71–80 of 96 posts
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.
And you went into management?
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.
trying to get my Amazon AWS Machine Learning Cert. Certs definitely give you credibility in this game nowadays. Google Cloud certs are also good, as well as CyberSecurity stuff
The future you can bet on is the one you create.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He won't tell you. Nobody would tell well-paying niche to avoid competition.
Competition never hurts :). Quite the opposite, I spend a lot of time training others in the field, and passing work in their direction. I can't go into detail here though, as that would dox me, and I'd prefer my HN person not to mix with my IRL person. The thing about niches is that you don't really "look for them" - you stumble over them as your skills develop. You -could- learn my job, of course, but it would take…
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?
If ever, a GPT-like LLM/AGI ever exists where it can distill business requirements, understand modular designs and intelligently establish complex relationships between different systems and contexts, then 99% of all jobs will perish.
This will be an unprecedented disruption at a macro scale that humanity has never seen before. All of our current economic models will be instantly trash. How likely do you think this will happen? If it does, there's no real incentive to have these systems produce anything because no one can afford to buy anything. A global revolution would be inevitable.
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.
For anyone else reading who is unhappy, uncertain or struggling, I hope you find the same for yourselves too. I probably don't know you, but there's complete strangers out there who want good things for you too. Don't give up.
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Sounds like the sort of thing someone with money would say.
I think what GP meant was that money, beyond a certain point , means little. Upto that point money does mean a lot, and anybody who denies that has never lived in poverty. 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 signif…
The answer is going to be different for everybody. I hope people find their ikigai.
I've often found fundamentals to be just as important, or more important, than chasing the trends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He won't tell you. Nobody would tell well-paying niche to avoid competition.
Competition never hurts :). Quite the opposite, I spend a lot of time training others in the field, and passing work in their direction. I can't go into detail here though, as that would dox me, and I'd prefer my HN person not to mix with my IRL person. The thing about niches is that you don't really "look for them" - you stumble over them as your skills develop. You -could- learn my job, of course, but it would take…
but, if i may ask, is that work that can be done 100% remote? would it make sense for an older software developer to pick that up? i am a generalist with lots of experience and i'd love to train up in a niche field to help me find work.
if you think that makes sense id appreciate if you could ask your IRL person to email me :-)