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What would you study instead to remain valuable in the next two decades? I've gotten pretty deep into engineering: worked on games, mobile, web, FP, legacy code
by JackMorgan 10y ago
What would you study instead to remain valuable in the next two decades? I've gotten pretty deep into engineering: worked on games, mobile, web, FP, legacy code revival, a half dozen popular languages, automated testing, and people management. I'm looking for something new to study to add flexibility and "luck surface area" to my career. I was thinking ML would be another area of valuable study. Do you have any alterative suggestions?
- sp527 10y agoI think you're already doing the right thing in continually learning. No one can tell you whether or not studying ML will prove to be valuable with any certainty, so it might be a good bet to pursue it if it interests you and you have the spare time and especially if you're desperate to pivot your career towards it (then you're left with no options). I can't offer a definitive decisionmaking framework, except to say that if you want to monetize something, make sure you can (fairly obvious, but not always what happens with people in our industry).
- petra 10y agoNot him, but: It's clear that the trend in software is towards higher abstraction, and that's what makes selecting what to learn so hard. But maybe a heuristic: learn thing that could not be abstracted(unless AI appears), or at least choose a few abstractions up ahead. One such thing is desinging and developing domain-specific-languages, which also looks to be an important tool in some systems. Another thing is prototyping with very high-level tools, because it gains you experience in working with customers, extracting requirements, product management, etc.