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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”?

#21

Post by saltcured »

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…

Even more, timing the market would be like going to school or taking a "gap year" because you don't think it's the right time to put your effort into the job market. Timing is when to put your money/effort into the market, not which fund/job to pour your attention into.

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

#22

Post by cultofmetatron »

muzani wrote: post #3

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns. Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late. Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but matu…

> You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns.

This is why I started as a javascript programmer. These days I code almost exclusively in elixir but that wastn't before spending. lot of time learning elixir on the side while nodejs and react paid my bills.

My current big bet is rust and more math heavy stuff like ML and graphics which don't go obsolete so fast

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

#23

Post by brian_spiering »

I think about technical skill development as a diverse portfolio. I spend a majority of learning budget on fundamentals, mostly overlearning core knowledge and skills. I spend a small amount of my learning budget on specific techniques, tools, and packages that currently popular. A very small fraction of my learning budget is spent on high risk / high reward elements.

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

#24

Post by redisman »

nsotelo wrote: post #18

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…

People who have only used one language way overestimate the importance of having a decade of experience in one language and way overestimate the amount of time it’ll take them to be production-ready productive in a new language.

Syntax is easy and learning a new approach to language design is a great learning experience. You’ll still transfer most of the good parts over but you’ll also learn that maybe some things you’re used to can be made simpler.

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

#25

Post by atom_arranger »

I guess the market analogy would be that you want to buy into an index. So if you’re invested in PHP but you see over 20% of jobs say React it might be time to diversify a bit into React.

This leaves out that diversifying one’s tech skills isn’t as easy as diversifying a portfolio though. You could do a React side project, but it won’t be considered as highly as a full time job. I guess that’s the difference between adding a bit to your portfolio vs. going all in.

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

#26

Post by redisman »

ralmidani wrote: post #19
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…

If they’re having such a hard time, maybe they should spend a month teaching solid engineers Elixir when they on-board? The erlang family would be intuitive and fun to learn for any distributed systems engineers.

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

#27

Post by Chyzwar »

That only natural for people that are not interested in technology or programming itself. People that are interested in new technology and keep learning new things will become more successful as IC and have more opportunities. If you are lucky, and you start with something that is popular long term like Java, you can find decades of stable employment in big corporations. If you are unlucky and start with PHP/Perl you either switch stack or you will stuck in low paying jobs maintaining legacy apps. Programming is less forgiving than other industries, as there are more fundamental changes over years. On the other side, huge demand make it easy to find and change job. You could make AWS certificate and some JS/Python/go training, update LinkedIn profile and wait for offers to flood in. In less than 1 month effort you could rebrand yourself and find jobs in new stack.

There is good satire of the stone to Bronze Age transition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHGafC7zOUE

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

#28

Post by ipaddr »

What if you love working with php and when you start working in other languages you start noticing shortcomings that have been solved in php?

Let's say you wanted to jump into golang. It is easy enough to learn but you are forced into structuring your app a certain way. You lose some joy you had with php. How do you deal with those feelings?

Historically it was widely believed on here that php lost the race to Ruby/rails but fast forward and Ruby has grown out of fashion and a php developer is more employable.

React has the most job postings but most of them are frontend jobs. Comparing php to node jobs is probably a better match for a backend developer.

Most jobs are trending for python this year. Different types of companies use python. Typical startups may use it as a replacement for php but others may be more interested in unlocking ml. That complicates that stack.

One thing is to consider is culture . Moving from php into a different stack usually means a different culture. Chances of bigger teams, daily standups.. bigger orgs.

Let's say you decide to switch to React how would you leverage 20 years of php experience into a React position?

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

#29

Post by dankoncs »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #22
muzani wrote: post #3

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns. Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late. Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but matu…

> You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns. This is why I started as a javascript programmer. These days I code almost exclusively in elixir but that wastn't before spending. lot of time learning elixir on the side while nodejs and react paid my bills. My current big bet is rust and more math heavy stuff like ML and graphics which don't go obsol…

Out of curiosity, why? Perspective projection is based off of an old insight from hundreds of years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera

Projective geometry and the perspective projection matrix (extrinsic and intrinsic parameters of your modeled camera) is basically the "mathified" version of that. Or just "perspective drawing", as artists used it for 100+ years by now.

In my opinion, computer graphics is basically applied math (or linear algebra). (You even don't need linear algebra or matrices to render stuff on the screen, but it will be painful to keep track of what's going on.)

Math hardly dies off, it seems. Maybe some methods change. Like calculating results by using some geometry and measuring its length.

However, unless we don't have any need for projecting something from 3D (world/scene) to 2D (image, monitor, photo, photosensitive sheet, ...), I think we can count on it for a long time.

What changes might be some algorithms. Earlier, we used the "edge walking" algorithm to fill out triangles. Now, we use edge equations that tell you whether an image point is inside a triangle or not. But they do essentially the same, namely, filling out a triangle.

Also, things like the Phong model may stick as well.

There are other methodologies, that are basically still based off of the pinhole camera model. In ray tracing, you shoot rays into the scene and check whether they intersect an object. If it intersects, then you color that pixel with the intersected object's defined color. Otherwise, you leave it out and move on pixel by pixel. So the shooting of the rays from the camera to the scene is basically the reversal of the pinhole camera where light enters the hole and "colors" a photosensitive sheet of paper.

At least this is my understanding of it.

Just learn math, math, math, and you will be fine. Math is the lingua franca for engineering and science, so learn it and understand the concepts from those other fields/branches.

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

#30

Post by dankoncs »

muzani wrote: post #10
brailsafe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late But what if that is the case, and also there aren't many other options because the tech reached a critical mass. Do you try and catch up, or do you quit, or somewhere in the middle? For example, I don't really have much React…

Like other investments, it's good to check whether it's overpriced or underpriced. Supply and demand will always change, and so will the value. One hint of oversupply is when everyone does it. I don't mean there's a lot of jobs, but when your farmer uncle is telling you to learn React the same way they'd tell you to go to law school or buy Bitcoin. A hint of a bubble is when it's expensive and people try to sell it o…

I don't want to derail the parent thread, so let me ask you: what job skills are "low risk" for you? Can you give a couple of examples, please?

Thank you! :)

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