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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

Definitely disagree with this one.

The way to be outstanding is to go after a niche and learn your way into the 20% of that field. For knowledge-based work this is not that difficult.

For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the industry. The whole Trust & Safety industry has only gotten larger ever since, and there's no shortage of product management/engineering/data science/program management/analyst jobs in this area.

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Isn't there an element of being in the right place / right time though? I sometimes feel like my side-interest niches fall into two categories: things I came late to the party to, or things I thought would be a good thing to get into but not enough other people cared.

So that's where the point of the article comes in. If you are working at a corporation, the problem that seems hard (but probably really isn't) and would unlock a lot of value if solved, is a good thing to work on. Chances are, other companies have similar blockages and becoming an expert in that area is likely to offer a lot of career growth opportunities.

Yes, but that's true of a lot of things in life.

I mean you can find a professional niche that is already somewhat well known and study your way up to the top 80-90% from 0. My point is that it actually isn't that difficult to do if you make it your goal to do so.

My point is that the niche doesn't have to be objectively "hard".

> For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the industry.

So "payment fraud" was the elephant problem you tackled when no one else in your company would?

> learn your way into the 20% of that field

Agreed, but how do you do that though? My experience is that there is only so much you can learn without the challenge

Books and the internet?

I'm not joking.

I mean when you go to industry conferences for niches I feel like maybe half the speakers I listen to are just winging it. If someone who is objectively in the bottom 50% of expertise in a niche is speaking at an industry conference you can definitely learn your way to greater degree of competence than they are at.

You are right. My personal motto is "there are no adults" and I am constantly blown away how incompetent people are in the wider business world. Edit: sometimes I am blown away by amazing professionals, so I guess I am surprised by this variance :D

If you could, how would you rate the value of self-promotion compared with learning and education in your own industry?

Obviously learning is more important, but would you recommend spending, say, 1 hour of promotion or networking per 10 hours of learning, or 5 hours? What worked for you?

For what it's worth, I'm about 2-3 years into my career and see a lot of advice to spend a significant amount of time promoting yourself.

The majority of people read zero technical or business books per year. It's pretty easy to exceed that baseline.

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