
Which job skills are most employable? - jbreckmckye
https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/
======
osrec
Perhaps I have been unlucky in my past jobs, but the single most important
thing that allowed me to be successful in my investment banking career was
bowing down to my boss's ego, even when he/she was wrong. A few of my
colleagues had perfected this "skill", and got promoted super quick. Talent,
ability and reliability are all okay, but giving your interviewer/boss the
impression that you will never show them up seems to make you super
employable! I remember a particular interview, where me and my then boss were
looking to hire a new market risk guy. The first guy we interviewed was super
talented, and actually quite a nice guy - I thought he deserved the job - he
even corrected our misunderstandings on a newish risk model. The second guy we
interviewed, not so great. My boss gave it to the second guy; when I asked him
why, he fobbed me off with a vague response, but it was clear to me that he
felt threatened. Had the first guy acted a bit more average in the interview
and pandered to my boss's ego, he would have almost certainly got the job.
Personally, I have also had much more success in interviews/jobs by trying to
be distinctly average. Eventually I was sick of playing that game so I started
my own company and never looked back!

~~~
jarsin
I have come to see this sort of thing as a symptom of the extreme advantage
incumbents have in the marketplace. This is why most companies become straight
up high palace drama. They can do this because they rule the kingdom and
everyone will pay their tax (do business with them) like it or not. If you
threaten the king and show you are smarter you are toast and will be killed.

Every established business I have worked with is like this.

~~~
osrec
Very true - it's really quite annoying and unnecessary. Funnily enough, even
when ex-employees from such firms establish a start up, much of this culture
comes with them. I know I had elements of it engrained in my psyche, much to
my detriment. It took a good 6 months to train myself to not feel threatened
by my own employees. I like to think I'm mostly rid of this mentality now and
can celebrate/cultivate the strengths of my team!

------
ldp01
Most of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment and
Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant to make
that generalisation.

Reaching a basic level of success in employment is way more holistic than
these bar charts would indicate.

Statements like this are just silly:

> "A skill like “judgement” could make you highly employable, but be hard to
> improve, and so offer poor returns per hour spent learning."

How about this for a pretty generic plan:

\- Know your trade: Understand whatever system you are using in depth.

\- Understand how you create value within the specific business you are in.

\- Have an O.K understanding of how your work interacts with others, and be
O.K at explaining your understanding to others.

\- Try to consistently interact with others in good faith and try to score
runs for your project/business/whatever. Subjugate your own ego as much as
possible and remain friendly when things get hectic.

~~~
coldtea
> _Most of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment
> and Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant
> to make that generalisation._

You don't need to "quantify" it. You just need to be able to exercise it. It's
one of the things that people you know when you see it (especially in
hindsight) whatever the domain (so the fact that it's context dependent
doesn't matter either).

~~~
ldp01
I'll buy that. I am expecting a lot from a random/free study on the Internet!

But I think part of my gripe stands: the study is treating all these skills as
independent when they actually seem pretty interrelated. There are also
important confounding factors like industry which aren't given a mention.

For example 'judgement and decision making' in any professional field has to
be built on a foundation of technical knowledge. And that judgement and
decision making is probably not really transferable to other professional
fields.

~~~
coldtea
> _For example 'judgement and decision making' in any professional field has
> to be built on a foundation of technical knowledge. And that judgement and
> decision making is probably not really transferable to other professional
> fields._

Is it though? Because we have the case of CEOs and upper management doing fine
in widely differing companies and industries.

It's more about knowing who to trust and what the signs tell you, than about
having any low- or even mid-level technical knowledge.

Taleb has this story: "“In one of the rare non charlatanic books in finance,
descriptively called What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, the protagonist
makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow called Joe Siegel, the most
active trader in a commodity called “green lumber” actually thought that it
was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because
it had not been dried). And he made a living, even a fortune trading the
stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into theories of what caused the price of
commodities to move and went bust. The fact is that predicting the order flow
in lumber and the price dynamics narrative had little to do with these details
— not the same thing. Floor traders are selected in the most non-narrative
manner, just by evolution in the sense that nice arguments don’t make much
difference.”

------
alanbernstein
"Coding" is mechanical. "Judgement and decision making", "Critical thinking",
"Complex problem solving", the actually difficult parts of doing long-term
programming work, are at the top of the list.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Coding is not mechanical. Or to say, what do you mean by coding? The ability
to write programs that successfully solve problems good judgement and decision
making, critical thinking, complex problem solving...it sounds like coding is
just a meaningless term without the others.

