[muzani]

You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns.

Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late.

Just go for things that actually excite you. For me, it's GPT-3 today. It's too early for job openings, but mature and impactful enough that it feels like a secret weapon. I adopted Kotlin before Google officially did, because it was cutting down lines of code by half.

No matter how boring you are, there should be things that actually excite you as an expert, and those are the only ones worth investing in early. Since you already browse HN, you shouldn't worry about missing out on them.

[brailsafe]

> Many people go in at the peak of hype where it's "overpriced" and lose out. Even if it's a good stack, you won't be as good as the people who have years of experience in it now. It's too late

But what if that is the case, and also there aren't many other options because the tech reached a critical mass. Do you try and catch up, or do you quit, or somewhere in the middle?

For example, I don't really have much React experience, and now the entire market is basically React. It's not hard, I know at least enough to get going reasonably well, but I probably don't know as much as some bootcamper who graduated 2 years ago and now their 2 years of React is considered more highly than 5-8 years of various other things.

[muzani]

Like other investments, it's good to check whether it's overpriced or underpriced. Supply and demand will always change, and so will the value.

One hint of oversupply is when everyone does it. I don't mean there's a lot of jobs, but when your farmer uncle is telling you to learn React the same way they'd tell you to go to law school or buy Bitcoin.

A hint of a bubble is when it's expensive and people try to sell it off to the next sucker, normally in the form of classes. When bootcamps are cropping up everywhere and there's FOMO, that's a good hint that it's a really bad time.

I think this is where time in the market matters too. Bitcoin price history is an interesting analogy. If you bought at the top and held through the dip, you'd be ahead of those who never came in.

Android was similar for me. It dropped as hybrid, RN, and Flutter were trending and there was a dry spell for 3 years where there were few native jobs. Then companies like Airbnb were hitting a barrier on RN, plus Android Jetpack was introduced. Now the Android skillset is valued highly, especially those who bought the dip (learned Jetpack+Kotlin). It's still trending hard now that Jetpack Compose puts it on par with Flutter so I'll keep investing into it.

The other thing to look at is when something peaks, a lot of things crop up that don't actually make things better. This is around the time people complain about frameworks and stuff. Android had RxJava, JS had CoffeeScript. So you want to avoid investing into these kinds of things.

[dankoncs]

I don't want to derail the parent thread, so let me ask you: what job skills are "low risk" for you? Can you give a couple of examples, please?

Thank you! :)

[muzani]

Sales is the lowest risk job tech related skill I know of; it works even if we were hit by an apocalypse and had no electricity. In all likelihood, we'll still be making tools and selling those tools. It helps you to think in the problem/business domain too. So you're not simply learning PHP to build a website, you're doing it to say, help people find hotels.

It works on your resume, it works for job searching, it helps with getting promotions (proving yourself useful), and it works with landing a higher salary without negotiation. You still can't sell crap. So you need a good product (i.e. yourself, your skill) worth selling. But it complements any other skill you have.

There's also communication skill in general. How to refine ideas into denser, cleaner formats that people and AI can understand. This works for sales, and it works for code.

Tech-wise, I can't say. The nature of tech is that it's very high risk. If you've had a look at how GPT-3 is engineered [1], it makes you question whether algorithms and OO will be a useful skill in the future. Sam Altman expects us to hit AGI within 2025 [2]. He's probably being a little optimistic, like every other programmer, so let's double the estimate and say we have until 2030. Codex itself scored #96 when pitted against 9000+ humans in a coding challenge [3]. So whatever you pick, it should be fairly AI-proof.

Data will be around, and anything that deals with data will be helpful. Even if you could tell AI to do whatever, it has to pull data from somewhere. Spreadsheets are great. Databases will be around for a long time. The top 3 most used DBs or so use some variation of SQL.

There will also need to be some kind of front end for data for people (and even AI) to use. Low/no-code has been around forever but there's always a domain it can't solve. Something specialist like Shopify, Magento, WordPress that solves a problem millions of people have. If you want something that combos well with higher risk work, you can learn UI/UX.

Again, low risk, low returns. The absolute lowest risk is food. Everyone needs to eat. Farming and cooking will keep you from starving, but probably won't take you much higher than that.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#prompts-as-programming [2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1081584255510155264 [3] https://challenge.openai.com/codex/leaderboard

[cultofmetatron]

> You have to "invest" in a low risk one that pays the bills. Then go for things that are medium risk, high returns.

This is why I started as a javascript programmer. These days I code almost exclusively in elixir but that wastn't before spending. lot of time learning elixir on the side while nodejs and react paid my bills.

My current big bet is rust and more math heavy stuff like ML and graphics which don't go obsolete so fast

[dankoncs]

Out of curiosity, why? Perspective projection is based off of an old insight from hundreds of years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera

Projective geometry and the perspective projection matrix (extrinsic and intrinsic parameters of your modeled camera) is basically the "mathified" version of that. Or just "perspective drawing", as artists used it for 100+ years by now.

In my opinion, computer graphics is basically applied math (or linear algebra). (You even don't need linear algebra or matrices to render stuff on the screen, but it will be painful to keep track of what's going on.)

Math hardly dies off, it seems. Maybe some methods change. Like calculating results by using some geometry and measuring its length.

However, unless we don't have any need for projecting something from 3D (world/scene) to 2D (image, monitor, photo, photosensitive sheet, ...), I think we can count on it for a long time.

What changes might be some algorithms. Earlier, we used the "edge walking" algorithm to fill out triangles. Now, we use edge equations that tell you whether an image point is inside a triangle or not. But they do essentially the same, namely, filling out a triangle.

Also, things like the Phong model may stick as well.

There are other methodologies, that are basically still based off of the pinhole camera model. In ray tracing, you shoot rays into the scene and check whether they intersect an object. If it intersects, then you color that pixel with the intersected object's defined color. Otherwise, you leave it out and move on pixel by pixel. So the shooting of the rays from the camera to the scene is basically the reversal of the pinhole camera where light enters the hole and "colors" a photosensitive sheet of paper.

At least this is my understanding of it.

Just learn math, math, math, and you will be fine. Math is the lingua franca for engineering and science, so learn it and understand the concepts from those other fields/branches.

[cultofmetatron]

I don't think we're disagreeing. the fact that math doesn't change is exactly why I'm saying it won't go obsolete