Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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In China, if you are one-in-a-million skilled at your endeavor of choice, there are still a thousand people better at it than you. Ditto with India.

I had a facts-of-life conversation with myself prior to entering college on how good of a computer programmer I am (decent, but not the best) and what my competitive situation would look like next to 100,000 Indians graduating every year (not so great). That is when I decided to double major in a language. Playing the Venn diagram game, the circle of people who are better programmers than me is pretty big, the circle of people who speak better Japanese than I do is pretty big, but the intersection of those two circles is pretty freaking small.

I really suggest that everyone play the Venn diagram game for themselves. And, no, "speaks English kinda good" and "has a college degree" is no longer enough to cut it. Find yourself a niche and be at or near the top of the skill curve in it. (I rush to add, for my fellow ArtSci graduates, that it helps if the niche has cough economic value. Nobody says you can't be the world's leading expert on traditional Louisianan pottery, but that may end up being your hobby rather than your day job.)

P.S. "Can program way out of paper bag" INTERSECT "marketing skills" results in a disgustingly small set. This is great news for small businessmen!

If I'm a one-in-a-million programmer in a population with one billion people (which I assume is what you were getting at), to have a thousand people better than me would assume that 100% of that population are programmers. They are not. Say for arguments sake that 5% of the Chinese population are professional programmers, then if I'm one in a million then I have around 50 other people on my level in the entire country.

On the other hand if my entire gimmick is "I'm a decent programmer but I can speak Japanese!" and you limit yourself to that market then the reality is that your opportunities are drastically smaller than even "American programmer who is self-qualified with good experience, solid skills and good work ethic looking for a 9-5 job in America."

Your numbers are more precise than Patio's, but I think they miss the bigger point he is trying to make: distinguish yourself from the crowd, find a niche.

To your second point, he also does emphasize that you need to create a marketable niche. Programmers who speak Japanese would be very valuable, iff there aren't a lot of Japanese speakers who can program.

I got the point, I just don't agree that it's essential or even all that effective to become niche. In fact I can think of many examples were becoming niche will hurt you in the long term - I mean, hey, my niche used to be Perl :)

Which I guess is my point - if you're a programmer and looking to add a language to your toolkit, surely a programming language would be the better choice?

The problem comes if you choose the wrong niche and become overspecialized for that niche. It could be that at first that niche does just fine, but after some number of years some technological shift might occur that would render your very specialized skills obsolete. That's the danger.

Not saying that finding a niche is a bad thing, but you have to be flexible enough such that you can find another at short notice if need be.

You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force.

As long as the need for labor scales roughly in line with the population and the supply of competitors scales with the population as well, then your economic prospects are equally good whether you're in the top 1% (or .0001%) of a thousand people in a field or a hundred million.

You just need to make sure you're in a field where the need for labor (and the compensation's correlation with talent) scales properly with the population. A good surgeon is always going to be in a decent situation, because the demand for surgeons is exactly proportional to the number of people around; a high level competitive athlete is probably much worse off as the population grows, because the number of paying athletic competitions is mostly uncorrelated to the population (though other opportunities correlate better, like teaching gym class, being a personal trainer, etc. - music is similar, in that the number of massively profitable rock stars is mostly constant, but the more mundane opportunities, like gigs and lessons, grow in line with the population).

Startups probably walk both sides of the line depending on the specific business plan, and I suspect that a lot of them do have plenty to fear from the growing pool of competent entrepreneurial programmers. One of the issues here is that the supply of programmers is probably growing a bit faster than the population; then again, so is the need for them, especially as the world shifts more and more towards the digital, so it's possible that there's still a good balance there, I'm not sure.

Curious to what are the various topics you covered under the facts-of-life conversation?

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