In the workplaces of the past, talented knowledge workers had two ways of getting ahead: by their work product (docs, slides, code, papers, etc) and by their interpersonal skills in close quarters office environments. Lunches in the office. F2F presentations to the bosses. Water cooler chit chat. This was both wonderful and miserable, depending on whether you were good at it, liked to do it, and were in the in-groups where it could make a difference. (Sadly, not everyone was, but let's park that for another long thread.)
In the workplaces of today, you still havr the work product, but opportunities for face to face interaction in physical space are vastly reduced. You may think this is wonderful, and for many workers, it is, but it does make it much harder to get noticed and advance in your career. You are just a face on a Teams call. Your personable-ness is flattened by the intermediary screen and technology.
Your challenge, then, is to learn screen politics. How to come across well with a screen between you and progress in your career. I don't think we know collectively how to do this yet.
There is tremendous amount of value in working with people who can jump in and out of projects, with the associated cost. But more than that, it also helps you bring a different approach to problem solving, one gleaned from turning the problem over in multiple ways. This is an adjunct to critical thinking.
Building for the long term.
Everyone wants to do things quickly. That’s hyperscale hangover. while you can make a decent whiskey in just a year or two, the really good stuff requires more time.
Practice saying “no” to good ideas that excite you.
Skill does not matter. You need the minimum and no more. It doesn't hurt to be exceedingly competent, but not necessary if you want to climb the ladder. If you want to be a one single thing and not rise in the company, but only interested in increasing your particular skill, like programming, that's cool. But the rest of this doesn't apply to you.
Communications and being able to meet the right people in the company matter the most to climb the corporate ladder.
You didn't come out of the womb programming or doing double-entry accounting. You have to learn all those by an investment of time. In the same manner, you can learn interpersonal skills, but it is just as time-consuming as learning programming and one has to really work at it. But it can be learned. There are a ton of videos online.
There are tricks. Like when you first start a job, you do not make friends willy-nilly with the first person who talks to you. You take your time, figure out the power structure in a company - who the powerful people are. Then you set out step by step how to meet them. You can't go around your boss, so that is part of the game is to make yourself noticed in indirect ways. If your bosses bosses boss talks to you first, you are not going around the chain of command - you can't just not answer the person. Depending on how big the company is, it can take years to manuever up the chain. I'm not saying to do this in a dickish way where you backstab or even frontstab people. All you are doing is being sociable, seeing what has to be done, and are noticed by those who need to notice you.
Working where you bring dollars in the door is super important. Rainmakers are everyone's friend. So if you are a computer programmer, and can help the sales and marketing team become more effective to make more money, that's a winner.
It's amazing, when you meet the right people, they pluck you out of nowhere and zoom you right on up the ladder. It's happened to me a few times.
But you have to know how to be sociable, which means sociable to that person. If they are an introvert, you need to know and understand it and adjust yourself to that person, for example. That's what it means to be sociable. Not to be a braying jackass who wants to be the center of attention & holding court.
Of course, this is irrelevant if you work in a startup with 5 people.
I also think that true SRE skills will further expand, way beyond for what Google designed such roles.
Security in all areas will also continue growing in human skills demand. Creativity in this space is crucial.
For the next 5 years, any team that is big enough to have a collection of multiple restful endpoints and services, GraphQL is just generally superior. Federated GraphQL is worth investigating as well. For performance, look into the various protocols that are superior to json over http.
For frontend, if we're looking at a 5-10 year timeframe, I think it's still the wild west. I still suspect that React, while a good evolution over what came before, is still something of a conceptual impedance mismatch. Whatever model is best for reconciling UI concerns with network communication data flow, I'm not sure we've really identified the right primitives to design on top of. We're still rewriting to find the lower-level approach that really fits.
For AI, we're really distracted. We're on this road to engineer more and more convincing simulations of intelligence without really tackling intelligence, and we're going to eventually realize it's asymptotic and will hit another dry spell. When we get back to focusing on not how to make computers smarter, but instead how to use them to make people and societies smarter, then we'll make fast progress again. But this will require some political realignments. I think this is more of a 20-25 year timeframe. You can make a lot of money in the next ten years if you get into AI with the intention of finding even more effective ways to trick or con people in the short term, but the overall impact will be damaging.
