What's a lucrative niche technical skill you can learn on your own?

Question

A lot of technical skills require access to enterprise systems to develop, or years of experience in a domain, or access to client data to learn how to handle real-world scaling issues and real-world edge cases.Is there a well-paying in-demand technical skill that you can learn alone, remotely?This used to be React (or Vue, in my case). You could get very good, just hacking on your own projects. And it was in demand and paid well, before the market got saturated (and before the end of the era of free money).Can you think of a niche, highly in-demand technical skill that an average person, learning on their own, can pick up and start offering now?

qbxk · Accepted Answer

I have found that very few developers care to learn about cloud infra and deployment best practices, but the skills are in high-demand (though AI could be putting that on the downtrend, it's so critical that having a human in the loop will still remain likely for some time)Learn how to use AWS cheaply and effectively, or GCP or Azure. But probably AWS.

profsummergig · Answer

After seeing all that Blender could do, I used believe that learning 3D modeling/animation could be a very useful skill. And it's free, OSS, etc.However, it has a very steep learning curve, and I'm not sure how generative AI queers the pitch.

Leftium · Answer

Machine Learning seems to be a hot technical skill that is in demand almost everywhere and pays very well. Korean companies are poaching ML engineers from the US and paying nearly SF salaries without the SF cost of living.
It's fueled by the LLM "AI" hype, so not sure how long the demand will last.
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One of my friends thinks Salesforce is her ticket to a better career, but I'm not convinced...
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Svelte(Kit) is very niche. The DX is very nice. While React has the quantity of openings, it seems Svelte has the quality openings. At least I found one of my best clients via the Svelte community.

purple-leafy · Answer

Yes - chrome extensions or other browser extensions, mobile apps, vscode extensions.
A rare skill/environment for people to work in, but it is lucrative.
The first piece of software I sold was a browser extension. It was sold for about 1/5 of my salary but the time commitment was about 1/50th of my salary.
I’m working on more browser extensions and currently working on one in the LLM space.
And because most browser extensions are very small, or basic or crap quality - if you can build something of any real complexity and usefulness you are pretty far ahead of the common developer making extensions
Oh also - LLMs are terrible at understanding browser extensions and how they work and what they are capable of, so you are pretty safe from AI

comprev · Answer

In my experience (nearly 20yr in tech now) may Devs AND Ops struggle with implementing observability.
The sheer amount of "things" that can be monitored and logged on modern SaaS applications can be overwhelming and people seem to default to the "switch everything on and then decide" mentality.
As you can probably guess... this leads to even more confusion... and has a negative impact on their original goal.
My recommendation would be to learn how to create useful observability that benefits both Devs and Ops. The greater the overlap in a Venn diagram, the greater the success at resolving issues together - and NOT pointing the finger at the other party.
Over the years I have done a few gigs which focused on observability and they have been the most lucrative too.
It turns out companies are more than willing to pay top dollar if it means their teams work _together_ much better.

horsellama · Answer

kdb

imglorp · Answer

Cobol