I'm an Industrial Engineer by training with a deep background in software, but I find myself increasingly disillusioned by the current cloud-native saturation. While the market is flooded with AWS/DevOps experts managing abstractions, I'm interested in the "ground truth": the physical and low-level reality of data centers, medical infrastructure, and defense systems.

I'm currently digging into OSTEP (Remzi) and DDIA (Kleppmann) to bridge my industrial roots with modern systems engineering. I want to focus on bare-metal deployments, L2/L3 networking, and Linux at a molecular level (Kernel hardening, LVM, performance tuning), specifically for environments where the cloud isn't an option (air-gapped, high-stakes, or edge-heavy).

I have a few questions for the HN community:

   1. Is there a sustainable career path for engineers who prioritize the ATMOS layer (Physical/Kernel/Networking) over the Public Cloud? Do firms like Anduril, Palantir, or high-end industrial automation giants actually value the Physics + Software hybrid, or is it becoming too niche?

   2. How much does a deep understanding of thermodynamics, power integrity, and signal physics matter compared to the ability to write low-level firmware or C/Rust? Where is the real bottleneck in modern hard-tech infrastructure?

   3. For someone moving away from VMs and towards bare metal, what kind of scar tissue projects actually impress senior infrastructure leads? I'm currently building a resilient, air-gapped data pipeline on physical nodes (Intel NUCs) with manual kernel tuning and thermal monitoring in Rust. Is this the right direction?

   4. If OSTEP and DDIA are my baseline, what are the TIER-2 materials or real-world challenges I should be tackling to prove I can manage high-stakes infrastructure in a hospital or a remote deployment? Kubernetes?

I'm looking for the hard advice, the stuff that doesn't make it into AWS certifications. What does it take to be the person they send when there is no internet, no cloud, and the hardware must not fail?