Ask HN: Beyond the AI Bandwagon

1 points by raj555 2 years ago | 1 comment

I live in Bangalore and work as a junior SDE at some unknown small company and want to boost my career. My current job is maintaining some boring CRUD like apps in python/C++. I see the industry is obssessed with AI esp lang model ones or at least it seems in the echo chamber. My question is what to learn and invest in for long term relevance. Databases? OS? IoT? AwS? COBOL? I am open for anything and everything. I love programming and want to do interesting things not sure what tho lol.

rednafi 2 years ago |

Since you're a junior engineer, I'd highly suggest to ignore the hype and focus on the fundamentals of software engineering. I don't know what segment of software you're into, but in general, you'll always need the fundamentals of data structure, database design, backend API design, HTTP, REST, Auth, security basics. After that you can specialize on the things you want to adopt as career-progression tools.

It's easy to get lost into the deluge of tools, techniques, and hype cycle. But in the early stage of your career, it's important to stick with a single programming language and learn the fundamentals. You'll get better at learning other PLs and tools as you move forward. One thing I'd also suggest is to take advantage of the ML driven tools like ChatGPT, Claude 2, CoPilot, Cohere, Langchain, etc. In the right context, these can be immensely powerful learning assistants—so completely ignoring them wouldn't be prudent. Good luck!