Ask HN: What will be the most valuable technology skills in future?
Young person, a bit lost, struggling to get anywhere. Not really qualified for any work or able to afford degree. Had to drop out of college and have a year long unexplainable work gap after mental health decline. Have a generalized knowledge in tech from linux use, tinkering with networks and have a programming admiration but no idea how to translate this to a marketable skill set.
If you were in early 20s and had 6months to a year to try and get on track. what would you focus on? IT, programming, cloud, what is the optimal vehicle and will be valuable in 5 years? Is IT or programming safer bet?
57 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 73.5 ms ] threadDon't. Learn soft skills. Put all that tech in the cupboard.
How? Man, I don't know, but I bet there's plenty of material out there. Maybe get a job in a service industry that kind of overlaps with your interests.
Get to know people. Skills can be outsourced. Lovely, empathetic, and patient people (with a backbone) cannot be outsourced.
For example, I'm in a startup producing hardware products for industrial use: who do you think got fired in the last few years, 1) the one guy who implemented all the low level stuff and knows the product inside out, helps sales and support with technical knowledge, fixes bugs at any time, or 2) the nice sales people who could not really deal with the complexities or were not persuasive enough to make enough sales?
Food for thought.
However, I was assuming OP would balance their soft skills with their tech skills and aim more for management and eventually a CO position. IMHO softskills(tm) mostly leads to sales only and, funnily enough, a lot more opportunities than a ossified tech stack.
Knowing some python and bash is very helpful
AWS is a huge area with a bazillion of ingredients but you could start with learning: S3 buckets, permissions, lambda functions.
"DevOps" can be a lot more than configuring AWS or Kubernetes and SRE'n those systems. I don't think it wise to fully absorb it into the development teams, the ops team enables them to do more and has cross team visibility to create opportunities that aren't seen at the team level.
I would expect backend development to experience as much automation as operations. There is a lot more training data for backend compared to operations as well
I recently watched a video describing a decent learning path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnjly9iBHso
And Tim Corey has a lot of good, free, videos on YouTube. But like he says, you really have to sit down a practice. You can't just watch videos all day long. It's one thing to watch an NBA game to see how basketball is played, but it's another thing when you get on the court and do it yourself.
And by practice, you don't need to come up with an idea for an app. Just create a project to test the one skill you are trying to learn. Want to understand foreach? Create a project for it. Want to understand switch statements? Create a new project just for that.
Good luck!
#1 Youtube channel on C# out there imo.
The fact that I knew before just goes to show how well known he seems to be in the C#/.NET community, is what I'm saying.
If you mean actually valuable, I think the most valuable skill in the future might be the same as it is today: being good at considering the tradeoffs to different technology choices and design decisions and putting it in context with how you actually solve specific business problems intelligently. The best Java developer in the world is not as valuable if he doesn't understand business at all and doesn't question and even push back on the requirements and spec he's given once in a while and come up with some simpler ways to solve problems other than sitting down and churning out the thousands of lines of code he's told to.
If by actually marketable, in a 5 year timeframe, something like Blockchain programming might end up being in very high demand. As interesting as all of these AI things are, I wouldn't trust them for anything except toys for quite a long time. In 5 years, I'd think centralized digital currencies might emerge, banks might use some form of crypto for lots of transactions between themselves, oracles might be more mature and smart contracts might be established in some business domains, etc. The amount of money that might be secured by crypto in the future could be significantly more than it is today.
My suggestion is if it's not too late, focus on something totally different: effective networking with people and integrating yourself into communities. A lot of success seems to be about who you know, what community you are in and who knows about you and your services or products.
Also don't sell yourself short. Having some Linux and networking experience is more than many young people can say.
Generative AI is the obvious current hot topic as far as a marketable skill. I think it will continue to become even more important to know how to leverage these tools. But also for people to find your products or services you need to be part of their network so people skills are also very important.
I am building a website that integrates multiple generative AI APIs with the goal of being able to replace humans doing basic server configuration, making simple programs, editing websites and generating content for customers.
Within say three years we can anticipate many such systems, some built in yet-to-be created AI systems like more advanced video generation.
Robots are getting better. There will be opportunities for people who build services that train and the rent out robot platoons for different tasks.
We don't know what's going to happen with Neuralink but the rapid approach of AGI may accelerate their schedule. If we get high bandwidth BCI in the next 5-10 years that, combined with AI, creates new types of collective socialization, entertainment, problem solving etc. with their own opportunities.
