Curious as to what kind of jobs there are out there - I know some pretty basic ones but I am interested in jobs you don't hear about often.

Especially interested if there are jobs out there that work primarily in lower level languages, namely assembly and C. And how does one get into those jobs etc.

I know the field is pretty wide but my view is still pretty narrow.

To get in to lower level stuff like what you want, you want to start studying up as an Electrical Engineer with an emphasis on Embedded design.

Prove that you have the skill (a github repo with some code, maybe submit some fixes to an open source project), then let the job look for you, not the other way around.

originally was going to but ended up in CS because I felt like I could do more with a cs background.

Another question:

When you want to help an open source project, what is the general plan of attack? Do you first download the software (if it exists), run it, and see if there is something you want to add, then check the source code out? Or do you check the source code out first then run it?

I have checked some open source projects out lately and they are so huge and massive that someone like me has no idea where to even begin, let alone have understanding of what is going on.

Is it something you have to study for awhile before you tackle it?

That depends on the project. Usually, the best idea is to improve something you already use, so that you have at least basic knowledge of the project.

when you say use, do you mean like utilize or like something you yourself created/helped create?

my coworker wrote some python scripts for his itunes to do something. not sure on the details since i dont use itunes. he posted it on a forum somewhere since other people were talking about how they wished those features were available, then someone started an open source project with his code. after that, other people started committing a lot of shit into it. coworker doesn't like any of that, so he just uses his original code lol. but you can try that idea. look around forums for people making custom scripts then turn them into an open source project

or if you want an idea, go look into TOra. it's an IDE for sql. i tried it briefly, but the row heights are fixed in size. considering that i use 2-3x the normal font size, that means i only see the top 1/4 of every character in the results set. not very usable for me. so go download it, adjust the row height size, and BAM you contributed to open source projects and made me happy at the same time

haha those are the kinds of things I would like to do. Take stuff and make modifications to it. I just want to make sure I don't mess everything up when I do it.....I know the OOP model makes it so that it is harder for you to screw everything up, but don't you need intricate knowledge of how all the functions interact etc before you go making changes to source code?

like modifying a field value or something small won't require much but if you want to add new utility or something.

This post was edited by Eep on Jan 28 2013 01:09am

The layer of work you want to do determines the language you program in... not the other way around.

one of the professors I have had twice now is a big compilers guy, I am kind of interested in that field. How you translate high level code into lower level code then ultimately machine code seems pretty cool. Are the big languages out there (java, c++ etc) done by corporations or just anonymous groups of individuals, like giant open source projects?