[tiu]

The comments are wildly fragmented in this thread. I agree with @torginus, the article has less and less of anything useful to people that want to get into compilers.

Anyways, the "Who .. hires compiler engineer?" section is fairly vague in my opinion, so: AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Google definitely hire for compiler positions. These hire fairly 'in-open' so probably the best bets all around. Aside from this, Jane Street and Bloomberg also do hire at the peak tier but for that certain language. The off beat options are: Qualcomm, Modular, Amazon (AWS) and ARM. Also see, https://mgaudet.github.io/CompilerJobs/

I seriously attempted getting into compilers last year before realising it is not for me but during those times it felt like people who want to be compiler devs are much much more in number compared to jobs that exist (yes exist, not vacant).

The common way to get going is to do LLVM. Making a compiler is great and all but too many people exist with a lox interpreter-compiler or something taken from the two Go books. Contributing to LLVM (or friends like Carbon, Swift, Rust) or atleast some usage experience is the way. The other side of this is doing GNU GCC and friends but I have seen like only one opening that mentions this way as being relevant. University level courses are rarely of any use.

Lastly, LLVM meetups/conferences are fairly common at most tech hubs and usually have a jobs section listing all requirements.

A few resources since I already made this comment too long (sorry!):

[0]: https://bernsteinbear.com/pl-resources/ [1]: https://lowlevelbits.org/how-to-learn-compilers-llvm-edition... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/@compilers/videos

[wiseowise]

> Making a compiler is great and all but too many people exist with a lox interpreter-compiler or something taken from the two Go books

Damn, you don’t hold back, do you?

[vidarh]

It's not that it's bad that people have written a compiler. It's that having written a simple one isn't a very useful indicator.

[mattgreenrocks]

Good synopsis! I enjoyed my time doing some compiler-type work in the past, but there are so few job openings that it can feel quite cramped after awhile, especially without great experience/credentials.

Definitely worth some self-study, however, if only for the healing effect of being exposed to a domain where the culture is largely one of quality instead of...everything except that. :)

[doix]

Semiconductor companies developing DSPs also likely hire them. My first job was writing an LLVM backend for a DSP.

Looking through the domains in the LLVM mailing list or the git commits should get you a longer list of "off beat" options.

[MatejKafka]

Microsoft also has many engineers working on compilers, with open positions - MSVC, C#, F#, CLR, rustc and other projects.

[criemen]

> but for that certain language

What do you mean by that?

[roarcher]

I assume they mean those firms hire compiler engineers to work on the specific languages they use. Jane Street famously uses OCaml for pretty much everything. Not sure about Bloomberg, though a quick search shows that they have Bloomberg Query Language and Bloomberg Scripting Language, both proprietary.