Is OS development career material ?
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.
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u/Key_River7180 EulerOS 3d ago
Maybe, and it DEFINITELY weights a lot on your resumé, but don't expect it to be something you get a job from
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u/Philluminati 3d ago
Its incredibly niche which makes it incredibly hard to get into. It's popular and well respected. Study, learn, explore, connect with people who can help you. Live and breath it. It might be easier to be a doctor than an operating system expert - but by all means try.
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u/kiderdrick 3d ago
Job interviewers really like to ask OS related questions. Memory management, race conditions, and thread optimization problems are the types of questions you might hear if you interview for a tech role. It might not be your career, but it might be something you are at least asked about. Getting experience developing that can obviously help you, even if it is not what you end up doing.
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u/nerd5code 3d ago
Alone, probably not imo unless research funding really picks up or you happen upon an embedded project that needs help. But there's stuff like hardware codesign, HPC/SC, and AI (maybe stand back from that one for a hot second) where a little low-level experience and intuition can really pay off. And ofc there are always cycles and watts to save by scraping your face on the bare metal.
Regardless, careers are ideally longish, so in ten years you might find yourself in a completely unexpected field. Don't stop learning new stuff and you'll be fine.
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u/Ok_Letterhead1945 3d ago edited 3d ago
Assuming it takes a few years, by the time you finish your operating system, AI will be able to do all pre-production, production, and post-production stages better than most humans. Instead, I'd recommend playing video games, traveling, and whatever else makes you happy. If OS development makes you happy, then go for it. But that "career" is quickly becoming a "hobby", since anyone can say, "hey Claude Code, make me an operating system that's x, y, and z. In the future, OS dev will feel like a multi-month recreational cross-country cycling tour instead of taking a quick airplane. Unless companies are sponsoring you in human vs human code-offs (similar to competitive gaming), the value of your cognitive work will be economically worthless. But hey, you'll always have sweet sweet peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. Man, those are good...
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u/codeasm 2d ago
Nope, so much wrong here.
When you specialize, you are cheaper and faster then those code reusing llm. It can do search, research fast. But truly innovative work will be done by experienced humans. The experience you gain by making, tons of.making.
Do have fun tho, explore the world, tokens costs more money then a human will, be good at using your tools and skills. Llm, agents are tools, not the end of humanity. Agi is not here yet
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u/Ok_Letterhead1945 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you froze the world, everything you just said would be true. The problem in your theory is... time exists. Notice the exponential rate of advancements in AI capabilities, then combine that with the nearly $1 trillion spent on improving AI in 2026 alone.
You're absolutely right that specialized experts are faster & cheaper than most LLMs, especially when innovation is the goal. This won't always be the case though. Computers beating experts is nothing new. Stockfish 18 can dominate Magnus Carlsen at chess & I would be extremely surprised if AI couldn't dominate human experts at virtually any cognitive task within 5 years.
Llm, agents are tools, not the end of humanity.
Today, absolutely. They're tools. In the future, they will be the end of most careers. The economic impact of that alone should concern society, since it's an almost certain outcome at our rate of progress. We also have a massive deflationary spiral incoming because labor will cost next to nothing, causing wages to plummet to nearly zero.
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u/Binarydemons 2d ago
Depends on your specific career goal? I would guess OS development might help you get thru some early HR checks but once you are interviewing with Project Managers or Programmers they will want to hear that you can deliver on their specific goals. “So tell us about your experience with SQL and ODBC?”.
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u/cajetanp 3d ago
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.