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Ask HN: What are you doing to stay employable in tech in the next 1-5 years?

• smiling-hen-285 3y ago
  [dead]
• kidgorgeous 3y ago
  trying to get my Amazon AWS Machine Learning Cert. Certs definitely give you credibility in this game nowadays. Google Cloud certs are also good, as well as CyberSecurity stuff
  • explaingarlic 3y ago
    Dunno, I got AWS CSA-P and it never got me any new interviews. Granted I stopped looking and only took interviews from people that looked for me actively.
• meiraleal 3y ago
  I'm creating a low-code platform using AI to automate my own work (to be more productive) and also trying to learn how to engage an audience on social media (around AI and software development) to use as leverage to get contracts, launch apps and make a profit. As a coder since 2002 (when I was 12 years old), I feel like I got into tech at the right time. Nowadays the new hacker is the people that can amass a big audience doing interesting things. If I was 12 years old now, I probably wouldn't hack my way coding, I would do it through social media.
  • anonzzzies 3y ago
    I am doing the same thing; this will be my 5th since the mid 80s with the AI (obviously) being a lot better than in the past decades. It's hard but fun.
  • vasili111 3y ago
    Which low code platfor do you use?
    • meiraleal 3y ago
      I'm creating it from zero, creating a framework using Lit (moving from React professionally), PWA technology and LLM integration (to generate code using the framework)
• ilaksh 3y ago
  I've been avoiding having a real job for most of my adult life. I am trying to build an online business or two that leverages AI. Such as for fine tuning LLMs or an open source agent hosting system. Although right now I don't have the energy to work on that stuff since I am scrambling to get the next crap Upwork contract.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    I say this with respect. If you are following the trend of the moment, your chance of success is low. Everyone and their friend is "working on an AI business" right now. Some might make it. You might be one of them. Most will turn into nothing. Again, with respect, jumping into AI now shows a lack of imagination. If you want to make something of value, you need to get outside the mainstream, be more creative, not something that's just riding the current hype wave. I say this to be constructive. Not to insult.
    • ilaksh 3y ago
      The fact that you had to claim it was respectful multiple times indicates that the opposite is true. I kind of asked to be disrespected by admitting that I am not having an easy life. I got into generative AI awhile back when GPT-3 came out. A very significant portion of Silicon Valley also switched to AI related efforts. Not from a lack of imagination but because it was painfully obvious how powerful it was. It's been enough to get by. It's definitely easier to get jobs on Upwork in a trending field. Since I've been pursuing online business for over a decade and built many for others, I am quite aware of the odds of success. What you actually informed me about was only your lack of respect. None of the rest of it was even a tiny bit informative. Perhaps to are projecting this as a way to defend against your poor ability to adapt.
• aristofun 3y ago
  It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future. By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo). I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before. For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me. JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs, unit tests are still unit tests. The fact that now instead of googling a problem you google and gpt it is a minor change in any real world complex engineering context that im aware of. What exactly is obvious to you that im missing?
  • mech422 3y ago
    I agree on the AI stuff ... personally, I think it's going to need 5 years or so just to iron out all the legal and regulatory stuff before the 'next big push' In general, I think you make your money in Tech at the ends.. Either bleeding edge or trailing edge. ATM, I'm working on Rust, serverless, playing with Pijul, keeping an eye on OpenTF, and pulumi. For trailing edge stuff - I figure I'll be the worlds oldest COBOL coder by the time I retire and can use that to fund my retirement :-P
    • Tommah 3y ago
      There are certain aspects of computing that will probably always be around. We'll always need fast compilers that generate fast code -- people don't want slow programs, and programmers don't want to wait for compiles to finish. Relational databases aren't disappearing anytime soon. And as we keep getting smaller and smaller devices, we'll keep shrinking things down, so we'll need new ways of representing and compressing data. The list goes on and on. If you can get comfortable with things like these, you'll always be useful to somebody. (And yes, COBOL will be with us for many years to come. In the next century, we'll probably be emulating IBM mainframes on quantum computers.)
