(1) people who know C are better programmers. I think (1) is generally true. I would be interested to hear someone explain why they think having low-level programming knowledge makes you a worse programmer than one without low-level knowledge.
This isn't related to the argument per se, but it's interesting to observe that website ninjas are making >$150k, whereas most low-level ninjas are making less. The reason is because most people want websites, and all of my SIMD knowledge becomes irrelevant in that case.
"Better programmer" is very hard to quantify. Whereas "makes more money, on average" is a solid metric.
I agree that it's hard to find low-level work with equivalent pay to web development/frontend/etc. I think this is a reason that the "learn to code" movement focuses on Javascript and Python rather than C.
From my limited experience, big companies (Google, Facebook, etc) are a good place to do low-level programming with good pay. Additionally, a lot of the programming in the financial industry (particularly high frequency trading) is very low-level work, and the pay is significantly better than the standard "Bay area web company".
This isn't related to the argument per se, but it's interesting to observe that website ninjas are making >$150k, whereas most low-level ninjas are making less. The reason is because most people want websites, and all of my SIMD knowledge becomes irrelevant in that case.
"Better programmer" is very hard to quantify. Whereas "makes more money, on average" is a solid metric.