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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

This is depressing. I'm 33 and still haven't really find a niche inside software dev that I'm willing to stay...

On the other hand, nobody asks doctors and lawyers if their are planning to retire at 35.

To be fair many doctors are just starting to make a real salary and can be a half a million in debt by 35.

Yea I'm getting depressed reading the advice in here. I'm around your age and not an expert in any domain. I pick work based not on a particular domain or industry but more so tech stack and perceived work environment. As a result my domain expertise is the equivalent of "10 years of 1 year experience" .

I mean, are you distressed by "only" making a salary in the low six figures? It's still pretty good.

I'm 37 and would rather not stick to a niche personally. Being able to quickly adapt and grow keeps the job interesting to me.

Yeah, niches don’t last in our field. Sure, become an expert in akka, kubernetes, or whatever tech is fashionable now - in 10 years it will be like you were an expert in CORBA.

It’s a little annoying how you have to chase tech fashion to remain employable though. As if simply being a good engineer isn’t enough to pick up these techs and contribute meaningfully. You need to spend your free time learning the tech, or be at the right company, to even be employable. As we get older and have families, this becomes more difficult.

Which is why one needs to sell him/herself as expert in distributed systems, databases, systems administration, ....

Meaning mastering the domain and not the tools currently being used.

It's better to stay away from the super-hyped technologies IMHO. They might provide a few years of higher earnings but they have a bad habit of flaring out, rendering all of that hard earned knowledge useless.

A niche doesn't necessarily have to be a specific technology. Why not become an expert in micro services instead of Kubernetes or an expert in message processing instead of Kafka?

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