What areas are the smartest developers working in? | Hacker News Reader

What areas are the smartest developers working in?

12 pointsalirsgp17 comments

Crypto, AI? I'm seeing a high concentration of talent focusing on crypto.

The smartest developers are working on crud apps at a faang, it’s the smartest thing to do. It’s easy as shit and pays a ton. If you are smart, that’s what you do.

If you are hard working, then you do something hard, and doing hard things is … well, not so smart.

The question you should be asking is what are the modestly average developers trying to work hard on.

Sitting on the terrace of a villa in Sweden overseeing a beautiful lake, having finished all client work for the year two months ago, working as an individual contributor at a faang does not strike me as a very smart thing to do if easy life is the goal.

How expensive is a/your villa in Sweden?

Inexpensive unless you're near a major city/transport hub:

https://www.hemnet.se/

The smartest developers are probably at the beach surfing, or chilling out.

I don't understand this abhorrence for work. There's more of a dopamine kick from solving a tough bug than surfing.

Not even close, bud. I’ll live my life before solving a problem I don’t benefit much from.

I don’t think they meant lifestyle app devs/founders lol

Depends what you mean by smart? A lot of smart people enjoy technical & mathematical problems as opposed to business, hustling and risk taking. So they are probably on the career track at large tech and finance companies.

It allows you be well paid while specialising on what you enjoy. No drama.

I would also like to know. Where are Stanford grads going these days? I doubt to FAANG.

All kinds of areas I guess…?

From CRUD apps over to cryptography (e.g. WireGuard, Signal, Noise), kernel hacking, programming language design, DBMS development (SQLite, PostgreSQL), app development (e.g. Chrome, Firefox) etc etc.

Staying far away from hyped up areas like crypto and AI

The smartest? Probably on ways to defend against the eventual and coming AI apocalypse, it's not a matter of how, but when-

I'm betting the climate apocalypse will come before the AI apocalypse, thus the latter isn't worth wasting any energy on.

There seems to be a lot of energy in LN, e.g. http://bolt12.org

On code synthesis :)

SAP

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