practical reasons for learning assembly

I've been learning MIPS assembly and I'm wondering if there's any practical uses for it. Is there a lot of demand for people who write assembly these days? I've seen some job postings online looking for people to help write/debug embedded systems, but it doesn't seem like it's a very profitable skill to have compared to more high level stuff.

>>6
how embedded are you talking about? i have had zero occasion to actually write anything significant in assembly for any of the embedded work i've done. clever use of __attribute__((always_inline)) or __attribute__((flatten)) or whatever the equivalent is for your desired compiler and being knowledgeable of what the compiler will output for your C or SEPPLES has served to result in easier to read code that is just as optimal as the handwritten asm solution would have been. the only caveat being that most of the work i've done is on ARM and NIOS which are relatively easy to compile for compared shit like PIC.