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As someone who basically never worked in an office since I began working as a dev in the early 90s; you have to protect yourself and carve out niches and knowle

As someone who basically never worked in an office since I began working as a dev in the early 90s; you have to protect yourself and carve out niches and knowledge that takes actual time and elbow grease to catch up to. Sure many people anywhere in the world can do what I do, but with the deep knowledge I have about some subjects (banking/payments/insurances backends & production firmware), it is not very likely to get a better deal as I speak the same language of all parties involved and I did it many times already. So it is not trial and error. It simply takes actual time to sit down and suffer for years/decades. You can hire entire teams cheaply with great looking resumes and fail because some of these things are not hard/difficult per-se but you have to have done them before to succeed fast. But yes, if you shoot with hail and focus on the latest and greatest, you might be easily replaced. I am surprised how cheap (embarrassingly so) I can find good react/node devs; that tells me it is really bad to specialise in that...

joelbluminator 6y ago
try to find cheap react/node devs in the U.S, good luck with that. The cost of skills doesn't always translate to how hard it is to acquire it. I mean, some medical nurses study for 5-10 years and specialise and specialise only to earn 1/2 what a react dev earns in the U.S
- tluyben2 6y ago
  I think we were talking about work-from-home/remote people and for me that is ‘earth’; I can find really good people for next to nothing because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And this is not a stab at the technology; it is saying that it is a not a niche; I have maintained an yoy upward income for over 25 years by picking things that are valuable always. And, in line with this article, if I can have excellent react/node (and Go.. and C# and Java...) people for $1k/mo or less, then that is not for me. It might work well now; I want things to work out longterm. Because, you know, shit happens and they might kick everyone but the bottomline out...
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    So what kind of skills would you recommend ? What have you picked up over the years ?
    - joncrane 6y ago
      I don't think it's one skill; it's having your antennae up at all times and sensing what the next big thing might be, as well as actually liking that thing. For me it was AWS. About 7 years ago I was sitting in "Architecting on AWS" and I had an epiphany that this wasn't a game changer, this was a game redefiner. I was jazzed about it and have been pursuing AWS jobs and expertise every since. AWS isn't the end-all and be-all, and it's abused more often than not, but it has provided an extremely lucrative career for me. Also, as much shit as Amazon gets, AWS is a very, very good product, or suite of products. It only gets more complicated every year and my idea of it evolves every year as well. It's still going strong, but I do have my eye on other technologies and am making sure I don't become a dinosaur.
      - thewarrior 6y ago
        Interesting. What aspects of AWS do you think will grow further ? What other technologies do you have your eye on ?
        joncrane 6y ago
        #1 Security: no one knows how to secure AWS. But I also really, really hate how the Cybersecurity organizations operate in every job I've ever had so that would feel like selling my soul to the devil. #2 "Big Data" #3 Containerization (working with it on AWS specifically)
    - tluyben2 6y ago
      I think anything that takes years to learn properly (and of which the knowledge is not neatly packed into a book); communication skills, using vertical-specific language/terms correctly, integrating complex systems etc. Things you cannot take a book, read and do without countless failure, retry, mentors etc. Anything you can pick up quickly, probably anyone can pick up quickly... You cannot learn production firmware coding fast; sure you can pick up ARM c/assembly, you can read books, watch videos, but when you get a totally strange device that has 20kb (kilobytes!) of usable memory, you won't be able to get a factory ready implementation without years of experience. The same with a lot of other niche areas; sure you can learn it, sure you can probably get 80% there (wasting a lot of time on learning) but delivery is not reachable without the place burning down after. Things that are not hard necessarily, but just a lot of work to learn to do well. Again, and again, i'm not critiquing the tech here, just the niche-ness of it; I hate frontend work and yet it took me 2 days to learn react native well enough to make a production app. If I can do that, too many other people can do that as well and I do not believe that's a viable longterm strategy. But if it works for someone then glory to them; I am older and know it will likely be gone in 10 years; most of everyone (by far) won't be millionaires by then even though they aspire to it now, so you need something for after 10 years. Go into management is an option, but I like remote work, coding and tech, so I had to find another way.
luckylion 6y ago
100% agree that experience and good communication skills are key. People will happily pay more for somebody that understands them the first time they explain something, that comes back with questions about things they hadn't thought about and has already dealt with similar issues before and can provide guidance. If you're also able to at least manage yourself on the project, you will be loved. Imho, freelancing on smaller projects is great for learning those skills, because you will either learn them quickly or you will sink like a stone.

