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Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

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31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#31
Definitely adding generative AI clients on my portfolio, then just using the latest tech I like. I don't take side gigs unless they're AI, Rust or solid.js.

The focus is still on making products and live off them though, more than staying employable.

Staying employable is a nice side effect of training the "building products" muscle.

I don't think it will be too soon but at some point work done by humans will lose any meaning and we'll just divide in people with income/value generating assets and people without.

Better be rich by that point.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#32

Stop following the crowd. Where the crowd is, there are lots of people after your job, and if we're honest, probably better than you. I've had one job my entire career (31 years and counting.) It's very niche tech. I'm good at it. There are maybe 10 other people in the world who can do what I do. And they're all overworked. The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.

> The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.

disagree. fewer jobs. less turnover. like yourself - 3 decades.

better go for the next big thing. whether AI, VR or something.

long as it has a barrier to entry. even just complexity.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#33

Not writing JavaScript for money ever again. I switched careers. Now all future jobs will either be in management or require certifications or someone else more naive can have it. My solution in general terms is to go where competence isn’t ambiguous.

Or ubiquitous. When you are selling a skill that is as common as the ability to write JavaScript, then you aren't selling much, and you're very replaceable. Learning a very niche skill is harder. Finding jobs with very niche skills is harder. But once you've done that you become very hard yo replace. (Your job might go away, but there's seldom outright replacement. ) Plus of course some protection from offshoring.

Agree on the principle - but management is another very replaceable skill.

It may protect you from offshoring because the stakeholders don't want to talk with people in third world countries and want to zoom with someone in a nice office paying 2k rent per month for a studio.

It won't save you from AI. We jokingly built a chatbot to write in the style of our product manager and engineering manager and it's shockingly accurate, especially if you consider both figures ask what the stakeholders want and technical feedback to engineers who knows what they're doing and meet the requirements.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#35
post #26

It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future. By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo). I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before. For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me. JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs,…

The obvious thing is gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) will be able to do your job better and faster than you. This will happen in 1-2 years. That doesn’t scare you?

I am bearish on that prediction. I’m not convinced LLMs can scale that much more. Of course, I’d be happy to be wrong. In that case, I’ll leverage the tools to become more productive.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#36

It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future. By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo). I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before. For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me. JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs,…

I think AI will still be important, but the AI of the future won't look like the AI that we have today. People have a tendency to redefine "AI" to mean whatever the new hotness is -- LLMs today, deep neural nets a few years ago -- but new things are created all the time, and fads always change. When I started grad school for comp sci nearly 20 years ago, I worked with a group that was big on "AI", but we were dealing with multi-agent systems. No neural nets or super-intelligences or anything like that. Neural nets were actually considered passé back then; I vividly recall a professor telling me that SVMs (support vector machines) were stronger than neural nets, because SVMs had a stronger theoretical foundation and were more amenable to mathematical analysis. Neural nets, on the other hand, just happen to work -- but they happen to work very very well! Deep learning didn't gain traction until after I had finished grad school.

The LLMs that we have today are amazing, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Having to train it on a huge dataset is problematic for some uses; perhaps there is a related structure that can be trained more easily and more quickly. That would also reduce the effect of OpenAI's monopoly. LLMs also have specific weaknesses, like poor performance at arithmetic. At this stage, I wouldn't really feel comfortable feeding problems into an LLM and presenting users with the LLM's answers. It's still the Wild West in many aspects. There is always an improvement on the horizon, but it's hard to tell where it will come from and when it will come. Maybe we'll have LLMs that really start to resemble intelligence, or maybe we'll have a totally different structure that does everything LLMs can do plus more.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#37
post #29

Stay employable? I have been unemployed for 1.5 years. Absolutely NOBODY needs a product management leader anymore. If anything only entry level and I am overqualified to do that (not saying it arrogantly, but companies don't ever consider me stepping 3-4 levels back). Tech is in a slow death spiral.

Check out the book Never Search Alone. Not that I recommend it, but it will lead you to a networking group of lots of product people.

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#38
post #7

It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future. By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo). I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before. For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me. JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs,…

I agree on the AI stuff ... personally, I think it's going to need 5 years or so just to iron out all the legal and regulatory stuff before the 'next big push' In general, I think you make your money in Tech at the ends.. Either bleeding edge or trailing edge. ATM, I'm working on Rust, serverless, playing with Pijul, keeping an eye on OpenTF, and pulumi. For trailing edge stuff - I figure I'll be the worlds oldest CO…

There are certain aspects of computing that will probably always be around. We'll always need fast compilers that generate fast code -- people don't want slow programs, and programmers don't want to wait for compiles to finish. Relational databases aren't disappearing anytime soon. And as we keep getting smaller and smaller devices, we'll keep shrinking things down, so we'll need new ways of representing and compressing data. The list goes on and on. If you can get comfortable with things like these, you'll always be useful to somebody.

(And yes, COBOL will be with us for many years to come. In the next century, we'll probably be emulating IBM mainframes on quantum computers.)

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#39
post #26

It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future. By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo). I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before. For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me. JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs,…

The obvious thing is gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) will be able to do your job better and faster than you. This will happen in 1-2 years. That doesn’t scare you?

LOL maybe it will if you are a "coding by copying from StackOverflow" "developer"

Re: Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

#40
post #29

Stay employable? I have been unemployed for 1.5 years. Absolutely NOBODY needs a product management leader anymore. If anything only entry level and I am overqualified to do that (not saying it arrogantly, but companies don't ever consider me stepping 3-4 levels back). Tech is in a slow death spiral.

Can you apply your skills to other leadership positions?
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