Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success

I have tried to maintain a generalist role[1]. It's worked very well for me so far - and there's some peace of mind in knowing that if needed, you can switch areas reasonably easy. And I harbor the hope that at some point (when kids go to university) I may start my own business, since I've looked for enhancing those skills. It's not without downsides though - you get the occasional impostor syndrome (since you'll never be able have the depth you wish/ know you could achieve, in any area). It's hard to balance being at least "good enough" at the current task with broadening your knowledge, and it can be straining at times. And also, though in theory you can get hired anywhere - in practice, relatively few companies will appreciate you enough to pay you well, since most companies' ideal candidates are really specialists in very narrow fields (also those ideal candidates tend to be unicorns, so companies settle for generalists, but that's a different discussion). The end result of this is that, unless you're willing to take a significant pay cut, the opportunities to switch companies might get increasingly rare (but opportunities to switch roles within company will be present).

[1] I've developed (professionally/ for money) compilers, VMs, image processing, web apps (mostly middleware), desktop apps, "big data"(spark, kafka streams, etc.); Have done product management, data science, and even worked on the architecture of a DSP processor at a time. Worked in most of the "mainstream" languages (Java, Scala, C. C++, Javascript, Python, C#, Vb.net; and of course various kinds of assembly language).

Agreed, that article could not be more vague.

I don't argue with the main point, which is "broaden your skills."

But the rest is debatable and not such good advice. Some of the items given in the "skill list" used as an example are absolutely unusable as it. "writing"? writing what, there's a huge difference between being able to write novels and writing technical documentation for instance. I also have a grip on "productivity", that's not a skill, that's the ability to apply a skill. A better pragmatic definition of a marketable skill, I think, would be the ability to write it on your résumé, and only a subset of the ones discussed in the article fit this definition.

>>Eat well. Sleep. Maintain relationships with people you care about. Work hard, pay attention to what you're doing and think critically. That's all there is to it.

That’s my takeaway.

> This assumes that the pension system there will be able to sustain itself in a few decades hence despite low birth rates and limited immigration.

Indeed, the system is not perfect and the general outlook of it is pretty bad. But you still have a higher chance of getting a pension at 65 in Europe than in the US while being mediocre. Also don't forget automation, which I'd assume will trickle down to benefit the lower and middle European Class faster than it'll happen in the US. Again, assumptions. The future is unsure for sure.

>Also, most people in developing countries, i.e. most people in the world, do not have that option.

Indeed. But most people on HN are usually from North America or WE, so you know... saying that is a bit disingenuous. You could say "most people are _dirt_ (emphasis on dirt) poor and cannot lift themselves out of poverty". Yes, most people in the world are like that, but we all know that for example this article is not directed at those sorts of people, but rather at "Westeners", who probably won't go hungry in their lives ever unless a major catastrophe happens.

Not sure if I really believe this.

I'm someone who likes to pick up new skills for fun & fulfillment. And yet, when it to career success, roughly 80% of my net worth is attributable to two, maybe three skills: being really good at Javascript, and having solid CS fundamentals in data structures and algorithms. Together they got me into Google, where I picked up the third skill (knowing the full Search stack from the crawler to the browser), which made me very valuable to Google and got me a bunch of stock that's done quite well since.

Now, I also picked up a bunch of other skills while I was there: visual design, interaction design, product design, empathy, management & leadership, some machine-learning & data science, distributed systems, how to approach a vaguely-defined problem with no clear answer and make forward progress on it, how to balance lunch & a drink on your laptop and show up late to a meeting without spilling, etc. And I had some skills from before Google: investing (professional, not just personal; I worked for a company that wrote software for hedge funds for 18 months), game design, compiler design, Django, even some PHP from my college days. And I've learned even more since leaving Google: entrepreneurship, corporate structure, identifying markets, Android development, iOS development, watchOS development, blogging, YouTube video production, Photoshop, how cryptocurrencies work, a lot more unstructured data mining & data science, what risk actually means, etc.

But when it comes to cold, hard economic returns, nothing seems to beat identifying an in-demand skill, doubling down on it until you're noticeably better than the vast majority of people a company will interview, and finding a wealthy buyer who will pay you for it. (On a corporate level, this translates to finding a growing and potentially large market, doubling down on it until you're noticeably better than every other company in that market, and finding a wealthy buyer who will pay you for it.) I kinda wish it wasn't so, because I really enjoy the learning-new-things part of life, and I enjoy learning hot new technologies or algorithms more than obscure proprietary frameworks in a megacorp. But people pay you for the portion of your skillset that is relevant to the problem they want solved, not the portion that is personally fulfilling.