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Ask HN: What's a lucrative niche technical skill you can learn on your own?

38 points by unsupp0rted ↗ HN
A lot of technical skills require access to enterprise systems to develop, or years of experience in a domain, or access to client data to learn how to handle real-world scaling issues and real-world edge cases.

Is there a well-paying in-demand technical skill that you can learn alone, remotely?

This used to be React (or Vue, in my case). You could get very good, just hacking on your own projects. And it was in demand and paid well, before the market got saturated (and before the end of the era of free money).

Can you think of a niche, highly in-demand technical skill that an average person, learning on their own, can pick up and start offering now?

28 comments

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profsummergig
After seeing all that Blender could do, I used believe that learning 3D modeling/animation could be a very useful skill. And it's free, OSS, etc.

However, it has a very steep learning curve, and I'm not sure how generative AI queers the pitch.

imglorp
Cobol
fiftyacorn
Not just cobol - but running/supporting legacy systems(eg older Java systems). Its a mix of business logic and learning/remembering old ways of doing tech.
horsellama
kdb
purple-leafy
Yes - chrome extensions or other browser extensions, mobile apps, vscode extensions.

A rare skill/environment for people to work in, but it is lucrative.

The first piece of software I sold was a browser extension. It was sold for about 1/5 of my salary but the time commitment was about 1/50th of my salary.

I’m working on more browser extensions and currently working on one in the LLM space.

And because most browser extensions are very small, or basic or crap quality - if you can build something of any real complexity and usefulness you are pretty far ahead of the common developer making extensions

Oh also - LLMs are terrible at understanding browser extensions and how they work and what they are capable of, so you are pretty safe from AI

spacebacon
Wordpress plug-ins are also a good path for the same reasons. Wordpress is also a ripe marketing channel to small and medium business.
bodantogat
How tough is it to market an extension? I’m thinking about building one as an extra feature for my app or service, but I’ve been holding back because I think it might be hard to get it in front of my target audience
purple-leafy
If it’s an extension-website pairing it may be harder to market in general because it’s a complex architecture for users (need to do 2 things)

But stand-alone extensions are pretty easy to market.

For example my most popular extension had about 700_000 users with minimal marketing, I have another extension with 10_000 users with no marketing, another with 5000 users and no marketing, another with 1000 users (and it’s a pretty crappy one, my first) and no marketing

I’ve only been a web dev for 2 years, and building extensions for about 1.5 years

snicky
What do your extensions do?
purple-leafy
All sorts of things - network blocking, devtools extensions, job-site salary revealers, design tools
unsupp0rted
I'm curious how to monetize something like a job site salary revealer
purple-leafy
Oh that one I can’t monetise as people don’t want to pay for something like that, I just made that out of the goodness of my heart :P
profsummergig
Something I've wondered for a while...

I have a bunch of Chrome extensions installed, but they're all free...

so...

how do devs make extension-development lucrative?

Is this some enterprise-level activity where you market to private players who side-load these extensions for enterprise use?

purple-leafy
For 99% of extensions it is not lucrative and probably nets 99% of developers a fat $0, because people view extensions as shit-tier fun little hobby scripts and so they built shit-tier extensions, or they build extensions that can’t be monetised.

But then you have smarter players (Honey, Grammarly) who realise that if you build extensions to their full potential, you can have a packet sniffing, network orchestrating, data harvesting, insanely powerful privileged web app that can do things most developers have never thought of.

So if you build these Uber extensions (Grammarly is the best example I think) you can make insane amounts of money with virtually no competition!

I’m all in on extensions. I’m currently building an LLM extension for developers that is a first in the market (unique concept) that is free in Beta, but a paid subscription once out of Beta. It is basically a super-privileged web app that is performing a useful function for devs that would be impossible for a normal website/service.

This means it has login/signup as well, which is an extremely rare sight for an extension (Because it’s much, much, much harder to handle auth in an extension. Seriously extension auth is horrible to implement and I think I’m maybe the only dev in the world with a working Google Sign In inside an extension)

But also the reason you don’t see many monetised extensions is because it’s extremely hard to securely setup auth and stripe within an extension, as they are client only.

So my powerful extensions are backed by things like cloud functions etc for some functionality and for checking auth/db-access/subscriptions

meiraleal
How is the extensions store approval process? Is it bureaucratic like the play and app store?
purple-leafy
It’s not too bad. Usually takes about a week to be accepted. I have only had 1 extension update declined, but that was because I pushed broken code
Leftium
Machine Learning seems to be a hot technical skill that is in demand almost everywhere and pays very well. Korean companies are poaching ML engineers from the US and paying nearly SF salaries without the SF cost of living.

It's fueled by the LLM "AI" hype, so not sure how long the demand will last.

---

One of my friends thinks Salesforce is her ticket to a better career, but I'm not convinced...

---

Svelte(Kit) is very niche. The DX is very nice. While React has the quantity of openings, it seems Svelte has the quality openings. At least I found one of my best clients via the Svelte community.

hknws2023saio
Can you please elaborate on the last part? do you actively contribute to Svelte open source?
qbxk
I have found that very few developers care to learn about cloud infra and deployment best practices, but the skills are in high-demand (though AI could be putting that on the downtrend, it's so critical that having a human in the loop will still remain likely for some time)

Learn how to use AWS cheaply and effectively, or GCP or Azure. But probably AWS.

hnthrowaway0315
You can't learn that on your own though, unless you have a large side project.
more_corn
AWS offers free training for the solutions architect exam. Their “well architected framework” is a must read. After that build a home lab and learn to use some open source log collecting and monitoring projects (elk, Prometheus grafana) those things could probably land someone a DevOps role in about three months of independent study. I second the AWS recommendation. There are azure and gcp jobs but you don’t want them.
qbxk
> open source log collecting and monitoring projects

SigNoz looks interesting

comprev
In my experience (nearly 20yr in tech now) may Devs AND Ops struggle with implementing observability.

The sheer amount of "things" that can be monitored and logged on modern SaaS applications can be overwhelming and people seem to default to the "switch everything on and then decide" mentality.

As you can probably guess... this leads to even more confusion... and has a negative impact on their original goal.

My recommendation would be to learn how to create useful observability that benefits both Devs and Ops. The greater the overlap in a Venn diagram, the greater the success at resolving issues together - and NOT pointing the finger at the other party.

Over the years I have done a few gigs which focused on observability and they have been the most lucrative too.

It turns out companies are more than willing to pay top dollar if it means their teams work _together_ much better.