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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

It's also somewhat risky to focus your whole career on learning a product that a single company makes. In 10 or 20 years, it may be depreciated.

There are plenty of Crystal Reports professionals who found that their skills didn't transfer as the software declined.

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And there's plenty of COBOL developers that have been trying to retire for years but keep getting coaxed back.

Maybe the nuance you're looking for is it would be unwise to not progress your skills along the way. Like Salesforce Classic is a dead end, but if you transitioned to Lightning you're probably ok.

Or Tableau, maybe you should be learning Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, etc... at the same time.

COBOL is a programming language. Salesforce is a product.

Learning a product is good. Basing your career from it is limiting.

That advice ignores the opportunity cost of learning other things. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. Focus your career on what you want to focus it on. If that is Linux kernel development, great! If it's WordPress modules in PHP, great! If it's AWS (to the exclusion of GCP and Azure), great! If you'd rather specialize in multi-cloud and learn all three, awesome! Some choices will limit the future possibilities - there are fewer companies that need eg Linux kernel devs, but two of them - Facebook and Google - are both known to pay really well and aren't going away any time soon. No one has a time machine to predict the future, so who knows if Salesforce will disappear in 20 years or if it will buy out the rest of the tech industry and we'll all be working for them? Point is, specialize how you want to specialize, plenty of people have done the same and found success, others who have done the same have found failure. Others who have chosen the opposite have also done the same.

There’s lots of transferable skills from crystal reports to other reporting platforms.

It takes the professional to do that skills mapping.

Reporting systems are reporting systems for the most part. In the case of Crystal Reports, it was acquired by SAP and still pretty heavily in use in businesses.

The skills transfer to Power BI on the Microsoft side, as another example.

Finding the best version of the role is part of being a professional too. At least where I am, there are lots of opportunities with mid-to-huge insurance/finance/healthcare companies that need this type of reporting.

They outsource a lot of the work, but they also have many slot for people with the tech skill and domain experience. If you were doing sales reporting, you could easily slot into one these roles because there is a need for someone locally who can talk to stakeholders versus someone at an outsource provider who can could be a great communicator, but has too many blockers at that type of inside company communication.

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