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Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#42If you want a clear path avoid IT. The best advice is learn to learn and don't ever stop. In my over 40 years the only constant was change. Whatever you learn at college don't assume you will end up using it.
I have the opposite perspective from my 40 years - not about learning to learn - that is 100% correct. But change is not as constant as it seems. The surface levels churns and change, but the fundamentals change very slowly. Hardware, networking, and those low layers of the OSI stack are not exactly the same as back then... but close enough. If you understood it then, you understand it now even if some details have e…
While I'm only 40 y/o - I started with computers really early (Amstrad CPC 6128, later Amiga before PCs).
And both of you seem correct.
Looking at short enough time window, and especially if you don't know those lower/deeper levels (concepts) - even more so if you focus on buzzword/trends - it does seem to change a lot.
With deeper and longer term context, and focus on concepts - IT is seemingly doing circles. From mainframes and thin clients to fat clients to big servers, to "serverless".
Last time I checked "serverless" it went from it's initial "So it's basically like CGI scripts - each request executes a program from scratch" to "And now it's faster with persistence" (so like FastCGI/Plack/etc).
Of course with orders of magnitudes improvements in memory size, execution & computation speed and bandwith/latency...
Every now and then, some things which were impractical/gimmicky and maybe even not possible (e.g. text to speech, sound/image to text, 3D/VR/raytracing, ML/AI ...) finally become possible.
And on occasion the sum of those "new but theoretically/conceptually old" things unlock something that's really kind of new - like video deepfakes.
To me personally - ChatGPT and similar still seem like just much less (but still a bit) gimmicky variant of those end of 1990s IRC and early 2000s phpBB chat bots.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#43foraging, skinning, herbalism, small engine repair…
Those ...?
Would those be stuff like carpentry/construction, animal husbandry, distilling alcohol, making "green" petrol/diesel (from vegetables), cooking gas (from food scraps and manure) ...
And anything and everything else that might be considered long term and post fall of civilization prepping?
At that point you might as well also add knowledge of some Germanic (that includes English), Slavic and CJK/Asian language... Though French, Spanish, Portugese and such could also come in handy.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#44It's difficult to predict, but I don't see the classics going away: Java, JavaScript, SQL. But overall, the goal should be to get a broad range of experience in different platforms so the technology you use is irrelevant. From that point on you just need to decide where you want to invest your time. For example, when I was doing internships in college I invested in getting Java experience because I knew that it was u…
Funny that for you Java and JavaScript are classic.
After initial big corporate SOAP/servlets buzz in 1990s, Java itself was trending down for a while. Stuff we have now (mostly due to borrowing a lot of good things from C# and other even more "dynamic" languages) gave it second life.
Well also strong PR and push for it in academia (because there were many big corporate jobs for it). But without improvements it had (and continues to have) - it would've ended like Visual Basic.
And I'll leave JavaScript mini history lesson (or rant) to someone else
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL is a great one because I've found so many devs either know nothing, or so bare minimum that it's easy to become the SQL guy on a team just because you're familiar with window functions. There's a lot of SQL out there too, and nothing has dethroned it after probably near 50 years now and I don't see anything coming close. It's also one of the best bang-for-your-buck things to learn, time to usefulness wise. Whethe…
I addition, the industry has repeatedly attempted to kill SQL, but it lives on. The level of survivorship bias SQL has achieved is only matched by C.
Can you give some examples for "repeatedly tried to kill SQL"?
For me it's only KeyValue/NoSQL (which trades/focuses on some ACID traits over others) and various incarnations of ORMs (which try to normalize different SQLs and map it to your familiar OOP programming language) that come to mind.
However they are either orthogonal or complementary to SQL.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#46Communication and marketing. Nobody really knows what will be important on the technical side, especially as 10 years is a good timeframe for disruptive changes from AI. But being able to communicate well, with other humans, with yourself, and maybe even AIs, and marketing yourself on at least the basic level, are skills, which are very important in any business.
Sure, I follow you. But you need to actually have some hard skills in order for those to have any value, right?
Yes, but hard skills are not fixed. They change with company, project, country, industry sector, time and opportunity, and constantly evolve and swing around. And that's even ignoring your personal ability to be good in a specific topic. That is why nobody can tell you what will be popular in 10 years or what will work out for you.
That is why you should have a solid foundation on general skills, and be able to move fast in whatever direction opportunity arise. And this is also where communication will help you, because it will teach you to listen, to understand people and their problems, to find opportunity and maybe also how to take them for you.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#47Honestly, the most important skill is to learn how to learn. There are some basics that will always be useful such as SQL or any of the popular high level programming languages. But in 10 years, the demands of whatever sector you want to work in will have changed in ways that we can only guess. But learning how you learn, what techniques help you stay focused are much more useful in the long term. If you are serious…
I'd doubly emphasize this. Technology changes rapidly regardless of bubbles, its better to learn how to pick up skills quickly and grok (deeply understand) them. I found these two courses to be really good foundations for kicking off in my own reeducation post-bachelors (in CS). They filled in blanks and reinvigorated my internal monologue of "yes i can do/learn that" growth mindset. https://www.coursera.org/learn/le…
Thanks for this resource! And the advice! Thanks parent comment for your advice too!
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. Math does nothing for you by default but it makes almost everything else easier, to the point of making the impossible possible.
Thirded. I just got back from a customer visit. They were trying to do something where the back of the napkin math said it would take a couple dozen CPU years to solve. I recognized a simple (in the math world) transformation we could do and the could run the whole problem in under 10 min. Coding the transform isn’t trivial, so we’ll get some contract dollars to solve it, but it will still be done faster than the nai…
If you can recall it, do you remember the math problem in question? And could you loosely explain how you transformed it?(just with general concepts or keywords for my own curiosity. I love math, and seeing how different problems can relate to each other in unexpected ways. For example, when the sum of two quadratic roots gives the width of a given rectangle. Like this problem: A rectangle has an area of 32ft² . Its width is 4ft less than its length. What is the width? A = l(w) and 32 = l(l - 4). I’ll spare you the work shown, but l = 8 and l = -4. … (8) + (-4) = 4 = w
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#49Good old fashioned server wrangling, since the pendulum will be back in full swing from “cloud” back to “on-prem”.
Why do you think this will occur?
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you think will be most in-demand in 10 years?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thirded. I just got back from a customer visit. They were trying to do something where the back of the napkin math said it would take a couple dozen CPU years to solve. I recognized a simple (in the math world) transformation we could do and the could run the whole problem in under 10 min. Coding the transform isn’t trivial, so we’ll get some contract dollars to solve it, but it will still be done faster than the nai…
If you can recall it, do you remember the math problem in question? And could you loosely explain how you transformed it?(just with general concepts or keywords for my own curiosity. I love math, and seeing how different problems can relate to each other in unexpected ways. For example, when the sum of two quadratic roots gives the width of a given rectangle. Like this problem: A rectangle has an area of 32ft² . Its…
Roughly it can be viewed as a change of coordinates and then recognizing the symmetry. Say you had a 2D function of x and y and transformed it to r and theta and then noticed that it was independent of theta. You go from an 2D problem to a 1D one.
In this case we’re transforming a 7D problem into a sum of a discrete set of 2D problems. With more algebra we could get it down to a 1D problem but that would take more human work that wouldn’t be paid off later in CPU time. If their project ends up scaling and the 1D transformation makes sense, we’ll do it.