My experience has been the complete opposite. When I was in Uni I was required to take an assembly language course and was told it was foundational but I'd never use it in industry.

Straight out of Uni in 2001, I became an operating systems programmer bringing up a new platform and pretty much immediately started debugging C++ code almost exclusively in an asm debugger (it's what we had for an OS level debugger). I also started implementing capabilities provided by a hypervisor directly available via asm instruction because there wasn't a C construct for doing so).

After that I became a toolchain programmer (working mostly on new system libraries) and would write in C and Assembly language and debug mostly in Assembly language because, when you're working on system libraries and the toolchain for a new platform, you can't always trust the compiler, and the compiler can't always generate optimal code (or any code) based on the new instruction set. Oh, and you can't always trust the debugger either if it doesn't understand the instruction set.

While there I would work on 9 new platform bringups and would often need to stub in assembly language routines for capabilities that were in the architecture but not yet available in the toolchain. Other times, new system call routines, locking intrinsics, unwinders, exception handlers, and some optimized routines would require implementation in asm as well.

If you're only working on the non-platform part of an operating system, you might not need to learn assembly language, but if you touch platform code you will likely need to know it.

Sounds like fun experience to me. I guess grass is greener everywhere else but what are places that hire for a large number of such positions (and don't require much industry experience)? But I'm in Canada so that could be an issue...

I was recruited directly out of a feeder school (University) for this company after focusing my undergrad course selection on operating system topics.

Compared to twenty years ago, there are significantly fewer operating systems which means fewer companies have a need for this type of work. If you're looking to get into this work I'd suggest looking at Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Arm, and any Arm architecture licensee. It seems that the people with the most luck these days end up tinkering with Linux at university, do a Google Summer of Code project and score an internship with one of the above.

Thanks, looks like way off my projectile. But at least I can keep this as a hobby~

What if for a career switch? I work as a data eng but have no idea how to make the switch (looks like a huge leap indeed). I did start working on some personal projects but I don't think they are enough to prove. I actually don't know how many projects to prove.

I want to say apply to any job that seems interesting since some of the best programmers I've worked with on embedded systems came from desktop & web backgrounds because they had a good grasp of modern development techniques as opposed to "hack & fix."

But those were systems where we abstracted away as much of the hardware as we could so everyone could focus on "business logic." The hardware interface is the part that's hardest to debug, so we try to put as little as possible into those layers.

Unfortunately, it sounds like that's exactly where you want to be working :-(

Thanks. I understand it's kinda niche field nowadays. At least I can still pursue it as a hobby.