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Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

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Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#11

Post by fendy3002 »

rgoulter wrote: post #6

I think an important part of tech is continuously learning. e.g. if you can't find jobs as a PHP developer, but you see there are many jobs for (say) NodeJS web development, or Golang API development, you may need to learn some things, but that can build upon how you did things with PHP. You still have a website still involves HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A website will still send HTTP requests (and receive responses).…

And there are many similarities of syntaxes between languages. For example javascript, php, C# and java all are c-like languages syntax wise.

The problem isn't on languages, it's on tooling. Docker, kubernetes, elasticsearch, git etc all have their own workflow and learning them isn't fast. Though with a solid basic programming, learning them is only a matter of time.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#13

Post by imakwana »

An investment analogy can be "Core & Explore" portfolio of skills with pareto distribution (say 80% Core, 20% Explore).

The core skills are those that have stood the test of time over multiple decades (OOP, FP, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems).

The "Explore" portfolio is essentially venture capital like bet on new tools/frameworks/languages. Most of the venture bets will fail, but few of them will have exponential returns where you will get ahead of the rest of the market or discover early that your side-project/prototype is very valuable in the market (e.g. ML, Cloud services, etc).

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#14

Post by karmakaze »

In my experience if you get to a senior+ dev level, specific tech doesn't matter much. My background was C, assembly, C++, Java and others with solid SQL for a good chunk of it. Most everything else is syntax/sugar on those and pretty transferable. There's typically two framework styles fat (rails/django) or thin (sinatra/flask). GC and static typing can be nice.

Front-end has more vertical tech e.g. mobile platforms and another framework flavour (Vue/React).

More advanced tools (NewSQL) and languages (F#, Elixir) would be great to use but don't often find opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#15

Post by sokoloff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #9
awildfivreld wrote: post #5

"time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_, and ignore if the market is going up or down, as it tends to always trend upwards. "timing the market" would then be saving up for a long time, then dumping it all in when you think it has hit its low. To transfer the analogy, it would be like shireboy describes. You would keep up with the news to see what technolog…

> "time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_, Why at regular intervals? “Time in the market” seems to imply the earlier, the better since obviously earlier means more time.

Two reasons: IMO primarily because it’s written to address people who are learning about the market and likely in the accumulation phase of their financial life. They are likely to have money to invest at regular intervals (and if they don’t have money to invest, knowing when/how they should is fairly academic).

Secondarily, if you say won a large cash lottery, you might choose to invest that over a series of spaced investments to ensure you got some kind of blended/average price rather than facing the market-timing dilemma of “should I invest this on Monday or wait until Friday?”

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#16

Post by lotsofpulp »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
lotsofpulp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_, Why at regular intervals? “Time in the market” seems to imply the earlier, the better since obviously earlier means more time.

Two reasons: IMO primarily because it’s written to address people who are learning about the market and likely in the accumulation phase of their financial life. They are likely to have money to invest at regular intervals (and if they don’t have money to invest, knowing when/how they should is fairly academic). Secondarily, if you say won a large cash lottery, you might choose to invest that over a series of spaced…

How is that not timing the market?

The premise of “time in the market > timing the market” is that all you know is that at a point sufficiently far in the future, the value will be higher.

Which means at any given point in time, if you have the ability to invest, and your goal is to achieve long term returns with low risk, then you simply invest as soon as you can. Since the longer the investment is held, the less volatile it should be. You are not trying to maximize returns, you are trying to minimize volatility.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#17

Post by sokoloff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #16
sokoloff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons: IMO primarily because it’s written to address people who are learning about the market and likely in the accumulation phase of their financial life. They are likely to have money to invest at regular intervals (and if they don’t have money to invest, knowing when/how they should is fairly academic). Secondarily, if you say won a large cash lottery, you might choose to invest that over a series of spaced…

How is that not timing the market? The premise of “time in the market > timing the market” is that all you know is that at a point sufficiently far in the future, the value will be higher. Which means at any given point in time, if you have the ability to invest, and your goal is to achieve long term returns with low risk, then you simply invest as soon as you can. Since the longer the investment is held, the less vo…

Timing the calendar is different from timing the market. I internalize the latter as “buying when you think the price is lower than it should be and/or selling when you think it’s higher than it should be”.

(I agree with your approach and do not make an effort to dollar-cost-average or otherwise smooth my investments over time. But I don’t think of a pre-defined calendar based approach as “timing the market”.)

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#18

Post by nsotelo »

I'm not sure it really works like this. Suppose you've spent 10 years becoming a master java developer, and now all the investment is going into python. You're going to better than the boot-campers after 1 week and a master developer after 3 months, whereas the others will still need years to catch up.

I think it's worth keeping a loose working knowledge of all the mainstream software in your field, but don't really go deep until you need it.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#19

Post by ralmidani »

karmakaze wrote: post #14

In my experience if you get to a senior+ dev level, specific tech doesn't matter much. My background was C, assembly, C++, Java and others with solid SQL for a good chunk of it. Most everything else is syntax/sugar on those and pretty transferable. There's typically two framework styles fat (rails/django) or thin (sinatra/flask). GC and static typing can be nice. Front-end has more vertical tech e.g. mobile platforms…

Regarding Elixir specifically, the situation is much more nuanced; I went to ElixirConf last month, and the impression I came away with was that most companies present, and most speakers representing their companies, were desperate to find Elixir devs. And most attendees who already knew some Elixir were not looking to move.

If there were a sudden event that caused a new army of developers to learn Elixir, such as a Harvard or MIT course switching to it, it might change this reality.

But for the time being, Elixir developers are in short supply in relation to demand, so we tend to be treated (and paid) well. Our interviews are probably less frivolous, as well, because companies can’t afford to miss an opportunity to hire folks who know Elixir (or can learn it easily) just because they can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard (https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768).

Timing-wise, this is probably the best time to get into Elixir, and get a head start before it reaches critical mass.

Lots of interesting companies are using it, the community is fantastic, salaries and dev satisfaction are among the highest in the industry (https://fossbytes.com/these-programming-languages-pay-highes...). And besides, it’s an amazing language and ecosystem in its own right.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#20

Post by ab_testing »

I think it depends on technology to technology. I know people who are still milking their Enterprise Java and Spring skills almost 20 years after they started. Now obviously they don’t work at FAANG but rather at smaller companies but the advantage is that they can spec out and complete the work much faster and don’t have to slog more than 20-30 hours a week.
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