedded real-time environments before and found working with the system constraints to be highly rewarding. Yes there are tools that can write and test code for us now, but it’s also true that someone still has to build the low level high performance stuff.
What opportunity do you see in the realm of atoms?
One huge opportunity is in the electrical energy space. With renewables our transmission systems and the control of those many resources is lagging. From control systems point of view having a small number of well controlled sources of energy, aka power stations, it was simpler to manage the load and distribution. Now we have millions of capricious generators of which hundreds are very large, e.g. wind farms and solar farms. Even with grid scale batteries it is like herding stray cats.
This was an amazing read, and frankly inspiring with regard to your final thoughts. I’ve yet to build anything substantial on the side but still searching for that idea
now I’m convinced that a certain senior engineer at a very well known tech company had this as an instruction manual. I’ve experienced each of these multiple times from the same person!
On my own though, I’m certainly guilty of the 100 round trips. I tend to mentally group nits and not spell out every one that I find
You: Have problems related to data, want to modernize your operations (no more clickops), want to build a mobile app, want to add AI to your product.
Me: 10 years of experience, previously at Amazon, currently an LLM research engineer. Expert in CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code through Terraform. Skilled in building AI-enabled application through the usage of RAG and agent-based workflows. Also have built many MVP style products with Flutter and .NET.
I can handle your Sagemaker MLOps, can help experiment with LLMs, and can build products with Flutter, or Ruby on Rails. Fullstack. I've helped one startup reach exit by building fitness tracker integration into their flutter app (https://fytfeed.com). I've tried to build several products myself with C#/.NET, Flutter, and Django
It may be time to finally learn it. I've standardized on Python, Clojure and C# of all languages (Julia for fun) but Rust may help me dive deeper into systems level problems.
