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by bruce511 888 days 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.

1 comments

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.

Everything is replaceable. My goal is to look for institutional barriers to keep the pretenders out.