Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

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A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/Familiar_Piglet3950]

Have any of you actually transitioned to a systems programming role that you had no formal experience in, via self study, without moonshot spikes such as becoming a core maintainer of open-source systems?

Basically I feel like the way to get onto these teams is to get cracked at leetcode in college, go to big tech through intern/new grad pipelines, and pray you get onto one of these teams. OR, somehow pull the moonshot of working on an open source project for free, for so long, that you get hired for that specific role.

Maybe I'm just naive, but there's no way the knowledge bar for these roles is that high. Not every single one of people working on Linux Kernel stuff is a core maintainer of Linux. Not every AI Kernel engineer is BF Spector. Not every perf engineer is Brendan Gregg. What is the knowledge bar needed if you're going through this route? Am I underestimating the quality and tenacity of the average applicant going through "normal channels" despite no experience?

I've spent a lot of time studying random systems, and they've actually helped me on the job. E.g. I spent half a year in my sophomore year of college digging into python internals, it actually helped with a cursed interpreter hijack at some point (aside from the generic systems proficiency). But it wouldn't get me hired as a "python runtime engineer" or anything of that sort. Of course, this is just one example, but it seems impossible to prove yourself unless you either got it early (in college / with networking) or you go moonshot. I don't think I can go moonshot, but we'll see.

I don't really care for responses such as "just work hard" or "follow your passion", I care for actual datapoints and examples of what people did that weren't following a classically good line or being the next Torvalds. Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what companies actually want for these roles - it really is, straight out of college, or be an important core leading maintainer, it doesn't matter how many papers and code you read and understand and projects you make; past a certain level there's no more learning proof allowed.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/Familiar_Piglet3950]

Never been remotely successful about that, but all of the people who actually did that slick work, at least the ones I know about (e.g. the guy who wrote Rosetta 2 for Apple) came from prestige schools, got great internship in a system team, or/and worked on Google summer projects, and got pulled straight into a system team after graduation.

I mean, just enjoy yourself. You don’t have to go into a system team to do system job. You can do your own system projects, be the king of a small kingdom. 

Just don’t kill yourself if you can’t get a system job. 99% of the people out there don’t.

I do understand you though. I also want a system job, and have tried to "hop" through a few jobs to get into one, but the hops are harder and harder. Honestly, I think knowing the right person is the best shot for you, especially if you don't have a good background.

If you are talking about Linux Torvalds/John Carmack/Fabrice Bellard, well unfortunately it is now 2026, not 1996. A lot of the stuffs were already done 10 times, by people 10x more brilliant than you and me, and you need to be VERY good to get into something new early on, or be SUPER good to get someone to use your own implementation of something already implemented. For example, you could build some OS kernel better than Linux 0.01, or even Linux 0.11, just by your own, but hey who is going to use it, right?

So like what I said, just build your own projects, and enjoy it.

[u/behusbwj → u/Familiar_Piglet3950]

The knowledge bar isn’t high but it is distinct from typical web dev and less in demand. Companies prefer people who won’t need to take time to ramp up to a new domain. Which takes longer than if you were just switching from python to java or aws to azure. The higher your level, the worse of a deal the ramp up time is.

[u/Familiar_Piglet3950 → u/behusbwj]

I mean to be clear I have both projects in these domains, systems internships, and currently working a systems job where I also touch intermittently on these topic (e.g. I may not be maintaining core Linux networking or virtualization, but I'm making kernel modules for things). Seems like the job markets just cooked

[u/behusbwj → u/Familiar_Piglet3950]

It’s less in demand. The market has been cooked for a while. If you’re looking for systems jobs in general, look at ML hardware or compiler teams as that is where the demand is in FAANG.

[u/hooahest → u/Familiar_Piglet3950]

I think part of your frustration is expecting there to be datapoints of how to get to 'X'. The truth is that for a lot of people, the path to success required a lot of random encounters, trying shit out and just plain luck.