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Job prospects for new programers?

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Dartful Dodger:

--- Quote from: ark_ader on December 03, 2011, 08:35:51 pm ---With a surplus of coders on the job markets (most of them 3rd best) getting some coding done is so much easier than say five years ago.

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It is getting easier and easier to program. My company has three real programmers (I'm one of them) and the rest of the "programmers" just copy and paste the code we've already written and modify a few variables to work with their project.

To get hired at my company you need to get past 2 rounds. HR then a peer review.
To get selected by HR all you need is a good resume (or you're in a minority).
To get selected by your possible peers all you need a good personality (or you're easy on the eyes).

MonMotha:

--- Quote from: Vanguard on December 05, 2011, 04:01:32 pm ---All the ARM11 stuff we work on has a system MMU that handles all memory operations for all devices on the SOC (camera, modem, audio, network, GPU, etc..).   Since WinMobile 6.0, the flat memory model went away.   Our page tables have full protection bits.   I've not seen this type of support on ARM9 and earlier but it is on everything going forward.

Having knowledge in system architecture is by far the best way to maximize your returns as a programmer.   It can be a frustrating job though.   Dealing with a freshly born GPU or CPU and having to identify and work around hardware bugs is challenging work.    Taking a black box with 250 million transistors and bringing it to life for the first time with any number of unknown issues blocking progress isn't something everyone finds "fun".   

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ARM920T and ARM926EJ-S, some of the most common ARM9 cores, do have MMUs that should be supported by both WinCE and Linux kernels.  There's little reason not to use those facilities, though applications not using external memory (just using the memory integrated on the SoC) don't usually have room for even the most stripped down Linux kernel, let alone WinCE.

The issue is things like ARM Cortex-M3/M0, ARM7TDMI, etc. as well as many small MIPS SoCs, AVR32 UC3, and others.  These are readily powerful enough to run a minimal OS (something along the lines of FreeRTOS or various offerings from the likes of Green Hills, etc.) with several largely independent tasks, but everything shares the same memory space.  Some of these (mostly newer ones) do have an MPU you can adjust on task switch to prevent a runaway task from hosing the entire system.  You're still limited to a flat, non-remappable memory space (which can cause issues if you want to make lots of use of heap), but at least you can catch a runaway task stepping totally out of its assigned memory regions.

The DMA controllers, even on most PCs, usually are totally uninhibited, though: they can (and will) walk all over anything.  They're usually only programmed from supervisor mode, but some things like GPUs have to accept user direction and can cause all sorts of mayhem if the drivers miss a problem and configure the hardware to do something "bad".

FWIW, I like taking a black box with 250 million transistors and making it do useful things, though I prefer to put the chips on a board rather than putting software on the chips.  And yeah, I've been bit pretty hard by chip errata before.  Just part of the "fun" :)

Gray_Area:

--- Quote from: stu33 on December 05, 2011, 08:15:37 am ---Medical Records software and interoperability.  My company has been hiring new programmers lately.  With all the Obamacare regulations, the medical software field is really growing, and it's not going away anytime soon, either.  In my experience, it's really best to be able to learn older techs quickly.  Most of these places already have installations in place, and they're old.  Seriously old.  I code mostly in C/C++/Java.  I've done most of my database work with OLD libraries, like D-ISAM and C-Tree.  Lots of SQL in this field too.
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I remember in '90 when my cousin was starting to make a business in this industry, and vaguely recall his comments then about how open it was. Apparently 'they' got it going and then it stagnated.

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