Ask HN: What (obscure?) areas of tech are engaging, sane, and incredibly stable? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What (obscure?) areas of tech are engaging, sane, and incredibly stable?

6 pointsi336_4 comments

I'd like to know where to look to completely sidestep the breakneck rat race to the bottom of mainstream technology.

Where would I find technical environments defined by the following qualities?

- Stability in the long term: 90% of the mental models being taught today will still be being leveraged 10 to 15 (or more - 20? 30? :D) years down the track, possibly even using the same stack/systems/operational techniques

- Operational sanity: technical and business practices don't distractingly violate whatever would contextually make common sense and impede natural flow; and political issues, if they must occur, are managed well

- Genuine engagement: a careful balance of tooling and policy means that only minimal overhead is necessary to achieve visible improvement and change, meaning enough time and mental energy are available to make a meaningful difference somewhere many times per working day

See my comment "It seems to me that the technology..." for more info (it wouldn't fit here)

This is a really great question as was the 'unfashionable' language thread. My intuition is that those quiet legacy country roads are out there. Slower paced may also be found in modern industries. I would like to be ready to offer interesting solutions or services in niches where most people don't think of working.

Health care is one place with potential though it may only fit some of your criteria. It's been a while since I've worked in HC but things don't appear to have changed much. It was pretty cool to make a 7 figure difference with a little SQL and TCL for a local clinic where I worked as a DBA. Lots of opportunities to make people's day to day lives easier, too. No need for the latest language either.

Instead of learning the latest popular language, what I've decided to do is start learning things that sound interesting. I've almost finished Little Schemer, for example. I'm working through Coding the Matrix to get my math up to speed. The Machine Learning course on Coursera was inspiring. After Little Schemer the rest of the "Little" books, Starting Forth, SICP, and others, are on the agenda.

I'm also wondering if Life Sciences might have some interesting opportunities.

> I would like to be ready to offer interesting solutions or services in niches where most people don't think of working.

This is a really good point; I was actually coming from the perspective of knowing where to look to find a[n existing] predictable work environment, but standing alone (or with a small group) and offering a stable service might be an even better balance, thanks to the more malleable culture. Hmm...

> Health care is one place with potential though it may only fit some of your criteria.

If I can avoid the corruption (sadly inevitable, with the boggling financial scales involved) and I was in a clearly politically defined environment that might work.

> It was pretty cool to make a 7 figure difference with a little SQL and TCL for a local clinic where I worked as a DBA.

Wow, cool. High-impact limited-radius work sounds like a lot of fun :D

> Lots of opportunities to make people's day to day lives easier, too.

Yeah :D especially in the UI/UX area: https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef9... https://medium.com/swlh/designers-healthcare-needs-you-stat-... (even just https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amedium.com+healthcare...)

> No need for the latest language either.

Which is great - if I'm not required to hold on and keep up, I can learn stuff on the side at a comfortable pace, and onboard useful tech in situations where it would really count, when I have enough competence to architect with it well. (That's my main fear with a mainstream job - being expected to continuously sign off on designs I don't fully grok.)

> Instead of learning the latest popular language, what I've decided to do is start learning things that sound interesting.

We're all at a different place mentally, etc; you're completely right, following the pack to learn the latest language is inefficient. (And "I need to learn the latest language" sounds ridiculous on the surface!)

> I've almost finished Little Schemer, for example. I'm working through Coding the Matrix to get my math up to speed. The Machine Learning course on Coursera was inspiring. After Little Schemer the rest of the "Little" books, Starting Forth, SICP, and others, are on the agenda.

TIL about CtM and ML, I'll look into those! I've actually been looking at Forth myself; its philosophy (http://www.ultratechnology.com/method.htm) and operational model (http://toddbot.blogspot.be/2014/01/the-ide-called-forth-or-f...) are the most interesting I've yet found in a language. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html is a fun, oddball anecdotal intro (and a site worth browsing as far as it will go - gems inside :P), and you may also be interested in http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net and https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako. (I have about ~20 more Forth bookmarks so far.)

> I'm also wondering if Life Sciences might have some interesting opportunities.

That might be interesting to explore. There was a thread on here recently that noted that developments are badly needed to help implement theoretical and research work, and while some of that would probably be quite fast-paced, something like this (depending on the work on a case-by-case basis, really) could be a pretty predictable work environment.

Thanks for the links! I'm intending to get Thinking Forth in hard copy one of these days. Though I've read and enjoyed the pdf.

It seems to me that the technology industry is increasingly focused solely on rapidly moving targets that constantly change specification at dizzying (even infuriating) rates, and my perspective as a hobbyist outsider is that developers are expected to figure out how to handle the breakneck pace and keep up, or go home because there simply isn't anything available if you can't make 65mi/h work for you.

The Web is easily the worst offender here: it seems to be stuck architecturally in a perpetual super-tight loop-the-loop of the "initial client design refinement" phase. It's as though nobody thinks it's possible to have forward change unless everyone maintains a constant state of being tensed and ready to pounce on and adapt to the next big thing. (Imagine if Web standards had to go through the RFC process and the bureaucratic noise was rate-limited out of the equation because nobody had time for it. That would be nice...)

This is in part due to the frenetic, rabid competitiveness the Web enables, but regardless of the cause(s), developers are ultimately running themselves raw in a breakneck race to "nirvana" driven by the speed of the technology industry. The most upvoted comments on "Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009956) strongly suggest that burnout is widely resonated with. (That thread also provided valuable insight on how to articulate my own thoughts.)

I've been wondering for a while now: surely there are some some slower-paced quiet country roads to be found out there...?

As one example, for a few months I've been considering studying FORTRAN, COBOL, APL, Forth, etc, so I can position myself to work on legacy systems. Looking at "Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001693), that would seem to be a good idea, if the unilaterally positive opinions in that thread are anything to go by. (Oh, add Object Pascal to that list!)

PS: I ask the above soley out of general curiosity for my own part, but FWIW, the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) say that job ads cannot be submitted as stories... there's no such restriction on comments :)

PPS. My OP is exactly 1000 chars, the title exactly 80 chars. For some reason I think this is really neat. lol

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