Ask HN: What are those strategic skills to master for the next 5, 10 years?
Hi folks,
With all things happening with AI, Robots, autonomous cars, drones, etc. I feel like even software engineers can experience difficult time to find a decent job in the future.
What do you think are those strategic skills to master for the next 5, 10 years to have an edge?
Please give some specific technologies/skills (learning how to learn is nice but not so specific).
Thanks!
87 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadGarbage In = Garbage Out
The data is more important than the model, and more data is not better than good data.
For many, that is good collaboration. For best results, you need diversity of opinion.
My opinion is the exact opposite of yours.
“How are you?” might be the right words, but the relationship between the speakers and timing determine if it’s the right question.
Building for the long term.
Everyone wants to do things quickly. That’s hyperscale hangover. while you can make a decent whiskey in just a year or two, the really good stuff requires more time.
Practice saying “no” to good ideas that excite you.
All I can say is now that I’ve seen a bit, I’m ready to kind of just focus on the fundamentals more. Everything is rooted from the fundamentals and as I learn more raw, low level stuff, the less daunting all the other crazy stuff seems
Most people won't persevere because they usually loose faith or lack perspective.
Opportunities are like waves. They come in bunches, but a good set doesn't mean every wave is good. Sets are unpredictable, but you know when they're on you. You need to be ready to catch the wave, and sometimes it fails underneath you despite looking like a winner.
So not to be too vague, I would say the best adaptive skill is being able to recognize a wave, paddle hard into it, and cut out as soon as you realize it's not going to give you the ride you want. There may be patterns out there, but instead of predicting it's best to react with vigor.
OP didn't come across as someone who was trying to learn PhD-level knowledge about a topic. In which case, being good at Java is probably as good a skill as any.
I think prompting may become a general skill superior in status to the early divide between those who could and could not use a PC/the web(which I lived through in the 90's).
Google-fu was useful because there was consistent syntax and semantics that returned good search results. That's no longer the case, and that might have something to do with ML model integration with Google's search product.
I'm sure you could figure out a way to train models such that they share a common method/syntax to "summon" accurate answers from the ML oracles. I could see that being somewhat useful, but it looks like those that are commercializing AI products that interact with humans are looking for natural language interfaces, and not a specialized query grammar.
This means that you're probably looking at buying land. As an alternative, consider a camper van, modulo certain upgrades to security, or even a boat.
Get a ham radio operator's license and get comfortable with the relevant tech stack. Critically, buy or make an antenna, as big and as high-up as possible. (Note: consider this if/when evaluating land)
Now, get some solar panels, a nice good old fashioned gas genny, and, since you're throwing down money, a fancy big-ass battery pack, all to support your radio gear.
Boom. Now you've got a thing that's socially useful that you can do (comms), which should allow you to exchange labor for food (say).
You relay messages from survivors to their loved ones and announcements from any remaining governing body. You help coordinate rescues and play a role in reducing human suffering, although of course, by this point, you're so numbed by the endless grind of monotonically-increasing misery that this sort of consideration seems to date from another era entirely, back when you felt good about eating vegan and sorting your recycling. But those years are gone.
Imagine worrying about what it is good to do. The luxury. The sotted luxury.
noun - a person or thing that is the center of attention or admiration.
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had to google that one
That's the problem with 'fun', obscure words. No matter how good they sound, the piece overall sounds better without them --- an instance (by no means the only) of the well-worn truism 'kill your darlings'.
Thinking about this specific instance carefully. There's a sort of tipping point and if words are on the too-fancy side of it, they (as it were) cost too much to bring in a good return-on-investment.
Better to sort of moneyball the smaller words, getting them 'cheap', and in quantity, to produce whatever overall effect you like. Don't carve boulders, shape concrete.
1. An object that serves as a focal point of attention and admiration.
2. Something that serves to guide. [French, Ursa Minor (which contains the guiding star Polaris), from Latin cynosūra, from Greek kunosoura, dog's tail, Ursa Minor : kunos, genitive of kuōn, dog; see kwon- in Indo-European roots + ourā, tail; see ors- in Indo-European roots.]
(from thefreedictionary.com)
Personally, I love learning the occasional new word. "sinecure" is useful, as is "copacetic".
Disclaimer: I'm a contributor to it.
In the workplaces of the past, talented knowledge workers had two ways of getting ahead: by their work product (docs, slides, code, papers, etc) and by their interpersonal skills in close quarters office environments. Lunches in the office. F2F presentations to the bosses. Water cooler chit chat. This was both wonderful and miserable, depending on whether you were good at it, liked to do it, and were in the in-groups where it could make a difference. (Sadly, not everyone was, but let's park that for another long thread.)
In the workplaces of today, you still havr the work product, but opportunities for face to face interaction in physical space are vastly reduced. You may think this is wonderful, and for many workers, it is, but it does make it much harder to get noticed and advance in your career. You are just a face on a Teams call. Your personable-ness is flattened by the intermediary screen and technology.
Your challenge, then, is to learn screen politics. How to come across well with a screen between you and progress in your career. I don't think we know collectively how to do this yet.
