[madaxe_again]

On your old car, you can just take it apart and see how it works. Don’t have the part? Improvise. It’s heavily skill-based, and a little knowledge will take you a long way. As long as you know your fundamental toolchains, you can make any part, do any job.

On your new car, it’s a series of black boxes, cables, and tubes - you don’t know and don’t care what happens inside the boxes, just what goes in, and what comes out. It’s heavily knowledge based - you need to know an awful lot about the boxes and how to work with them - but nobody expects you to machine your own parts. If one isn’t made that suits your purposes, you have to go to an old car guy.

The skillsets are similar but different. To be clear, I really am talking about cars and mechanics here - you won’t find many who can fix up both a 1960 and a 2021 motor. You’ll find plenty who can do one or the other, however.

And yeah - the same applies to developers.

[DieAgainAli]

Being an ex-mechanic I second this. You HAVE to specialise otherwise you’ll be left with the simple competitive jobs like tyre replacement.

I specialised in new vehicles and then you have specialise in brand to actually know whats going on and how to fix said black boxes and systems.

My reason for training to become a software engineer was mainly because I felt like the knowledge and on-going training you need to retain/constantly learn was not worth the money earned.

Instead now I earn my bread from what was my hobby, essentially the same work ethic as far as knowledge is concerned just less back breaking to put into practice.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I like to read comments from non IT people on HN, It's awesome that you were able change careers across different domains and still transfer skills.

[TacticalCoder]

On new cars one that recently got me is this: they don't even have spare tires anymore.

I blew a tire on my car and due to its unconventional size and delays I had to wait 3 weeks for new tires to arrive.

Then, during those three weeks, wife's car blew a tire too. Gigantic hole in the side of the tire: probably a defect back from when we bought the car that eventually made the tire blow (I kinda noticed it when we bought the car but the official dealership told me the car had been inspected and the tires were fine).

Thankfully it's a BMW with "run flat" tires: even if you blow a tire you can still drive up to 50 mph for up to 80 miles (officially, you can always try your luck too) on that blow / totally deflated tire.

But yup, even something which was as normal as having a spare tire in your car and being able to swap it yourself (something I've done several times in my life: for me and to help others) is a long gone skill.

[fragmede]

Some of that's down to the internal combustion engine being this insane, complex mechanical device, with 160 years of evolution on top of it. In comparison, electric motors, are much simpler. I'm sure that all of the technology in an EV 60 years from now will be amazingly advanced, but at least for now, an EV has no PCV valve to replace, no timing belt to synchronize a crankshaft and the camshaft; no O2 sensors.

[Retric]

Both batteries and electric motors are far older than cars and aren’t getting more complicated any time soon.

Infotainment etc impact both equally so it’s clear EV’s will just be simpler than ICE’s coming out in the same year.