Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?

ssunny678 4 days ago 53 comments

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For developers and non-developers alike: What's worth learning today to stay relevant in an AI first world

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Discussion (53 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

comicink•4 days ago

Ability to think like a human who will use your product. It's the small details like looking at a web page and understanding if it "makes sense" and "looks good" and what improvement would make usability better. AI can write the code and follow best practices, but the ability to think like a real human user and be a true Product Manager is something that would always be needed IMHO

yodsanklai•4 days ago

> Ability to think like a human who will use your product.

In my team, we need to redesign our products because the main user is AI rather than humans.

whattheheckheck•3 days ago

Who do the ai serve? Politically?

kimhjo•4 days ago

Judgment and domain expertise. AI can write the code, but it can't tell you what's worth building or why the architecture will hurt you in two years.

austin-cheney•4 days ago

* superior written communication

* leadership

* data structures

* task/project management

* performance/measurements

* data transmission techniques

Honestly, if you really have to ask the question then none of this matters because it sounds like you are already delegating your career to AI which would make this list unapproachable.

jf22•4 days ago

I'm interested to know why you think data structures are important. AI is pretty good at reasoning out data structures problems.

qsera•2 days ago

LLM does not "reason".

This should be clear by the fact that it can solve complex math problems without understanding how to count.

mattmanser•4 days ago

Yeah, even 2 years ago you could tell it to make a service with minimal instructions and it would usually guess the right data structure.

Often better than many developers I've worked with come up with.

austin-cheney•4 days ago

Forget what AI can and cannot do. What can you do?

If you are only doing data entry into an LLM without understanding how any of this actually works then what do I need you for? I can just promote the janitor at half the cost to do your job.

late_night_fix•4 days ago

I's argue no specific tool is future proof.The real skill is getting comfortable learning new tools fast and discarding old ones without attachment.

aldanor•4 days ago

Efficiently communicating with other human beings

phillc73•4 days ago

Paramedicine and nursing. These roles will adapt and use AI, but because they're still so hands-on, and there's already a shortage of staff in those roles in general, I don't see job cuts there.

sunny678•4 days ago

Agree, but can't learn it now- I am in a tech space.

phillc73•4 days ago

Plenty of tech happening in that space too.

As examples, check out:

Cosinuss: https://www.cosinuss.com/en/

Medictool: https://www.medic-tool.com/

LifesaverSim: https://www.lifesaversim.com/

fiftyacorn•4 days ago

Communication and networking - i think we'll see devs expected to bridge to the BA role and deliver based on that. So being able to communicate will become more important

sunny678•4 days ago

Yeah! Soft skills is a key skill to learn these days.

KetoManx64•4 days ago

Plumbing and electrical work

Areena_28•4 days ago

damm true haha

Areena_28•4 days ago

Judgment in ambiguous situations is the one thing that's held up consistently. AI is good at defined tasks, bad at knowing when the task definition itself is wrong.

Also, deep domain knowledge is the other one..... knowing what good output looks like in your field is something models can't fake convincingly at the edges.

cal_dent•4 days ago

Social skills. Same as it ever was. That beats talents/smarts every time in a corporate environment

benj111•4 days ago

Don't you mean sociopathy? Or it that just my autistic side talking?

nicbou•4 days ago

Empathy, getting along with people, seeking mutual benefit are also valuable skills.

hackable_sand•4 days ago

If someone is "learning" those to keep their job then yeah I'd say that's a huge red flag

bayarearefugee•4 days ago

If LLMs have roughly peaked, then everything is safe except for things that are already being eaten away like translation and call center work.

If they haven't and we have hit the exponential growth mark, nothing is safe and even the temporarily "safe jobs" will also suffer greatly from being crunched on both the supply and demand sides (there will be more labor supply for those jobs as the displaced try to flee to safe jobs, there will be less demand for the output of those jobs because the displaced will no longer have income to pay for those goods or services). And LLMs and robots will eventually come for many of those jobs too, likely at a rate that exceeds people's ability to retrain.

Better hope that either things have peaked, or that we can somehow manage to stop treating all forms of socialism as evil or we're going to see the violent unmaking of modern society in our lifetimes.

Krssst•4 days ago

Robots require material resources and are quite difficult to produce. I wouldn't be surprised if we go through a period of time were intellectual work is outdated and most people are back to exhausting manual work. Basically, no middle class anymore, just some elites and many manual workers doing what the AI asks. I guess, to those future elites, humans would just be self-reproducing robots. (well robots like those we have now would definitely see use, but I am not sure about the timeline for general-purpose robots that can do many things including assemble themselves).

