

Hey Developer, Are You Focusing On the Right Thing? - housecor
http://www.bitnative.com/2014/01/09/hey-developer-are-you-focusing-on-the-right-thing/

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mynames
I always find frustrating when there is so little content on a link. Although
it's linking to other articles, the author could have elaborated more...

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pdwetz
Agreed, it was nothing more than a glorified tweet. While I generally agree
with his points, some more depth and thought would have been much more
preferable.

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msoad
We had a discussion about this. What is the right thing to focus on to be safe
in future? Everybody knows software is eating the world and as a consequence
it's eating jobs. Sooner or later, your software hand crafting job will be
replaced with a software that does it better and of course cheaper. Where
should we go to be on bleeding edge that software can't reach yet?

One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was
robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You
have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university.
Specially if you are already a software engineer that makes a lot of money for
hand coding things that seems obvious to not be a hard problem to solve.

I personally believe that the state wr are in right now is temporary. Nobody
can make a living in future by coding simple web pages or CRUD backends. It's
gonna get automated way more that what we can imagine today.

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tbrownaw
_One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was
robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You
have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university._

Why? You need to put in significant _time_ to do well, but are the needed
resources (books, people to talk to, etc) really not available outside of a
university?

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analyst74
I am curious how one can break into robitics as a web developer.

The two obvious paths I can see are: a) quit job and get masters or even PHD
in robotics; b) become rich and found a company like Elon Musk.

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derefr
My own plan, from a similar starting position, is to buy one of these[1], and
start tinkering with it until I have a good set of "hard problems" I've run
into. _Then_ , read the textbooks, with a motivated eye to solving those
problems. I won't necessarily solve any of the Hard Problems, but I'll
hopefully get a journeyman-level ability to converse with others in the field
_about_ those problems--and from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to
making friends in the field and being tossed pithy journal articles to read.

[1]
[http://www.irobot.com/us/learn/Educators/Create.aspx](http://www.irobot.com/us/learn/Educators/Create.aspx)

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ambiate
Does anyone correlate the 'luck surface area' with that recent discussion on
being a sociopath in the workplace. Something along the lines of convincing
your coworkers that you're doing more work than you're actually doing. No one
can really pinpoint what you do. You just communicate so much that it seems
that you're 'in everything'. Just subtract the doing and exponentiate the
telling to result in more luck.

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AndrewKemendo
I really liked the 7 habits of highly overrated people [1] article that you
mention, but I would also encourage people to not ascribe all of those
activities to overrated people, by default.

If you read in the article he even concedes that very effective people do many
of these things, which is why it is an effective cover for incompetence.

 _Now, I know what you’re thinking — that might actually be productive. And,
well, it might be, nominally so. But do you notice that you’ve got a very
tangible plan of action here and there’s been no mention of what the project
actually involves? A great way to appear useful without being useful is engage
heavily in an activity completely orthogonal to the actual goal._

So if the goal aligns with the plan of action and there is "overcommunication"
there could well be value added.

[1] [http://www.daedtech.com/the-7-habits-of-highly-overrated-
peo...](http://www.daedtech.com/the-7-habits-of-highly-overrated-people)

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taybin
I'm reading hackernews, aren't I? Clearly not.

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ruttiger
Nope, I'm stuck on Hacker News.

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igvadaimon
That's a great advice actually. I'd also suggest reading something about
business and finances, at least that's what I'm planning to do.

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triangleman
How in the world is a Dale Carnegie book going to make you into a good human?

