I currently work doing the typical line of business web app development and I'm so disallusioned with it. Web development (and really business app development period) just bores me and I feel like I'm just doing different variations of the same thing.<p>I've always been interested, as a hobby in doing more low level type stuff. Think OS development, device driver development, firmware etc., but I don't think there's really any market demand for those type developers anymore and I imagine it would be extremely competitive (especially as I have no formal education)<p>Is there any real way to break into this field? I'd be willing to go back to school and such, I just doubt the existence of such jobs
<a href="https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs216/guides/x86.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs216/guides/x86.html</a><p><a href="https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page</a><p>There, all for free on the web no need to go back to school.<p>As for the type of work; most of it is writing the 1000th driver, making sure some mainframe doesn't keel over on a new version.<p>Also even the lower level stuff often escape to higher level languages after initial setup.<p>You'd still be writing code to make the hardware do stuff, just more work to achieve the same. So it might not be that exciting after a while.
If you'd be okay with low-level development on platforms other than typical desktop computers, there's a lot to do in aerospace-related fields. In my observation, you would probably be expected to have a bachelor's degree in some related subject (CS, math, physics, electrical engineering, etc.), but for an entry-level job they wouldn't expect actual low-level experience. Good knowledge of C or C++ in general would help.