alt Hacker NewsStill easy. You just have to learned different concepts. Someone in web needs to be familiar with databases, some protocols like HTTP, DNS, some basic Unix admin,.. Someone in low level kernel code will need to know about hardware architecture, operating system concepts, assembly,... But the coding skill stays the same mostly. You're still typing code, organizing files, and fiddling with build systems.
Different type of "coding skills" and different type of complexities make these two impossible to put into the same bucket of "still easy". You've probably never done the latter so you're under impression that it is easy. I assure you it is not. Grasping the concept of a new framework vs doing algorithmic and state of the art improvements are two totally different and incomparable things. In 30M population of software engineers around the globe there is only handful of those doing the latter, and there's a reason for it - it's much much more complicated.