Finally, I have no experience in this arena, but I think VR/AR/MR is going to be absolutely huge. Developers are going to have much more opportunity to play with this stuff than with machine learning, which will be part of it but at the lower level of libraries and device firmware. Integrating that tech with development tools, end-user experience, etc - that will be massive.
The first three are general skills that are, what I consider, mandatory life skills. Some learn young, others once old regardless skills are not just to learn and apply but to maintain as well. The last two are largely added because I think we are in interesting times and the macro view is there will be opportunities. Some will be good and some will bad, within your individual control I think those two skills will be more important while you navigate the times you live in.
I think prompting may become a general skill superior in status to the early divide between those who could and could not use a PC/the web(which I lived through in the 90's).
This means that you're probably looking at buying land. As an alternative, consider a camper van, modulo certain upgrades to security, or even a boat.
Get a ham radio operator's license and get comfortable with the relevant tech stack. Critically, buy or make an antenna, as big and as high-up as possible. (Note: consider this if/when evaluating land)
Now, get some solar panels, a nice good old fashioned gas genny, and, since you're throwing down money, a fancy big-ass battery pack, all to support your radio gear.
Boom. Now you've got a thing that's socially useful that you can do (comms), which should allow you to exchange labor for food (say).
You relay messages from survivors to their loved ones and announcements from any remaining governing body. You help coordinate rescues and play a role in reducing human suffering, although of course, by this point, you're so numbed by the endless grind of monotonically-increasing misery that this sort of consideration seems to date from another era entirely, back when you felt good about eating vegan and sorting your recycling. But those years are gone.
Imagine worrying about what it is good to do. The luxury. The sotted luxury.
Get good at living on 10% of whatever your income is today.
Get good at welding, so you'll be better equipped to repair your shipping container.
Get good at some basic homesteading capabilities in case you have to exit the wider society and provide for yourself.
Get good at finding a way to go live somewhere that is 50-100 years behind wherever you are so you are hopefully able to ride out the remainder of your time here in relative comfort.
My top few:
- practice reading code that is older you're comfortable working with, that you did not write and have no prior knowledge base for - designing systems that are easy to replace; no matter what tech comes along, new tech will come after, and we're not going to live in the world where X lasts for Y time, it will be Y/c (some fraction) - writing well, that's tailored to specific audiences, aided by whatever tools are available (spell check, grammerly, chatgpt, etc) - as far as tech itself goes, I'm hopeful about edge computing, where performance and power is near today's level, for an extended time
I see a lot of doomsdayism here. I recommend avoiding that, it's a tough and awful away to live.
There are some good pointers here [1].
As usual, the only 4 skills that truly matter in this world are:
* listening and empathy - being able to actually hear others in a way you can actually help them, and then having the capacity to do so
* critical thinking - being able to produce a real problem, understand a space with lots of ambiguity and subjectivity, overcome cognitive biases, identify and reject misinformation, and generally be logically thorough and adaptive to changes in information.
* creativity - seeking novelty, practicing self-expression, exhibiting curiosity, inventing, innovating, designing, dreaming.
* grit - perseverance in the face of failure, recasting failure as opportunities to enhance the skills above, being resolute in purpose, embracing change and uncertainty and risk.
From those spring our future.
Perhaps ironically these are the traits that will be the hardest behaviors to "emerge" from an AI, although they certainly have capacity to emulate these behaviors.
I figure all that bureaucratic stuff that hasn't been replaced by code won't be able to be replaced with AI.
Also, I'm moving towards security stuff. After a while the above starts to get a big to granular, and I want to work at a more macro scale.
"Skills" don't really give you an edge at anything. You're expected to learn those on the job. Nor does surface level knowledge of a trendy topic. You have to have a deep specialty if you want it to count for anything.
Build community with the people physically nearby.
Share knowledge and experience with said community.
Ask for help.
Pretty broad term but if I had to guess, we’re gonna see an absolutely ginormous deluge of data and being able to build/operate/reason about distributed systems will continue to be important (as it has been for the past couple of decades or so).
> The returns to factual knowledge are falling, continuing a trend that started with databases, search engines and Wikipedia. It is no longer so profitable to be a lawyer who knows a large amount of accumulated case law. Instead, the skills of synthesis and persuasion are more critical for success.[1]
As well as being simple “exceptional”, returns to being extroverted in the workplace will increase. Those who can show they’re distinguishable from bots will prosper.
Tl;dr: focus on interpersonal skills and persuasion.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/wh...
Disclaimer: I'm a contributor to it.