Well, the "programmers" in operating system and embedded domains are usually electrical engineers who learned how to write code, just enough to apply their domain knowledge. A programmer in the usual sense, that is someone graduated from pure software school, will have a hard time competing with those people.
I see that it could be true for many desktop and mobile phone applications but who should develop the operating systems, embedded applications and backends? It is a full time job just to learn all the programming languages, libraries, frameworks, standards, protocols and other related things.
