51–60 of 96 posts
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Curious how this works out financially though. Following the crowd got people into faang with 500k incomes. Working on something obscure I haven’t seen payoff the same.
Money aint everything.
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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…
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Money aint everything.
Sounds like the sort of thing someone with money would say.
What that specific point is, depends on who you're asking. If you ask me (a student in India), that point lies around $50k/year. For me that is an unimaginable amount of money, and I don't believe earning any more than that would result in a significant increase in quality of life.
But if you ask someone in USA, you might get a different answer. Maybe for them $300k/year is around where earning more wouldn't necessarily result in a significant benefit.
It depends on where you are, who you've been around, and what dreams you have.
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.
Curious how this works out financially though. Following the crowd got people into faang with 500k incomes. Working on something obscure I haven’t seen payoff the same.
Equally, yes, some folk rose up through the ranks at fang (or better yet fintech) and make mountains of loot. For each success there's a fair pile of failures though.
To rise up through those ranks, typically you need to make sacrifices. Long working hours, minimal time off, stand-by weekends, emails at night, and (imo) suffering the bs that comes with corporate jobs.
Building your own business are all those things too, but without the corporate bs.
The interesting thing about 500k though is asking what you can do on 500k, you can't do on 300. Or 200. Or in lots of the world, 50.
Time left for relationships, children, holidays, other interests and so on are important to me. So I'm prepared to balance those with raw income. I'm not making anything like 500k per year, but I've turned down fang recruiters because all the money in the world can't make up for what else it would cost me.
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.
Are you that engineer that fixed that AS400? Back in the early 2010s, there were like 5 people across, the whole UK who could work on those mainframes.
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.
Not sure about your capability but what I see in most of new devs and techs is serious lack of fundamentals. I would start there. Once you tick that box it doesn't really matter what's next. You'll pick it up quickly.
It doesn’t matter how awesome you are, because in most cases employers are viewing the world as a bell curve and targeting the large population in the center. Being supremely awesome in your skills and capabilities moves you far away from the center of the bell curve.
Most employers realize many of the people in that swollen center seriously lack the fundamentals and adapt the environment accordingly, such as lowering barriers of entry and lowering minimally acceptable quality criteria. That is not the environment a top skilled developer will strive in.
My goal moving forward is to work in jobs with higher barriers of entry, preferably some manner of institutional barriers.
Game has always been the same, provide value and you'll do well.
How to provide value if gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) can do your job better and faster than you?
"AI" tools are at their heart productivity tools. Use them to be more productive so you can focus on higher value activities.