Learn how to share your ideas and opinions in a concise, engaging way. Learn to advocate for (or against) something in a way that will have people engaged (first point: never be combative, people will mostly dismiss you as immature or emotionally compromised).
Yeah it doesn't sound like a "tech skill" but it absolutely is and I think too many "tech" people severely undervalue it, preferring instead pure "lone wolf" kind of skills that don't require the squishy, dirty aspects of dealing with other humans (speaking from personal experience here).
You can accomplish a lot on your own with the right talent and skills. But you can always accomplish more if you can engage more people.
Maintain a blog of interesting things you've learned, hiring managers will value the demonstrated writing skills.
You want to be an engineer at a small startup:
* Typescript and be familiar with common libraries and frameworks. I believe TS is going to become more common everywhere, frontend, backend, DevOps, etc.
* Learn python if you don't already know it
* Learn some kind of data science stack you can use to analyze small data sets (under 100GB). Pandas+numpy+scipy, Julia, whatever. Just be good at answering data questions and building small models.
Big company:
* Writing and communication. Practice writing about projects you've worked on and write down the projects you want to build with enough details that a junior engineer could build it.
* Be aware of how much companies are paying and be willing to leave for better compensation, work-life balance, or responsibilities. Practice interviewing.
* Read all the major postmortems from incidents at a big tech company and try to find patterns related to your area or part of the stack.
1) Data infrastructure. This is the inner loop of a lot of tech companies. Speed it up, reduce the cycle time, reduce the AWS spend and you’re a god.
2) Data science. Provide better insights into a domain or its customers, or as above, provide a better platform for others to experiment and discover the same, and again, be worshipped.
3) Customer success. Discover that your business is in a local maxima but could shift to provider vastly more value for customers, ditto.
4) Hiring. Forget how great you are, if you can hire great(er) people then you are an almost exponential factor in your company’s success.
1) Continuing to stoke the flames of curiosity and discipline within yourself so that you genuinely love to learn and get slightly better every day without fear of perpetual burnout.
2) Confidence to ask questions in group settings so that you can quickly get to a collective understanding of the problem space and challenges at play.
3) Communication. Litmus test is being able to present what you're doing in an understandable and approachable manner that can get the right people engaged.
And to answer the spirit of your question more directly, some technologies that my team have found to be super valuable:
A) Hasura (GraphQL/ORM layer to interface with Postgres)
B) Pulumi (TypeScript IaaC)
C) React (nothing super new here, it just continues to be incredibly valuable to us)
D) NestJS (TypeScript-friendly framework that is like Angular for the backend)
I'm thinking that having experience with a capability based operating system such as Fuchsia or Genode as a daily driver will be quite valuable, as you'll be ahead of the adoption curve. I hope to have this happen myself next year.
If you haven't already, I recommend doing the Advent of Code puzzles, all of them, in whatever language you are comfortable in. Redo them in whatever language you want to learn, ad infinitum. I personally haven't gotten through all them in Pascal yet. I did last year in real time, and except for day 19, and current in 2021.
I suggest you learn a little bit of practical machining, that done in machine shops. The process of using machine tools to make things, otherwise known as subtractive manufacturing. I'd also suggest you learn additive manufacturing as well. It is good to understand how the atoms around you came to be configured as they are.
There you go, 3 things to learn for 2022.
Learn stuff that will enable you to be better at what you are doing. This might be
* tools, techniques for development
* techniques for learning
* understanding of the underlying systems
* understanding of the processes involved
or you can choose any from https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
"Tech skills" is an enormously broad category on its own. You provide no context, so there's no way to narrow it down.
What do you want to do in your career? Answer that question first.
Low risk: React
Medium risk: Android Jetpack or Flutter
High risk: OpenAI Codex
Can't go wrong with any of those.
VR
Blockchain
Smart contracts
k8s
k3s
k9s
No-code
Web Assembly
Quantum Computing
GPT-3