  • p1esk 3y ago
    The obvious thing is gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) will be able to do your job better and faster than you. This will happen in 1-2 years. That doesn’t scare you?
• plasticchris 3y ago
  C worked for the last fifty years or so, I think it has staying power for the next five. But more seriously, just keep learning stuff. New languages, systems, tools, whatever grabs your interest.
• austin-cheney 3y ago
  Not writing JavaScript for money ever again. I switched careers. Now all future jobs will either be in management or require certifications or someone else more naive can have it. My solution in general terms is to go where competence isn’t ambiguous.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    Or ubiquitous. When you are selling a skill that is as common as the ability to write JavaScript, then you aren't selling much, and you're very replaceable. Learning a very niche skill is harder. Finding jobs with very niche skills is harder. But once you've done that you become very hard yo replace. (Your job might go away, but there's seldom outright replacement. ) Plus of course some protection from offshoring.
    • jokethrowaway 3y ago
      Agree on the principle - but management is another very replaceable skill. It may protect you from offshoring because the stakeholders don't want to talk with people in third world countries and want to zoom with someone in a nice office paying 2k rent per month for a studio. It won't save you from AI. We jokingly built a chatbot to write in the style of our product manager and engineering manager and it's shockingly accurate, especially if you consider both figures ask what the stakeholders want and technical feedback to engineers who knows what they're doing and meet the requirements.
      • austin-cheney 3y ago
        Everything is replaceable. My goal is to look for institutional barriers to keep the pretenders out.
  • throwaway167 3y ago
    Management's quite ambiguous.
  • badpun 3y ago
    > My solution in general terms is to go where competence isn’t ambiguous. And you went into management?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• bruce511 3y ago
  Stop following the crowd. Where the crowd is, there are lots of people after your job, and if we're honest, probably better than you. I've had one job my entire career (31 years and counting.) It's very niche tech. I'm good at it. There are maybe 10 other people in the world who can do what I do. And they're all overworked. The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.
  • CountGeek 3y ago
    Are you that engineer that fixed that AS400? Back in the early 2010s, there were like 5 people across, the whole UK who could work on those mainframes.
    • bruce511 3y ago
      Not me :) - but that's the sort of thing I have in mind. I remember mainframe folks in the run up to y2k getting literal "blank cheques" to work on stuff.
  • metabro 3y ago
    Curious how this works out financially though. Following the crowd got people into faang with 500k incomes. Working on something obscure I haven’t seen payoff the same.
    • leetrout 3y ago
      Money aint everything.
      • mock-possum 3y ago
        Sounds like the sort of thing someone with money would say.
        • subtra3t 3y ago
          I think what GP meant was that money, beyond a certain point, means little. Upto that point money does mean a lot, and anybody who denies that has never lived in poverty. What that specific point is, depends on who you're asking. If you ask me (a student in India), that point lies around $50k/year. For me that is an unimaginable amount of money, and I don't believe earning any more than that would result in a significant increase in quality of life. But if you ask someone in USA, you might get a different answer. Maybe for them $300k/year is around where earning more wouldn't necessarily result in a significant benefit. It depends on where you are, who you've been around, and what dreams you have.
• penguinlinux 3y ago
  I am a devops engineer working mostly with platform engineering managing over 80 eks clusters, I am learning more AI an embracing AI, it makes my job much easier and helps me write tooling faster. I notice people at work that resists AI and like to do things the way they have been doing it for years. I wrote an Azure wrapper that helps my team debug kuberntes issues in real time using AI , it also analyzes deployments and makes recommendations and this has caught the attention of teams that are now using my tool to debugg their workloads. My company already is doing a hiring freeze and we have a lot of work so having tools like OpenAI has been invaluable to help me with my daily work.
