[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