[patio11]

When I look around me at conspicuously happy people I see a) cooking, b) exercise (less of a skill than a lifestyle but there you go), and c) a wide, wide variety of X plus Y such that you're better at Y than anyone who can do better at X and vice versa, for X and Y which are chosen to be commercially valuable.

Professionally, if you want a skill with a stupid amount of leverage, public speaking is pretty high up there for white collar workers.

If you're technical there are many, many options for adding one more arrow to the quiver. My specific recommendations would depend on your career goals, but for generic HNers, mastering the deployment story for your stack of choice (DevOps is more than a bit buzzwordy but some of the tools available now are just fantastic -- Ansible, Consul, Docker, the AWS stack, etc) would be up there. For people who are more comfortable on backends, learn React, which will take you through a nice swathe of modern front-end tools and practices. For folks who work more on the frontend, maybe Rails if you see CRUD/apps in your future or Go if you enjoy systems programming more.

[Omnipresent]

The X and Y analogy reminds me of a tweet from Josh Willis about Data Scientists [1]

"Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician."

[1] https://twitter.com/josh_wills/status/198093512149958656

[solutionyogi]

Could you please given an example or two for X + Y? I am not following that.

[patio11]

For me the original plan was bilingual (English/Japanese) plus engineering but I ended up getting more career mileage out of being able to program rings around most SaaS companies' marketing teams. (A high bar that is not.)

You can pick many, many things here, though. Combining programming (any stack which lets you ship things) plus any other white collar profession works well, too. Try embedding in anybody's workday and just sit on your hands and watch the insanity as they do any data-processing work, for example. It's insane how much of day-to-day accounting work exists because of the lack of 50 lines of Ruby.

[robinhoode]

In my experience I've found that you can automate a lot of white collar work if the rest of the business will become organized enough to make that happen. If they aren't collecting or ingesting the right data already, then the hard part is changing their behavior, not writing the code.

[lsniddy]

could you elaborate on what you do when "programming rings around most SaaS companies' marketing teams" ? Thanks!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

His blog does a really good job of explaining this. And you'll probably learn a lot of other stuff. It's worth getting sucked into kalzumeus :-)

[elros]

Let's say, a coder with significant law knowledge, such that he knows more about law than all the other coders and more about code than all the lawyers, in a given company.

[ellisv]

I think this is a good example. I would just add that it helps to be able to deflect when the lawyers come to you with all of their technology problems and coders come to you with legal problems (or whatever appropriate mix of skills and problems). You don't want to end up having to fix all the printers.

[shareit]

+1