  • okdood64 3y ago
    > I wrote an Azure wrapper that helps my team debug kuberntes issues in real time using AI , it also analyzes deployments and makes recommendations and this has caught the attention of teams that are now using my tool to debugg their workloads. Can you elaborate on this? Very interested.
• wmoxam 3y ago
  Game has always been the same, provide value and you'll do well.
  • p1esk 3y ago
    How to provide value if gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) can do your job better and faster than you?
    • system2 3y ago
      What can GPT-6 do for real? Just write single-step code? Whoever is writing that prompt will be a low-skilled person to fix their problem or find out whether they are doing right. No GPT will replace developers. Writers, maybe.
    • wmoxam 3y ago
      Use gpt-X as a tool to do your job even better and take on more responsibilities. "AI" tools are at their heart productivity tools. Use them to be more productive so you can focus on higher value activities.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't think it's obvious that the game has changed at all. I plan on doing what I've been doing to stay relevant in my career so far: keeping my skills fresh, tackling new problems, etc.
• mrnotcrazy 3y ago
  I’m taking some time to go back to school and finish my bachelors. I work with a lot of rural ISPs so I think for the moment I’m ok. I might pick up some networking skills. It seems like networking changes slower than server side stuff cause it more often requires hardware upgrades.
• neonlights84 3y ago
  I've been navigating this question myself - in the mechanical engineering world. Much of my background is in product design, particularly sheetmetal enclosures. I grinded through a few different jobs in that space, picking up some skills in CAD Administration, PDM (think engineering document workflows), and programming (mostly VBA and Python). I saw myself moving away from product design/manufacturing into engineering automation... but I kept getting pulled back into designing widgets. In my early career, designing widgets was fun and interesting. Even got some patents. But indecisive customers and overpromising salescritters made the experience extremely frustrating. Some people just love to quibble with designers over minutiae, resulting in delays and overruns. "Sure, the product is functional, but... it doesn't look like what we had in mind." I got laid off this past summer, but lucked out with two competing employment offers. Company A needed a product designer, and they needed a CAD/PDM Administrator as well. Company B needed someone to reverse engineer existing CAD models and program mesh generation scripts for simulation software verification models. In comparing these, I realized I had an opportunity to pivot away from designing new manufactured products - and negotiate for more money in the process. So I picked Company B, even though my skills were probably a better fit for Company A. Since starting my new job, I've found myself lately enjoying lots of downtime. In product development, I was always scrambling to produce and change designs to meet ever-evolving requirements. The design process often trends toward instability and complexity as requirements contradictions arise. In contrast, reverse-engineering naturally reaches a point of stability, and quickly. It's very satisfying doing well-defined modeling tasks and knowing that the tasks are DONE. Future-proofing a tech career is often seen as an exercise in skill-building, focusing on what employers are trying to acquire in new hires. But I think tech workers really need to think about eliminating their career pain points as well. Reducing burnout can open your mind to new career possibilities.
