Clarification

[bgits]

Hiring is hard, a lot of modern CS education is really bad, and it's so hard to find people who understand the modern computer stack from first principles.

Hiring for what is hard? Building hardware, software or both?

It generally seems people/teams are more productive operating at higher levels of abstraction. IE: Why write something in C when you can finish it 3x faster in python? Given how hardware continues to follow the historical trend of becoming faster and cheaper, from one perspective it makes sense CS programs are focusing less on the lower level because even if the code is not the most efficient, hardware is cheaper than developer time and for most modern development the end user won't notice.

Given your time constraints, perhaps doing a writeup on how you learned these first principles would be very helpful for others looking to learn, as the resources are out there it's really the learning process that could be a force multiplier.

[geohot]

I'm looking to hire generally smart people who understand the whole stack. Those are the people capable of pushing the envelope, not people who learned one abstraction layer as a trade skill.

That said, of course we use Linux and code in Python. This is an academic exercise.