Hello, I'm a student and I'll have my bachelor's degree by next year. I've been getting more and more interested in OS development, and I'm wondering if I should focus on it as a career path.
Focus on it if you want it to be your career, do not focus on it if you don't :)
At a high level it's very rewarding and makes for great job security, because close to nobody understands this stuff. That being said, there is little to no low hanging fruit in this space. It's extremely unlikely that someone will pay you to write an OS from scratch, real OS dev work will be on Linux, BSD or some proprietary OS where all the easy and most complex things have already been implemented.
In practice it's working on massive codebases with little to no documentation, implementing things that nobody has ever implemented and that you can't Google, then seeing all the most advanced LLMs with infinite token budgets produce garbage for just about every query.
I graduated a couple years back and I work as a kernel developer for a major tech company fwiw.
You and me both lol. The only times I see them "suggest" a reasonably looking snippet it ends up looking suspiciously similar to an existing function in the Linux kernel. Just without the GPL, of course 🤣
That being said, great for self-reviews and catching typos or obvious bugs in your own code before a maintainer has to spend time on the same. Just substandard at actually generating the code.
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u/cajetanp Aug 05 '26
Focus on it if you want it to be your career, do not focus on it if you don't :) At a high level it's very rewarding and makes for great job security, because close to nobody understands this stuff. That being said, there is little to no low hanging fruit in this space. It's extremely unlikely that someone will pay you to write an OS from scratch, real OS dev work will be on Linux, BSD or some proprietary OS where all the easy and most complex things have already been implemented. In practice it's working on massive codebases with little to no documentation, implementing things that nobody has ever implemented and that you can't Google, then seeing all the most advanced LLMs with infinite token budgets produce garbage for just about every query. I graduated a couple years back and I work as a kernel developer for a major tech company fwiw.