Ask HN: Future-proof my skills for work | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Future-proof my skills for work

16 pointsCiuB17 comments

I often read comments from other HN members, saying how they kept there skills up to date keeping them employable in a changing work place. As a Linux device driver developer, what new skills/technology can I learn to future-proof myself in terms of work?

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Linux device driver development is a rare skill. You’re fine. Linux isn’t getting anywhere, and device makers are still making devices.

There are talks about moving drivers to Rust, so that’s probably the next thing you’ll have to learn.

This was my current idea, I would like to start doing some Rust development. Is there any open source projects that might be worth contributing to?

Rare skill, but small market, right? I had experience with IBM FileNet process maps and Neoxam. There are very few opportunities there.

I guess I would just say be careful or you'll end up like me - starting over and over without any real future.

Imo you’re probably already nearly there. Most new developers are web developers having done a 6 week bootcamp and while there is an abundance of these roles now, I imagine they will be the first to be automated.

Anything that requires deep technical knowledge will provide job security

>I imagine they will be the first to be automated.

This has been said over again since the 90's when all sort of tools and "codeless" solutions started popping up. While you can automate some stuff for smaller shops, I suspect web development will trump all the rest simply because of how ubiquitous it is.

I agree with deep technical knowledge but at the same time make sure you don't dig a hole too deep where jobs are few.

In my opinion the best way to future-proof your skills is to stay up to date with market trends and notice when your tools of choice (even in your current job) start to become obsolete or used less and less. I would also pay close attention to the number of jobs for a particular skill.

I wonder where are all the jobs are for a device driver engineer. The company recently changed my job title from a generic name (Network software eng) to what I actually do. And I updated my LinkedIn to reflect this, I have noticed a 75% drop in people looking at my page since doing that. Seems not to be a great number of jobs as a device driver developer.

I'd suggest thinking of this differently. You don't want (nor should you care, imo) if every last recruiter is looking at your LinkedIn profile. You want the right recruiter to look at your profile.

Post content about your work, and the stuff you can do. Stuff you're able to share that makes you stand out.

"Anything that requires deep technical knowledge will provide job security"

I don't think so. The market for the skill has to be large enough.

Embedded programming, signal processing, performance optimization.

Even embedded is changing massively. The days of regular ASM use are already long behind us and the time when you'd use the smallest, cheapest MCU available and run a bare metal program on top is past in the high end. The mid and low ends are going the same way in the next decades. I've seen companies who have compilers less than a decade out of date or even updated annually! You can actually talk to people who aren't in safety critical areas about undefined behavior and formal verification without getting quizzical looks nowadays. It's shocking.

There is an ever increasing amount of networking in the embedded space. For example, in the past you might have connected several stepper motors to driver circuits on a single MPU and had a RTOS managing concurrent operations. Now you are more likely to have a dedicated MPU on the stepper motor, connected via CANbus and responding to commands to move to a specific position and respond when that position is reached or a time-out due to a jam, overload, etc. Zero position detection is also more likely to be a sub-function of that stepper motor "module".

Look into IoT. A lot of your knowledge could be directly transposable to embedded devices and the industry is basically still in its infancy.

Start working on RISC-V ecosystem.

Google fuchsia.

Fuchsia looks very promising. I wonder why it still hasn't been released as part of a product, e.g. ChromeBook?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/18/22630245/google-fuchsia-o...

IoT is the natural progression. Robotics software perhaps.

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