Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

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The best insurance against age is to find some domain, and excel at that. At 40, it's not so good if your top claim in CV is "I know C++ in an out".

"I was part of a team delivering product X, Y and Z which produced this much revenue for our company and which provided this and this value to our clients. I'm experienced contributor in domain W, and am comfortable in providing value using technologies A and B." is much better.

That is, in corporate-ese, where it's all about value and revenue. Learn to explain your value, and forge a career that you can explain in terms of value. As an engineer you create value, but no one else is going to help you capture slices of that value financially - you need to do it yourself. It's not 'selling out', it's about being smart with your finances. Your skills are an asset, and if you don't know how to capture value from your output someone else will.

At 37, a software engineer, I'm pretty sure my career is more or less secure. I do things which I find interesting, but I make sure as well that I can explain my contributions in economic terms, should the need arise to find new employment. I'm not very wealthy, but neither do I need to stress out about money.

Lots of people in big companies specialize in things they think are domain specific but are really company specific, they become redundant and cannot get a similar position.

Odd to pick c++. If you are very well versed in c++ you could get a well paid job in 100s of places.

I should have defined domain better, my bad. Domain as in e.g. 'real time graphics'. True, one needs to understand what it takes to have true domain specific experience and not just 'company X widget specific.

I haven't been looking for a job in a long while so C++ might have been a bit non-obvious example. There are lots of positions where C++ alone is worthless without basic engineering level understanding of linear algebra, and it's harder to find peoples for those roles. Hence, the roles are less disposable (as long as there is a market for the product).

> "I know C++ in an out".

I know what you mean, but this was a bad example. People who really know c++ are having to turn jobs down right now. Fintech is all over my c++ acquaintances.

Your advice about clear economic terms is spot on for resumes at any age. You have to link to numbers and then try to link to dollars.

"Developed a Python API for reporting." -- boring

"Developed a Python API that handled X amount of data, with Y amount of request/s and delivered Z reports/month that in turn saved/made the company $U/year." -- this checks the tech boxes and the managers/owners box of dollars delivered.

"... this was a bad example. People who really know c++ are having to turn jobs down right now. Fintech is all over my c++ acquaintances."

Yeah, maybe some easier language would have been a better example of dangerously shallow knowledge base.

The basic theme was to give a financial valuation to a knowledge base - in your example, I presume a software engineer who had financial experience and could explain his contribution in financial terms would still have an edge in negotiating a compensation over the one who didn't :) ?

Not just negotiating compensation, but they could actually be more valuable to the company. The engineer who is always wondering 'what am I contributing to the bottom line' will make decisions that typically are more company focused. A bit sarcastic example ;) is as an engineer thinking about work to do or argue to get done. Do they rewrite some existing functionality in the latest js framework of the day or add a new feature that may lead to new sales?

By specializing in a domain, you live and die by it. It usually happens anyways, but it isn't all upside.

Domain as in 'aerospace', 'construction', 'finance', 'computational geometry'... If any of those die software is kinda pointless anyway.

Those are too broad. For aerospace, you could specialize in avionics for passenger jets, or design tools, or entertainment systems, etc...

We are seeing domain specialization at work now, though not many really saw the Deep learning coming so most of those people aren't senior yet (and the ones that did are super successful in their domains; e.g. A friend of mine has done really really well in applying DNN to speech recognition very early). In research, we talk about areas, but even these are not very well defined and people aren't really interchangeable.

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We were talking about domains, not technologies. They are very different concepts. Technologies are fungible, domains have people and business experience associated with them.

Node is not a domain, it is a tech.

> ...it's not so good if your top claim in CV is "I know C++ in an out"

There's a shortage of C++ engineers right now, at least in my region. They are getting a lot of interest and great job offers if they know their stuff.

Best advice here.

Communicating with a lot of non-tech folk and just going out there in the world helped me realize that us the programmers live in our own bubble just like everybody else.

Now that I can express the business value of my skills, I am sought after and I have to turn down offers on a regular basis.

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