~~~
closeparen
Coding is translating ( _encoding_ ) an existing design into an arcane
language at a high level of detail. A coder produces source code from a
specification in the way that a secretary produces a typed document from a
dictaphone tape. Like a secretary, a coder may be expected to have the domain
knowledge and judgement to interpolate small details, but should not generally
be making decisions.

Understanding business needs and gathering requirements is software analysis.
Deciding what components to write to fulfill those requirements is system
architecture. Determining the modules, algorithms, and data structures to use
within those components is software design. Finally, writing down those
algorithms and data structures in a way that satisfies the compiler is coding.

Most of us "software engineers," "software developers," or simply
"programmers" wear all of these hats at various points in a project's
lifecycle. But to wear the title "coder" is to explicitly mark your position
as one with minimal critical thinking, problem solving, or decision-making.

Coding is nowhere near sufficient to create programs that solve complex
problems, in the same way that typing is not sufficient to create a novel. If
people explicitly designated as _coders_ are making decisions and thinking
critically, we should be as concerned as if typesetters were reworking
character development.

"Design is not coding, coding is not design" [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I guess this definition of coding harkens back to the days when secretaries*
would encode programs written by mathematicians by punching cards or weaving
knots or configuring wires?

Because that hasn't existed in a long time, at least since the 70s. Much like
typesetter don't exist anymore where designers use programs that allow the, to
typeset themselves.

* many of these "coders" like future rear admiral Grace Hopper got fed up with this and did something about it, leading to the first compilers and programming languages.

~~~
closeparen
Coding is one activity within the software development process, and I agree, I
don't think those activities have been separated by job title in a long time.
Most people do some of everything.

Which is why it's so strange that people would suddenly rally around this
term, rather than "programmer" or "developer" or "software engineer" which
encompass the full range of what they're doing, and instead choose to cheapen
it by calling out the least intellectually challenging step.

You could argue that source code in a contemporary high-level language _is_ a
software design, and compilers/interpreters have grown sophisticated enough to
eliminate the need for human grunt work.

------
claudiulodro
> A skill could be highly paid, but only useful in a narrow range of jobs,
> giving you few options if you change your mind about what to do.

Makes sense. If you focus on coding there isn't much it applies to (in terms
of employment) other than coding for a living or working near coding-related
things (CTO, manager, etc.) That being said, accounting also only really
applies to a handful of jobs and nobody has ever said being an accountant is
risky.

Unrelated, but jbreckmckye your email is in the URL.

~~~
ahmadss
Good catch, re: email in the URL. I'm likely to the blame the sender of the
email for including PII in the Google Analytics UTM parameters, which is is a
clear violation of GA's terms and best practices [1]. If it's 80000hours.org
that sent the email and created the tracking params, then the OP should
contact them and hope that they remediate this.

[1] -
[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en)

~~~
robertwiblin
We'll fix this going forward.

------
aub3bhat
>As well as looking at income, we rated skills on satisfaction, risk of
automation, and breadth of applicability.

Translation: We cooked up data by adding our biases, but since we teamed up
with a "data science fellow", thus our findings must scientific!

This is worse than the average feel good pop pscyhology that appears in
NYtimes.

Reminds me of this good bit from an EJMR post:

"Any approach that claims to recover the distribution of individual utility
parameters from aggregate data based on arbitrary distributional and
functional form assumptions is dubious at best,"

------
paultopia
This is a fairly silly list.

Consider: "Reading comprehension": at a moderate level that's basically
everyone in the industrialized world. At a high level, what are the jobs where
this is going to be the skill that makes a difference, as opposed to prior
training and learning ability re: the things you've read?

Consider: "Management of personnel": in a world in which middle management are
the first to be laid off, it's hard not to think that the allegedly high
incomes are unstable and/or only for the best performers.

Consider: "Service orientation." Uh, like in the service industry? Sure,
that's "employable," for a can't-make-rent sense of the term.

Generally, the list seemingly fails to take into account the extent to which a
skill is already saturated. It's striking, for example, that the top few are
skills characteristically developed in advanced degree training in the
humanities, law, etc., who haven't, shall way say, had the best few years in
the job market lately, due to rampant overproduction...

