Comment by CrispinS

14 days ago

The thing I love about blog posts like these is how it reminds me that the tech world is a vast ocean that encompasses so many disciplines; it's not all full stack web development.

Related: I did not understand 95% of what she wrote.

25 comments

CrispinS

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pjc50  13 days ago

On some of my cover letters I wrote "full stack from the transistors upwards", because at one point or another I have shipped code in:

- IC design software (at a startup bought by Cadence)

- an IC (contract out of Dallas semi)

- FPGA HFT acceleration

- fixing some OS drivers for Windows CE

- finding a compiler bug

- various bits of embedded firmware in C and assembly for various platforms

- debugging with a scope

- desktop applications

- a web server (defunct ZWS)

- web apps (Perl. Long time ago)

Somehow I've never written a react app.

  • elevation  10 days ago

    When I first came to HN, I didn't know what `hn`, `pg`, or other initialisms meant. But I saw people boasting in the new vocabulary of "full stack developer." And I assumed that if companies loved "javascript down to redis" that they would really love that I could do front end all the way down to embedded development. Think of the problems all my full stack knowledge could solve!

    Never got an offer through "who's hiring" though.

tucnak  14 days ago

I wrote here a couple days ago: "For a Hacker News degenerate, everything in the world revolves around bean-counting B2B SaaS CRUD crapps, but it doesn't mean it's all there is to the world, right?"

  • mcny  14 days ago

    I didn't even know that 180nm was still a thing but clearly it is because apparently the cost difference is like USD 100M for 180nm vs USD 10B or more for the latest tech?

    Is it true that we will likely have these 180nm chips for things like light bulbs for the foreseeable future?

    • caisley  13 days ago

      Yes, actually 180 nm still represents a sizable amount of the market, in terms of volume! In more niche applications where chips contain lots of analog functionlity, you can still find plenty of designs being done in 180, 130, 110, and 65 nm. Most corporate designs don't disclose this, but I'd venture to guess the majority of integrated circuits in your home are made on these larger "process nodes". I work in 65nm and 130nm, for example. Free to ask if you want to know more!

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    • random_duck  13 days ago

      More thank light bulbs. As you have correctly pointed it out, its a matter of economics: 180nm is CHEAP! So a lot more things become economically viable, think of all the weird specialized ASICs that used to be to expensive to build.

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    • RetroTechie  10 days ago

      That's what is expected to finally kill Moore's law: the economics. At some point it'll still be technically possible to fabricate smaller IC structures, stack more layers etc, but the tech to do so (and fabs to do it at scale) will be costly enough that it's just not worth it.

      The other point is of course a next-gen fab first needs to be built, and get those yields up. While previous-gen fab already exists - with all the fine-tuning already done & kinks ironed out. Not to mention maaanny applications simply don't need complex ICs (typical 32bit uC comes to mind, but even 8bit ones are still around).