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Ask HN: What are some job sectors which are crying out for tech talent in 2021?

17 points by thebrowncat ↗ HN
For someone with programming/maths/statistics skills.

Is ML/data science still hot? Cyber-security? Or something really obscure?

24 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread
the_only_law
If I had to guess too heavy ones that are incredibly difficult for outsiders to break into.
MattGaiser
Ones interested in senior level people.
larrykubin
I see a huge amount of capital going into the crypto space. I would say learning Solidity would pay off big right now.
pawelduda
Being able to read solidity alone lowers your barrier to entire emerging ecosystems.
motioncuty
What kind of level of literacy is expected of someone transferring from a webdev environment. Would financial knowledge/certifications help?
zoenolan
Less than you think. Having some general ideal about the main asset classes and how finance works is useful but don't feel like you need a CFA or anything. Same goes for game theory, helpful especially on the protocol design side of things but don't feel like you need to be an expert to get started.

More useful coming from webdev would be good solidity [1] skills. There is a real shortage currently. Most general engineering practice carries over. Threat modelling is useful and more generally having a good understand about security. You should know about unit tests, code coverage and how they fit into building robust code.

In term of tools and frameworks. Hardhat [2] in my experience is a little nicer to use than truffle [3] but both help loads. Knowing how to use the Openzeppelin [4] contracts would be very handy. Waffle [5] for testing is helpful. Understanding about ERC-20 [6], ERC-721 [7] and ERC-1155 [8].

Cryptozombies [9] is a decent tutorial to get you started. Rust is also useful to know for Polkadot [10] (for ink! [11]) and other chains. The DeFi developer [12] roadmap seems decent for more resources.

[1] https://soliditylang.org/

[2] https://hardhat.org/

[3] https://www.trufflesuite.com/

[4] https://openzeppelin.com/contracts/

[5] https://getwaffle.io/

[6] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20

[7] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

[8] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1155

[9] https://cryptozombies.io/

[10] https://polkadot.network/

[11] https://github.com/paritytech/ink

[12] https://github.com/OffcierCia/DeFi-Developer-Road-Map

giantg2
Maybe I'm just dense, but i feel like crypto is in a dad phase and will not really grow from here.
_Wintermute
Bioinformatics/computational-biology. Lots of smart people with bio and maths skills, but a severe shortage of software engineering skills.
haxiomic
Second this, I worked on projects where "big data" meant 700MB

Lots of valuable work to be done, even in just taking standard bioinformatics algorithms parallelizing them for GPUs

jason2323
Sadly these jobs dont pay well enough. Software engineers in this space tend to be paid as much as biologists
tkiolp4
Indeed. Besides, there are not so many offers in such sectors.
aynyc
Ding! I interviewed in this area in 2018, I was shocked by how low the salary was.
f0e4c2f7
Cloud / Devops work pays extremely well in the US and not very many people seem to enjoy it.
chudi
do you know any place that is searching for remote people? Where I live everyone is wanting to hire but there isn't any more money around here and everyone is just jaded or working remote.
f0e4c2f7
I would say remote work seems generally pretty common. Even if they don't offer it outright you may find that to be more negotiable than you would expect.

Hiring for cloud / Devops is very painful right now. Often representing months of effort and 10s of 1000s in fees to recruiters per candidate.

Good places to look include career pages for tech companies and startups, hn who's hiring posts, angel.co, and LinkedIn (yes I know this one is unpleasant. For what it's worth is also where I have had the best results over the years)

tkiolp4
I would say devops is the most stressful role in the tech industry out there. If something goes down on a Sunday morning, you have to fix it; and sometimes the fix is not an as easy as restarting a server.
theflyinghorse
> and sometimes the fix is not an as easy as restarting a server.

Yes, but more often than not you just restart a couple of nodes, maybe kill and re up a couple containers and that's about it. The question is do the cases where you really have to dig in outweigh those where restarts just work?

oumua_don17
Asking genuinely ‘why are the restarts then not automated’?

Or is it that one gets paged after the automated restarts also have failed?

Edit: fix typo

tkiolp4
The problem is not how often disasters happen, the problem (for me) is that they will happen and you will have to fix it. Every minute the servers are down is money the company is losing. Just the mere possibility of that ruins everything. That’s why I, as a software engineer, don’t do on calls either. Money doesn’t fix my stress.
giantg2
I am in a DevOps role and do not like it. It's mostly config, troubleshooting, and PRD support. It would be nice to do some actually coding.
dpeck
Data Engineering.

Honestly I don’t like the name because gathering information, transforming, storing, and making it available for other uses is core to general software engineering, but I digress.

Many large companies in non-tech spaces are investing HEAVILY in their data engineering and automation teams. Many setting up Chief Data Officer positions and lots of roles reporting into them that have very good compensation and great work life balance.

You have to be ok that your area of work isn’t the full focus of the business and learn to work very well with other functions like finance, sales, etc. But if you can do that, it’s a great time to look into these kinds of jobs.

giantg2
I hate these roles at my company. I guess it's mostly because the data systems are a mess and require DB2 and COBOL knowledge.
pickle-wizard
This sounds interesting to me. How would one move into this spaces? I come from a Sysadmin/DevOps backgroud. I have done a lot of scripting over the years, but never any software development. Would it be worth while getting a Masters in something like Data Analytics, or should I focus more on certifications?
dpeck
In my opinion masters are not worth it unless someone else is paying for it.

The line between scripting and software development means a lot less when you’re writing ETL pipelines. I don’t think you’d have too much to worry with if you’re comfortable with something like Python from a devops context.

Speaking for the teams that I lead, do a little work with Airflow, have something approaching expert level SQL skills, be able to talk about Python requests, pypetter, and related libraries/tools and you’d have a good shot at getting an interview.