~~~
coldtea
> _Consider: "Reading comprehension": at a moderate level that's basically
> everyone in the industrialized world._

And yet, even HN comments (by native english speakers) illustrate every day
that this is not the case. Except if we have a very low bar for that "moderate
level".

In any case, when they that you need "those job skills" they don't mean "you
need them in the average level that everybody in the industrialized world more
or less has them". The mean you if if you're good at them, you have an
advantage.

> _it 's hard not to think that the allegedly high incomes are unstable and/or
> only for the best performers._

Isn't that the whole point of the list? It's not like they say "any kind of
skill in Management of personnel". They say you need to be good (best
performer) in it.

> _Consider: "Service orientation." Uh, like in the service industry?_

No, like everywhere it is applicable: "Service orientation, aka personality
traits and a predisposition to be helpful, thoughtful, considerate and
cooperative".

(Besides, there are extremely lucrative jobs in the service industry. Service
industry doesn't mean being a waiter. It can also mean e.g. running or owing
hotels).

~~~
paultopia
Re: average level vs good at them: part of the problem is that they _mix_
skills that almost everyone has to a certain degree (like reading
comprehension) with skills that very few people possess (like coding).

Re: any kind of skill vs being the best performer: they're clearly not
referring to best performer skill. Part of their analysis is based on "Time to
enter [which] depends on how much training it takes to enter the jobs in which
the skill is important." So the level of skill has to be something like entry-
level skill for the lowest level of job using the skill. Otherwise the time to
enter measure would be meaningless.

~~~
coldtea
> _Re: average level vs good at them: part of the problem is that they mix
> skills that almost everyone has to a certain degree (like reading
> comprehension) with skills that very few people possess (like coding)._

If some skills are a boon to success, why would they be constrained to be one
or the other type?

Some would be common in most (but not great in the majority, like reading
comprehension skills), others would be rarer (like coding or managing people).

> _Re: any kind of skill vs being the best performer: they 're clearly not
> referring to best performer skill. Part of their analysis is based on "Time
> to enter [which] depends on how much training it takes to enter the jobs in
> which the skill is important." So the level of skill has to be something
> like entry-level skill for the lowest level of job using the skill._

"Entry-level skills for the lowest level of job using the skill" can still be
compared relatively to others entering the same job -- so a ranking as being
the best performer among your competition still makes sense.

Clearly they didn't mean you have to be best in the world, or among the top in
your country in those skills. Just better than most you're competing against.

------
Clubber
The two best skills you can have:

1\. Be good at your job. 2\. Don't be an asshole.

------
taormina
Very click-baity title. The most employable skills for a human to have are the
ones that are hardest to automate away.

------
azangru
"Coding isn't one," they say in the title — but programming is there on the
diagram (right above mathematics). Is there a difference between programming
and coding?

------
justonepost
I'm confused. Is having a long blue bar low risk or high risk for automation?

Equipment maintenance seems low risk, unless robots start repairing
themselves. In which case..

~~~
antonvs
Equipment maintenance may not be low risk for automation.

If you look at modern automation trends in software, a key property is that
they rely on throwing things away that don't work, and replacing them with
known-good new "instances". The same approach is already used widely for
physical goods as well - the "disposable society".

It's not difficult to image equipment "maintenance" being automatically
performed by replacing major parts, instead of worrying about trying to
diagnose and fix precisely what went wrong.

------
user5994461
Cheapness.

Companies have limited money and budget, especially the small and medium ones.

When choosing between candidates, the ones who is cheaper is much more likely
to be given the advantage.

------
anotheryou
Is there many leadership positions that do not benefit greatly from some
specialisation (or technical skill set)?

------
wcr3
You might wanna take the query string off this link...

~~~
nessup
Might wanna send that in an email to Jimmy :)

------
dilemma
Why is the title changed from the original?

------
makosdv
>According to this analysis, the most valuable skills could be summed up as
“leadership” skills

>What are the most valuable combinations of job skills? >David Deming found
that the jobs with the greatest growth in employment were those that required
both social and mathematical skills.

I think these are the key takeaways. STEM is very important, but it appears
the market is saying we have a lack of leadership skills, which are not really
emphasized in a typical education.

~~~
UK-AL
Leadership skills are harder to prove.

There are some terrible leaders that somehow get into leadership positions

~~~
photojosh
IMHO that's because the skills to _become_ a leader aren't the same as the
skills to _be_ a good leader. See politicians for the premiere example...

~~~
ldp01
It's the Peter Principle!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