• ivraatiems 3y ago
  I've been asking myself this question a lot, and I don't have a perfect answer, but here is what I am seeing so far: We are moving from a period of time in which engineers were needed to do, essentially, day-to-day grunt work of software development (write this CRUD app, figure out this schema, implement these requirements) to a period of time where engineers will be needed to oversee, design, and manage relatively intelligent tooling that will do those things for us, and then be evaluated on its results. Put another way: Engineers are currently like factory employees at the turn of the 20th century. Lots of manual tasks are needed to keep our "factories" running, tasks that, in the 21st century, robots can do just as well. But that doesn't mean no humans work in factories. Plenty of people do, but what they do are the things that the machines can't be trusted to do alone, or at least, can't be trusted to do alone sufficiently reliably for reasonable cost. But even so, far fewer people work in factories now (as a proportion of the population) than did in the early days of the industrial revolution. It seems to me that engineering will likewise be winnowed down. That means that ultimately even the most valuable engineers won't be as valuable. You won't need as many of them to do the work, and you won't need to pay them as well. If I choose to stay in engineering (which is by no means a guarantee), I think I will need to focus on moving from "day-to-day implementation" into "designing and monitoring the overall approach to systems." At most organizations, this means getting to and being successful in, at minimum, a staff engineering position, preferably higher (e. g. lead/principal). I am nearly there at my current organization, but I don't have the skills to perform at the next level yet. I can probably develop them, but that's also not for certain, and even if I do, I might not like that kind of work. In that case, if I wish to remain in the workforce I will need to change career fields, and find one of the things that won't be automated away by LLMs or similar technology over the next 15-20 years. (For example, contrary to a lot of thinking currently, I think a premium will continue to be placed on genuine human creativity; I don't think AI will eliminate the desire for humans to consume art created by other humans. Any field which involves physically doing - such as the trades, or maybe some kinds of hardware engineering - would also be an okay bet.) Or I could always coast on the coattails of my spouse, who is already in such a field. That might be easier :)
• ulfw 3y ago
  Stay employable? I have been unemployed for 1.5 years. Absolutely NOBODY needs a product management leader anymore. If anything only entry level and I am overqualified to do that (not saying it arrogantly, but companies don't ever consider me stepping 3-4 levels back). Tech is in a slow death spiral.
  • hilux 3y ago
    Check out the book Never Search Alone. Not that I recommend it, but it will lead you to a networking group of lots of product people.
  • switch007 3y ago
    Can you apply your skills to other leadership positions?
  • AznHisoka 3y ago
    They don’t need product management leaders. They need product managers.
    • ulfw 3y ago
      Exactly this. Entry level yes, higher level hell no.
• _smfg 3y ago
  As a design student, I'm curious about what any designers are doing. (Design as in visual, graphic, or interaction)
• whateveracct 3y ago
  Take it a year at a time, and always pay attention to the job market & put out feelers every year or so to gauge where I stand.
• jokethrowaway 3y ago
  Definitely adding generative AI clients on my portfolio, then just using the latest tech I like. I don't take side gigs unless they're AI, Rust or solid.js. The focus is still on making products and live off them though, more than staying employable. Staying employable is a nice side effect of training the "building products" muscle. I don't think it will be too soon but at some point work done by humans will lose any meaning and we'll just divide in people with income/value generating assets and people without. Better be rich by that point.
• hardfriendship 3y ago
  [dead]
• theshrike79 3y ago
  I keep an eye on the trends and kinda dip my toe in a bit so that I know the basics. Like with AI, I've tried Copilot (in the free beta). I've poked around GPT both on the web and using the API. I've tried local LLM models and StableFusion. Not going to go all-in on any of that, but I kinda know what's going on and where the tech is at. Now if someone pays me to take a deeper interest, I already know where to start looking and who to ask for more information. Also: look for the boring stuff. There's a ton of work in the uncool industries. There's software in tractors, mining equipment, smart metering etc. It's not the cool whiz-bang stuff where you can rewrite everything in Rust, but on the other hand it's stable work where the software is just a part of the bigger machine and you're usually not writing code with a fire under your ass. Nobody expects 16 hour work days and there's actual work-life balance.
• d--b 3y ago
  Back in school in 2004, I had to make a choice: go into quantitative finance, the stuff was piping hot, and people there made a lot of money OR follow my interest in AI/neural nets, possibly not making much. I chose finance, then the crises kept hitting. I don't regret it, because I'm still very employable and I did make some money. But to me it's a bit of a missed opportunity. The point is: don't look at what is hype now, look at what could be good in a few years. My guess is that the next huge thing is robotics.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  I work for a company that I think will last, and is good to work for so just hold on tight! I did move over to devops (platform if you prefer) which I think is more evergreen. So knowing both app development, being the person who can configure tailwind on npm, how to do backend queries and set up an ingress controller in kubernetes is kinda a good jack of all trades to have!
