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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”?

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think we're disagreeing. the fact that math doesn't change is exactly why I'm saying it won't go obsolete

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

#32
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

Sales is the lowest risk job tech related skill I know of; it works even if we were hit by an apocalypse and had no electricity. In all likelihood, we'll still be making tools and selling those tools. It helps you to think in the problem/business domain too. So you're not simply learning PHP to build a website, you're doing it to say, help people find hotels.

It works on your resume, it works for job searching, it helps with getting promotions (proving yourself useful), and it works with landing a higher salary without negotiation. You still can't sell crap. So you need a good product (i.e. yourself, your skill) worth selling. But it complements any other skill you have.

There's also communication skill in general. How to refine ideas into denser, cleaner formats that people and AI can understand. This works for sales, and it works for code.

Tech-wise, I can't say. The nature of tech is that it's very high risk. If you've had a look at how GPT-3 is engineered [1], it makes you question whether algorithms and OO will be a useful skill in the future. Sam Altman expects us to hit AGI within 2025 [2]. He's probably being a little optimistic, like every other programmer, so let's double the estimate and say we have until 2030. Codex itself scored #96 when pitted against 9000+ humans in a coding challenge [3]. So whatever you pick, it should be fairly AI-proof.

Data will be around, and anything that deals with data will be helpful. Even if you could tell AI to do whatever, it has to pull data from somewhere. Spreadsheets are great. Databases will be around for a long time. The top 3 most used DBs or so use some variation of SQL.

There will also need to be some kind of front end for data for people (and even AI) to use. Low/no-code has been around forever but there's always a domain it can't solve. Something specialist like Shopify, Magento, WordPress that solves a problem millions of people have. If you want something that combos well with higher risk work, you can learn UI/UX.

Again, low risk, low returns. The absolute lowest risk is food. Everyone needs to eat. Farming and cooking will keep you from starving, but probably won't take you much higher than that.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#prompts-as-programming [2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1081584255510155264 [3] https://challenge.openai.com/codex/leaderboard

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

#33

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…

Are they using Phoenix framework? They should hire Ruby/Rails engineers interested in working with Elixir and invest in onboarding.
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