
Ask HN: Are there any jobs yet in WebAssembly? - milky2028
When I Googled about it recently, I saw one post at Apple and maybe one at Google. But even then, WASM was just listed as a nice-to-have on top of other job specifications.
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detaro
I mean, webassembly bascially _is_ a technology on top of others, either being
a compile target for or an input to software that needs additional skills to
write.

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masukomi
is it "a technology on top of others"?

Would you say the same about LLVM? How is it any different? I've never heard
anyone say anything like "oh, well LLVM is a technology on top of ..." They're
both compile targets that run within a VM right?

Now, I'd agree that there aren't many jobs "in LLVM". There are just a handful
of folks working on LLVM compilers and VMs. For the same reason I wouldn't
expect any jobs "in WASM" any time soon, other than ones working on compilers
targeting the format or enabling other language runtimes to consume it.

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detaro
Well, LLVM is a specific project, so "working on LLVM" is a lot clearer than
"working on WebAssembly" (which would be spec work I guess).

And e.g. if we're talking about improving WebAssembly support in LLVM, I'd
primarily consider that an LLVM job: Familarity with LLVM, compilers, ... is
probably more important than knowing WebAssembly. If you work on a project
targeting WebAssembly in the end, knowing the source language (and if
targeting the browser, browser APIs) is probably the primary part.

I agree that "on top of others" wasn't the best wording. Another attempt at
describing what I meant: You're unlikely to be a "WebAssembly developer", in
the same way that you won't a be a "LLVM IR" developer, and "x86 assembly"
developers are rare. Way more commonly, knowing about those lower-level things
are an add-on to the primary label, e.g. useful things for a C++ developer to
know. I don't think WebAssembly is big enough that a specialist role of e.g.
"WebAssembly on $platform performance expert" would be a job description yet,
even if there's maybe already a few people being effectively that.

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QuadmasterXLII
Kitware is currently working to use WebAssembly to deliver our open source C++
medical image analysis library (ITK) in the browser as itk-js. By looking at
the commit history of that repo,
[https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/itk-
js/graphs/c...](https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/itk-
js/graphs/contributors) , you can see that no one at the company works full
time in WebAssembly, but a decent number of us touch on it fairly regularly.

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arenaninja
I've been wondering the same thing since I've been focusing on UI development
lately, but AFAIK most frontend development is currently Angular/React/Vue and
a bit of Svelte

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milky2028
All of these are pretty good points. It makes sense that there aren't many
jobs specifically focusing on WASM yet or that anyone working on it now is
still seen as a Front End Developer who just does the WASM stuff.

Thanks everyone!

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valand
These guys might have wasm related work.
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/wasmerio](https://www.linkedin.com/company/wasmerio)

