[bruce511]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

It sounds like you found your ikigai. Wishing you continued job stability, satisfaction, income, delight, health and peace. It's wonderful to read things like this.

For anyone else reading who is unhappy, uncertain or struggling, I hope you find the same for yourselves too. I probably don't know you, but there's complete strangers out there who want good things for you too. Don't give up.

[metabro]

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.

[bruce511]

It varies. Some specialist skills pay -really- well. You don't really hear about them because they're, well, niche.

Equally, yes, some folk rose up through the ranks at fang (or better yet fintech) and make mountains of loot. For each success there's a fair pile of failures though.

To rise up through those ranks, typically you need to make sacrifices. Long working hours, minimal time off, stand-by weekends, emails at night, and (imo) suffering the bs that comes with corporate jobs.

Building your own business are all those things too, but without the corporate bs.

The interesting thing about 500k though is asking what you can do on 500k, you can't do on 300. Or 200. Or in lots of the world, 50.

Time left for relationships, children, holidays, other interests and so on are important to me. So I'm prepared to balance those with raw income. I'm not making anything like 500k per year, but I've turned down fang recruiters because all the money in the world can't make up for what else it would cost me.

[metabro]

You don’t really have to rise up the ranks to make 500k. That’s a competitive offer for a senior engineer or where a senior with a mediocre offer will end up with stack refreshers and stock appreciation in a couple of years withouts any promotion. It sounds wild but is true.

Also, many of the roles are just 40hr work weeks. Not that much more stress than a 150k a year job in my experience.

You are right that after a certain point more money doesn’t give you more utility in the present. However, it does buy you time in the future given the capital that you are bound to accumulate and compound.

[leetrout]

Money aint everything.

[mock-possum]

Sounds like the sort of thing someone with money would say.

[subtra3t]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

Here's a good question: if there was a sensible UBI for every human being, would you still do the work you do and still work just as hard?

The answer is going to be different for everybody. I hope people find their ikigai.

[marssaxman]

There's more to life than income.

[CountGeek]

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]

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.

[Tommah]

I would be really interested to hear about what you do. If you don't want to share it in public, you can email me at the address in my profile. I'm always looking for a niche, but I haven't found one that has stuck.

[system2]

He won't tell you. Nobody would tell well-paying niche to avoid competition.

[bruce511]

Competition never hurts :). Quite the opposite, I spend a lot of time training others in the field, and passing work in their direction.

I can't go into detail here though, as that would dox me, and I'd prefer my HN person not to mix with my IRL person.

The thing about niches is that you don't really "look for them" - you stumble over them as your skills develop. You -could- learn my job, of course, but it would take a lot of time and effort.

Part of what I'm saying I guess is that I am where i am because of a long career, amd I've accumulated a lot of experience, which is hard to pass on.

[em-bee]

i know what you mean with not going into detail. i only need to list all my favorite programming languages for someone to be able to identify me.

but, if i may ask, is that work that can be done 100% remote? would it make sense for an older software developer to pick that up? i am a generalist with lots of experience and i'd love to train up in a niche field to help me find work.

if you think that makes sense id appreciate if you could ask your IRL person to email me :-)

[bruce511]

Depends on uour definition of "older". In this niche, no, being an older worker would be detrimental. The root underlying problem (in any niche really) are people aging out the system, leaving a lot more work to be done by fewer people. 40 would be OK. 60 would be too old.

Clearly you -could- learn it now, but the effort would be immense. In the same way that you could learn to be a doctor, but at some point it becomes too much like hard work.

Also, unfortunately, there's a cost to entry. It's proprietary software, and you'd need around $5000 to get kitted out. Plus a lot of time.

On the other hand, yes it can be done remotely.

[meiraleal]

> if you think that makes sense id appreciate if you could ask your IRL person to email me :-)

He just explained that he has no intention to dox himself plus with 31 years of experience he is one of the few in his field. Do you think you would be able to catch up and be able to stand your ground in this market with less than say 10 years? It wouldn't make sense and you probably wouldn't risk doing the change so even if he thought it made sense to send you an email, it would be for nothing. You can still get his advice and use it for the specialization you can get based on your current experience.

[em-bee]

sending a private email is not necessarily doxing himself, at least not publicly (which is what doxing usually implies)

besides, the email would not have to even reference this thread. anyone reading who is in a similar situation could be responding and i would not be able say if it is the same person.

for the experience part he said he is training new people, not knowing what the field is, the question is if it is something a developer could specialize in. the answer could be "no". for all we know the specialization could be in bee-keeping.

so for that matter, if anyone has recommendations for a software developer on what to specialize in that they do not want to share publicly, please contact me.

[system2]

Yet you still avoided saying what your niche is. Not even a clue. :)

[metabro]

You are assuming it’s well paying.

[mouzogu]

> The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.

disagree. fewer jobs. less turnover. like yourself - 3 decades.

better go for the next big thing. whether AI, VR or something.

long as it has a barrier to entry. even just complexity.

[gogobio]

I heavily disagree. To preface - I have a recent and a successful PhD in Comp Sci. During grad school I've known active grads who jump onto the "next big thing". Well, long story short - almost every "next big thing" eventually dies down, every single one of them ended up being a generic Software Engineer after heavily specializing in the "next big thing" because, unfortunately, the cycle of the next big thing just keeps on rolling and within 3-5 years the current "big thing" may become entirely irrelevant, which ended up being the case for them. I understand this might not be very helpful, but I suggest doing the footwork to figure out the intersection of something you truly have an interest in as well as a tech with a potential and specialize in that.

[metabro]

Well they’re all employed and given they chased hype they probably are in a tech hub and therefore I’d expect them to be earning above median for their cohort and still working on interesting stuff. How many of these assumptions are wrong?

[em-bee]

when i was young, being in a niche area allowed me to get jobs on 3 different continents and travel too. but eventually, that was not enough. i had to leave that niche and accept a python job so that i could work and live in china. it was great while it lasted, but in the long term it proved to limiting because the jobs weren't where i wanted to be (if there were any jobs at all. i stopped looking)

the problem is of course to figure out what has potential, and what it takes to get into that field.

[internetter]

> better go for the next big thing. whether AI, VR or something.

The people on the edge create the next big thing