That's one of the many many reasons I miss my dad so much. He went straight from MIT to GenRad circa 1970. I didn't start doing software till 1998, but we had some years of overlap -- and it was profoundly gratifying to connect w/ him on engineering topics. The learning was even bidirectional tho I'm sure I got more out of our pseudo-professional interactions than he did. Sigh. I really miss him.

I worked on compilers and tools starting in 1981. Proprietary compiler technology has disappeared over the decades and the development tools/language/process/compute have changed considerably. But the skills and role of a compiler developer seem similar, although maybe it just means this sub-field of software has matured.