joelbluminator 6y ago

try to find cheap react/node devs in the U.S, good luck with that. The cost of skills doesn't always translate to how hard it is to acquire it. I mean, some medical nurses study for 5-10 years and specialise and specialise only to earn 1/2 what a react dev earns in the U.S

tluyben2 6y ago
I think we were talking about work-from-home/remote people and for me that is ‘earth’; I can find really good people for next to nothing because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And this is not a stab at the technology; it is saying that it is a not a niche; I have maintained an yoy upward income for over 25 years by picking things that are valuable always. And, in line with this article, if I can have excellent react/node (and Go.. and C# and Java...) people for $1k/mo or less, then that is not for me. It might work well now; I want things to work out longterm. Because, you know, shit happens and they might kick everyone but the bottomline out...
- thewarrior 6y ago
  So what kind of skills would you recommend ? What have you picked up over the years ?
  - joncrane 6y ago
    I don't think it's one skill; it's having your antennae up at all times and sensing what the next big thing might be, as well as actually liking that thing. For me it was AWS. About 7 years ago I was sitting in "Architecting on AWS" and I had an epiphany that this wasn't a game changer, this was a game redefiner. I was jazzed about it and have been pursuing AWS jobs and expertise every since. AWS isn't the end-all and be-all, and it's abused more often than not, but it has provided an extremely lucrative career for me. Also, as much shit as Amazon gets, AWS is a very, very good product, or suite of products. It only gets more complicated every year and my idea of it evolves every year as well. It's still going strong, but I do have my eye on other technologies and am making sure I don't become a dinosaur.
    - thewarrior 6y ago
      Interesting. What aspects of AWS do you think will grow further ? What other technologies do you have your eye on ?
      - joncrane 6y ago
        #1 Security: no one knows how to secure AWS. But I also really, really hate how the Cybersecurity organizations operate in every job I've ever had so that would feel like selling my soul to the devil. #2 "Big Data" #3 Containerization (working with it on AWS specifically)
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    I think anything that takes years to learn properly (and of which the knowledge is not neatly packed into a book); communication skills, using vertical-specific language/terms correctly, integrating complex systems etc. Things you cannot take a book, read and do without countless failure, retry, mentors etc. Anything you can pick up quickly, probably anyone can pick up quickly... You cannot learn production firmware coding fast; sure you can pick up ARM c/assembly, you can read books, watch videos, but when you get a totally strange device that has 20kb (kilobytes!) of usable memory, you won't be able to get a factory ready implementation without years of experience. The same with a lot of other niche areas; sure you can learn it, sure you can probably get 80% there (wasting a lot of time on learning) but delivery is not reachable without the place burning down after. Things that are not hard necessarily, but just a lot of work to learn to do well. Again, and again, i'm not critiquing the tech here, just the niche-ness of it; I hate frontend work and yet it took me 2 days to learn react native well enough to make a production app. If I can do that, too many other people can do that as well and I do not believe that's a viable longterm strategy. But if it works for someone then glory to them; I am older and know it will likely be gone in 10 years; most of everyone (by far) won't be millionaires by then even though they aspire to it now, so you need something for after 10 years. Go into management is an option, but I like remote work, coding and tech, so I had to find another way.

luckylion 6y ago

100% agree that experience and good communication skills are key. People will happily pay more for somebody that understands them the first time they explain something, that comes back with questions about things they hadn't thought about and has already dealt with similar issues before and can provide guidance. If you're also able to at least manage yourself on the project, you will be loved. Imho, freelancing on smaller projects is great for learning those skills, because you will either learn them quickly or you will sink like a stone.