If you focus on making friends instead of enemies (or at least people know they can rely on you, and are willing to say so to management), the word will get around, and in this disconnected environment, managers spend more time asking around about how other employees are doing.
Put another way - your reputation is a lot more important now than it used to be. It's a lot harder to schmooze the bosses than it was in person.
- wired LAN
- a soft key light
- a real camera (not a webcam, not the built in front-facing camera in your computer or display, but a camera with an HDMI output and an HDMI capture device on USB)
- real microphone, i.e. a wired headset that puts a mic close to your lips
These are cheap ways of quickly doubling your ability to convey information online.
You can also now use the iPhone as a webcam which gives exceptional video quality and they sell an accessory that sits it on the top of the screen.
Even clipping a $100 Logitech to the top of a 15-inch laptop at my standing desk, and dragging the video window of the person to be right below it, it doesn't look like I'm looking at the other person/people when I am.
https://kotaku.com/creepy-eye-contact-stare-ai-nvidia-broadc...
There's also cameras behind displays.
As an immediate practical matter, for a Linux desktop setup running open source with ordinary display and camera, I'm still wondering.
i wish this isn't going to be the case (but i do suspect it is true).
What i want to see in the future is more software entrepreneurs selling a service to a client rather than being an employee. In such a scenario, your work product is your value, and screen politics is synonymous to sales/marketing.
Strategic: Exploit new tech to generate the most attractive and personable virtual representation. Whomever wins Teams wins. Exploit tech to evaluate superiors and peers objective and subjective rankings based on video, audio and text. Stress analysis on superiors to identify actionable priorities.
Tactical: Know the buzzwords, flavors of the year, have enough skills to know where the breakage will be to avoid or to be taken advantage of. Identify the best peers to be leveraged when superiors come to you.
As the old guards passing is already accelerating, that’s where the most breakage will be, so invite them to mingle somewhere. That will work for the over 40. For the 30-somethings that may require other means.
There are some good pointers here [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
I figure all that bureaucratic stuff that hasn't been replaced by code won't be able to be replaced with AI.
Get good at living on 10% of whatever your income is today.
Get good at welding, so you'll be better equipped to repair your shipping container.
Get good at some basic homesteading capabilities in case you have to exit the wider society and provide for yourself.
Get good at finding a way to go live somewhere that is 50-100 years behind wherever you are so you are hopefully able to ride out the remainder of your time here in relative comfort.
For the next 5 years, any team that is big enough to have a collection of multiple restful endpoints and services, GraphQL is just generally superior. Federated GraphQL is worth investigating as well. For performance, look into the various protocols that are superior to json over http.
For frontend, if we're looking at a 5-10 year timeframe, I think it's still the wild west. I still suspect that React, while a good evolution over what came before, is still something of a conceptual impedance mismatch. Whatever model is best for reconciling UI concerns with network communication data flow, I'm not sure we've really identified the right primitives to design on top of. We're still rewriting to find the lower-level approach that really fits.
For AI, we're really distracted. We're on this road to engineer more and more convincing simulations of intelligence without really tackling intelligence, and we're going to eventually realize it's asymptotic and will hit another dry spell. When we get back to focusing on not how to make computers smarter, but instead how to use them to make people and societies smarter, then we'll make fast progress again. But this will require some political realignments. I think this is more of a 20-25 year timeframe. You can make a lot of money in the next ten years if you get into AI with the intention of finding even more effective ways to trick or con people in the short term, but the overall impact will be damaging.
Finally, I have no experience in this arena, but I think VR/AR/MR is going to be absolutely huge. Developers are going to have much more opportunity to play with this stuff than with machine learning, which will be part of it but at the lower level of libraries and device firmware. Integrating that tech with development tools, end-user experience, etc - that will be massive.
I've never seen it be anything but accidental complexity, but would love any concrete examples of where it's been worth the effort.
Pretty broad term but if I had to guess, we’re gonna see an absolutely ginormous deluge of data and being able to build/operate/reason about distributed systems will continue to be important (as it has been for the past couple of decades or so).
I also think that true SRE skills will further expand, way beyond for what Google designed such roles.
Security in all areas will also continue growing in human skills demand. Creativity in this space is crucial.
Figuring out which of those causes some rare problem is going to require dark wizardry.
Also, I'm moving towards security stuff. After a while the above starts to get a big to granular, and I want to work at a more macro scale.
My top few:
- practice reading code that is older you're comfortable working with, that you did not write and have no prior knowledge base for - designing systems that are easy to replace; no matter what tech comes along, new tech will come after, and we're not going to live in the world where X lasts for Y time, it will be Y/c (some fraction) - writing well, that's tailored to specific audiences, aided by whatever tools are available (spell check, grammerly, chatgpt, etc) - as far as tech itself goes, I'm hopeful about edge computing, where performance and power is near today's level, for an extended time
I see a lot of doomsdayism here. I recommend avoiding that, it's a tough and awful away to live.
"Skills" don't really give you an edge at anything. You're expected to learn those on the job. Nor does surface level knowledge of a trendy topic. You have to have a deep specialty if you want it to count for anything.