Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#1

Post by amazonavocado » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 6:01 AM UTC

I've been thinking about the phrase "time in the market beats timing the market." Not just with investing, but also in career management. After all, that also involves trying to get a greater return on investing your time into some job or skill.

But the more I look at the job market in software, the more I see advice for managing a software engineer's career like trying to "beat" the market. I don't know if I still like this approach. I'd rather not want to keep trying to predict when the high point of some skill or technology is approaching. I prefer to do what I personally like and only change/learn something new because I get bored, and not because the job market doesn't favor it.

Tech trends feel like moving targets, and I have a dilemma. I like working in tech but I also don't like being forced to hit moving targets.

To give you an example, I started my web development career in the late 2000's. I didn't "buy" into cloud computing when it went on the rise, and I didn't "sell" my PHP skills. That's making it tougher to get interviewed at jobs probably because my experience doesn't have enough of the right keywords. Trying to just keep up with new concepts just for the sake of the job market is stress-inducing and it's like constantly monitoring stocks to buy and sell. It's an emotional roller coaster.

Is it just possible to hold on to your initial "investment" of skills long-term, and regardless of what you started with continue to build returns from that? I know that the advice to just spend more time in the market is advice for the regular joe, but I actually do just want to be a regular joe programmer.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#2

Post by MattGaiser » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

No, as the need to learn new things is going to be inevitable. Even if you have been a Java dev forever (and that language will last your career), I know a couple Java programmers who took months and months to find work in this market as they didn't keep up with the latest in Java.

Keeping up with the latest tech is more properly compared to diversification. You are not abandoning your old skills, but you are adding some new ones that have a good chance of being valuable in the future. You may end up learning something worthless, but as long as what you learn is mainstream, there are probably jobs for it.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#3

Post by muzani » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns.

Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late.

Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but mature and impactful enough that it feels like a secret weapon. I adopted Kotlin before Google officially did, because it was cutting down lines of code by half.

No matter how boring you are, there should be things that actually excite you as an expert, and those are the only ones worth investing in early. Since you already browse HN, you shouldn't worry about missing out on them.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#4

Post by shireboy » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

I don’t think that’s an apt analogy. You have very little to loose by taking a few hours to spin up some new tool and see what it’s about. Even if you don’t use it, you know what it’s about and could if you wanted/needed. You don’t loose your investment in PHP by doing so. In fact sometimes new tech could inform your existing knowledge.

I do think there is wisdom in not immediately using every new thing in production, but that’s different from wanting to stick to one language and never try anything new.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#5

Post by awildfivreld » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

"time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_, and ignore if the market is going up or down, as it tends to always trend upwards.

"timing the market" would then be saving up for a long time, then dumping it all in when you think it has hit its low.

To transfer the analogy, it would be like shireboy describes. You would keep up with the news to see what technology is brewing. That does not mean that you have to be the industry expert on every single technology you decide to look into, but you are more aware.

I think your last paragraph can be compared to stopping investing into the market, and rely on interest to keep you growing.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#6

Post by rgoulter » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

I think an important part of tech is continuously learning.

e.g. if you can't find jobs as a PHP developer, but you see there are many jobs for (say) NodeJS web development, or Golang API development, you may need to learn some things, but that can build upon how you did things with PHP.

You still have a website still involves HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A website will still send HTTP requests (and receive responses). The program will still need to be deployed so that it's reachable from the web. etc. etc. -- And there will always be adjacent things which you will either need (or benefit from) learning.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#7

Post by brailsafe » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #3

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns. Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late. Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but matu…

> Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late

But what if that is the case, and also there aren't many other options because the tech reached a critical mass. Do you try and catch up, or do you quit, or somewhere in the middle?

For example, I don't really have much React experience, and now the entire market is basically React. It's not hard, I know at least enough to get going reasonably well, but I probably don't know as much as some bootcamper who graduated 2 years ago and now their 2 years of React is considered more highly than 5-8 years of various other things.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#8

Post by tacostakohashi » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

I don't think the analogy really works, for a few reasons.

The first is that you've already (accidentally) timed the market by "buying" PHP in the late 2000s when that was dominant. There's an illusion that everything that existed when you got into the industry is somehow dominant, fundamental, and long-lasting, and everything that comes after is a transitory fad. That might even be true for some things, but many things are transitory fads, and PHP was one of them - the problem is you didn't sell / rebalance as it was declining.

Secondly, getting into / out of a technology can be a gradual process, more akin to a dollar cost averaging strategy. If you start to learn Rust, your PHP skills won't vanish - some of them will even transfer, and others will fade, but still be there if you need them.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#9

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

awildfivreld wrote: post #5

"time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_, and ignore if the market is going up or down, as it tends to always trend upwards. "timing the market" would then be saving up for a long time, then dumping it all in when you think it has hit its low. To transfer the analogy, it would be like shireboy describes. You would keep up with the news to see what technolog…

> "time in the market" tends to mean that you invest what you can in broad funds _at regular intervals_,

Why at regular intervals? “Time in the market” seems to imply the earlier, the better since obviously earlier means more time.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't keeping up with tech for your career same as “timing the market”?

#10

Post by muzani » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #7

muzani wrote: post #3

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns. Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late. Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but matu…

> Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late But what if that is the case, and also there aren't many other options because the tech reached a critical mass. Do you try and catch up, or do you quit, or somewhere in the middle? For example, I don't really have much React…

Like other investments, it's good to check whether it's overpriced or underpriced. Supply and demand will always change, and so will the value.

One hint of oversupply is when everyone does it. I don't mean there's a lot of jobs, but when your farmer uncle is telling you to learn React the same way they'd tell you to go to law school or buy Bitcoin.

A hint of a bubble is when it's expensive and people try to sell it off to the next sucker, normally in the form of classes. When bootcamps are cropping up everywhere and there's FOMO, that's a good hint that it's a really bad time.

I think this is where time in the market matters too. Bitcoin price history is an interesting analogy. If you bought at the top and held through the dip, you'd be ahead of those who never came in.

Android was similar for me. It dropped as hybrid, RN, and Flutter were trending and there was a dry spell for 3 years where there were few native jobs. Then companies like Airbnb were hitting a barrier on RN, plus Android Jetpack was introduced. Now the Android skillset is valued highly, especially those who bought the dip (learned Jetpack+Kotlin). It's still trending hard now that Jetpack Compose puts it on par with Flutter so I'll keep investing into it.

The other thing to look at is when something peaks, a lot of things crop up that don't actually make things better. This is around the time people complain about frameworks and stuff. Android had RxJava, JS had CoffeeScript. So you want to avoid investing into these kinds of things.