A job say 7 years from now (maybe 17 not sure) might be "VR Role-Playing Game God" which requires a high bandwidth brain-computer interface. Your job could be to watch advanced magic users in the game who are trying to create new spells, and judge whether they meet the requirements to be allowed and setting some technical parameters for their use. After which the AI would determine whether the spells were invoked properly. The requirements for invocation could even involve certain specific visualizations if the BCI were integrated into the visual cortex.
Using an existing generative AI model is relatively trivial, just an API call, and so it doesn't have the complexity needed to create barriers to entry that'll justify high wages. Training a generative AI model does have that complexity, but it also requires compute & data resources that are beyond the means of an indie developer or small startup, and so you pretty much have to work for a well-funded company that can afford oodles of servers and petabytes of data. That limits the pool of potential employers, which again keeps salaries down.
I think it might be much more like the economics for say aerospace engineers or petroleum geologists, both of which are very difficult technical fields, but do not have the bargaining power to demand high wages the way software engineers do. Hell, even like embedded software engineers, which arguably is harder than web/mobile development but paid significantly less because there are fewer businesses competing for those developers.
Robotics potentially has a lot of potential, particularly if standardized hardware platforms emerge that could put the hardware aspects within reach of a lot of startups. It definitely has the domain-specific complexity, and yet will likely be structured as lots of small firms for individual markets searching for a common skillset rather than a few big firms trying to hire a very specialized skllset.
I have great intelligence, but not the credentials, resources or network. I have to construct some sort of plan and start now or risk being bitter and aimless till the end. I’ve been following GPT since beginning and the amount of progress language models has really astounded me. I feel as if the world is about to change very quickly because of things yet to come, and fear more than death being stuck mindlessly working Walmart type jobs, just to have food.
"I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb..." -- The Godfather Part 2 (1974).
Don't take these examples literally, but maybe I might try to be the best Rust programmer I can because it's thought to be a hard language to learn. Since you like networking maybe low-level Posix networking in C, or websockets. This are probably bad examples because I'd do a seriously deep dive into what jobs are being advertised that look interesting to you, which ones pay more than average, and which companies you might prefer to work for.
A related strategy was that I only applied for 2 or 3 jobs at a time, because I looked for companies I thought I'd like, and which I thought I could serve well with my skills. When I got to the interviews I would have a genuine interest in the company and could ask informed questions about areas that intrigued me.
I thought about rust before, seems like has potential for growth and hype is building. I was discouraged by previous advice that it’s rough introduction language and that it will take longer to make any projects that would convey competence absent credentials or experience.
Pretty much every job I’ve ever had came from knowing someone, whether a friend or former co-worker. I think technical people tend to overestimate the degree to which raw “skills” factor into who gets the job. Companies, especially small companies, are far more comfortable hiring a friend with level 6/10 skills than a complete stranger with level 9/10 skills. It’s just how people work.
So, my advice is to attend a bunch of meetups in various technologies (Python, mobile, security, etc.) and see who you get along with the best. In my experience, certain personality types gravitate to different fields. Because the relationships you build will ultimately be the ones that get you employed.
IMHO, the answer has not changed in 100 years: Critical thinking. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe.
There were a bunch of people who were getting jobs at animation studios based off their work on blender back then and nowadays the Blender Foundation has funds for more than just a couple core devs.
If you’re good at math and can code a bit learning your way around a huge codebase like blender so you can add state of the art stuff from papers will definitely get you noticed.
The present itself is changing so much.
Knowing how to adapt and evolve to change is a skill that many people don’t seem to have. Unfortunately they get left behind.
Getting too comfortable doing things one way or assuming things just won’t change is naive thinking.
If someone has solid critical thinking and comprehension skills, they can problem solve their way out of anything. Doesn’t matter if they’re in the IT field or researching history. You need to learn and pick up new skills fast, and be multidisciplinary.
Finally, I think the goal for someone who wants to stay near or at the top is to make as much money ASAP in their early days.
If you can quickly make your way into the investor class, you are basically free from having to keep building new things and hustle like a mofo. At that point you can just invest in some funds or maybe lead them, and honestly just enjoy riding the wave as long as possible instead of swimming against it to catch the next one. Just don’t over extend or get too greedy :p