• helij 3y ago
  Not sure about your capability but what I see in most of new devs and techs is serious lack of fundamentals. I would start there. Once you tick that box it doesn't really matter what's next. You'll pick it up quickly.
  • austin-cheney 3y ago
    I used to believe this too. It’s completely true, but only a half truth. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are, because in most cases employers are viewing the world as a bell curve and targeting the large population in the center. Being supremely awesome in your skills and capabilities moves you far away from the center of the bell curve. Most employers realize many of the people in that swollen center seriously lack the fundamentals and adapt the environment accordingly, such as lowering barriers of entry and lowering minimally acceptable quality criteria. That is not the environment a top skilled developer will strive in. My goal moving forward is to work in jobs with higher barriers of entry, preferably some manner of institutional barriers.
• nickd2001 3y ago
  "It’s obvious the game has changed" - it's obvious you haven't been in tech all that long. ;) that was a joke answer - no offence intended :) But seriously, I've heard "the game has changed" many, many, many times over the last few decades. Its true. The game is constantly changing. :) "what you all are focusing on to stay employed in tech". - Same answer as its always been. Be reliable, show up, get stories in the Done column. Be friendly, nice, help others when they're stuck, ask for help when you're stuck, do a mixture of work, some with new tech you wanna learn, some on old legacy stuff or things other people don't like so they're grateful you did so they didn't have to and want to hang onto you 'cos you know the codebase. Look after your boss :) People forget to do this. (not being a sycophant, just genuinely making their life easier and trying to be not too much of a PITA to manage). If a job ends up being stressful / non-fun, or you're locked into all old tech with no future, then ask for a change to the role, or move jobs internally or externally.
  • sirspacey 3y ago
    You’ve written an entire book’s worth of advice in a paragraph. Everyone who works in tech or aspires to should read it.
    • nickd2001 3y ago
      Ha ha thanks for the kind comment. :) Well I ought to know some things, been in the industry that long. BTW, despite the above tactics I haven't become financially rich from Tech - probably could have done if that was a priority, but , that's my other piece of advice to people, prioritise happiness, fulfilment and relationships with others especially family and friends, over money, 'cos "You can't take it when you go" , and people matter more. The wonderful luxury of working in tech is, salaries being what they are, you can take the middle path, balance life and work, while no-one's gonna starve. :)
  • j7ake 3y ago
    Sounds like great specific actionable advice under the general advice of “be worth more than the money they pay you”.
• jessenaser 3y ago
  Do what no one else can do. What no one thinks is possible, or worth their time, but you know it is. The future you can bet on is the one you create.
  • em-bee 3y ago
    that alone is not enough. i am already doing that. problem is, it is difficult to sell, so i am struggling to make money doing it.
• all_usernames 3y ago
  I don't know but I'm 25 years into my career and awk, sed, and grep are still valuable skills across many of the roles I work with. I've often found fundamentals to be just as important, or more important, than chasing the trends.
• sandreas 3y ago
  - Understanding git (deeply, including PR, cherry-pick, merge, etc.) - Using modern tools (ChatGPT, Phing, Copilot but also GH Actions, docker, etc.) - Workflow improvement (Faster typing, how to use keyboard shortcuts, write scripts for automation) - Debugging and measurement (Finding issues quickly, Analyse performance, etc.) - Basic infrastructure understanding (Networking, Orchestration, Deployment, CI, etc.) - Automated Testing (How to write Unit-Tests efficiently to save time ignoring all the TDD 95% coverage bullshit) - Learning Markdown (How to write good technical documentation quickly) - Learn concepts, not Frameworks[1] (tinker with other languages, command line, GUI, Web, etc.) - Basic Operating System and Hardware understanding (Tanenbaum: Modern Operating Systems, drivers, etc.) [1]: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/learn-concepts-not-frameworks/ https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/learn-concepts-not-framewor...