I don't have a strong belief this will happen however, and I hope it does not.

Ashbt•4 days ago

Meta skills: https://share.google/aimode/Fhd3GapqYWJ5vBBXo

sunny678•4 days ago

Seems interesting. Thanks for sharing

alegd•4 days ago

knowing how to give AI good context. Thats the skill nobody talks about. I use Claude Code daily and the difference between a lazy prompt and a well structured doc is massive.

also just understanding how the models work. I'm doing an AI masters right now and once you know whats happening under the hood the anxiety disappears.

bottom line: learn it and embrace it.

aldielshala•4 days ago

Communication, with both human and AI.

sunny678•3 days ago

You mean prompting and soft skills

aldielshala•3 days ago

Yes, maybe context engineering (prompting is just one part of it) and soft skills.

0xCE0•4 days ago

The answer is of course obvious, and applies to any business domain over time and hypes: how to sell, that is, being a real old-fashioned salesman, who has ability to make deals, who can bring money in.

10keane•4 days ago

management and critical thinking.

management - it occured to me that giving instructions to agent is very similar to giving instructions to human employees - even the best of them make mistakes.

i learnt that asking claude code to "investigate for 3 potential root causes" is more effective than "investigate the root cause" in bug fix. this blows my mind as i realize that agent can be lazy, can be careless, and we can give better instruction to prevent that.

another reason why i said this is that giving enough context and defining blast boundary is more efficient than hand-holding/micromanaging and checking every tool call for agents. the management skill for human employees also works here.

critical thinking - you just need to have your judgement on the seemingly solid but actually halluncinated agent bs.

Jamesbeam•4 days ago

Killing/rescuing people with your brain instead of bullets and/or creating/exploding structures.

Join the Army. Become a Combat Engineer Sergeant.

Enjoy getting told by your superiors that they are afraid of sitting in the same room with you, because your thinking cap gaze looks like you are always plotting to kill them in the most sophisticated and fun way imaginable. Never say a word, just give them a big friendly smile in return.

Leave with a treasure trove of abilities useful for the rest of your life, or to simply troll your neighbors, and give lifelong work to a local psychotherapist.

Big friendly smile. Two thumbs up.

guzfip•4 days ago

> Join the Army. Become a Combat Engineer Sergeant.

I guess the enlistment age has been raised to 42 so this may actually be a realistic option for more people on this site lol.

Of course I was born just in time to be loaded up on psych meds as a child, so the military didn’t want me.

Jamesbeam•4 days ago

Their loss, guz.

Have seen some smart comments from you. I am sure you’re doing fine.

Maybe try again, at least you were on psych meds.

You can become commander-in-chief these days by being off your meds. We live in interesting times.

omertt27•4 days ago

adaptability will be always important i think

zhouzhao•4 days ago

Critical thinking.

benj111•4 days ago

Unfortunately that's a skill that makes you less employable.

insane_dreamer•4 days ago

Barbers, plumbers.

ensocode•4 days ago

small scale farming to get your kids fed

mykowebhn•4 days ago

Restaurant work

SilentM68•4 days ago

Psychology, psychiatry, medical, construction, auto repair, at least in the short term. The jury is still out on the long-term view which is a bit hazy at the moment :(

cantrevealname•4 days ago

I agree with construction and auto repair, but why psychology and psychiatry? If there's anything that's perfect for LLMs, it self-diagnosis and self-treatment by chatting with them. Other than prescribing drugs, an AI system could do everything a psychologist or psychiatrist does.

The only significant barrier is that it's not condoned by the medical establishment and by law (which I imagine will indeed take a few years to work around).

fabulousman•4 days ago

Maths

bartvk•4 days ago

It depends on the level, though. You can easily ask AI to "Calculate intersection with X-axis for sin(2πx)" and I found many and I mean MANY errors in my textbook.

throwaw12•4 days ago

networking - to find gigs

bootlicking - to get promoted after you find your gig

good communication/leadership - to keep yourself in that high position

iExploder•1 day ago

Every hour spent on acquiring hard skills is an hour wasted that could be otherwise better spent on licking someone elses boot!

num42•4 days ago

Metrology, mechanical and materials science engineering, manufacturing and tool engineering, precision engineering, and electrical and electronics engineering, combined with being a generalist and having one specialization in physical or hardware engineering along with computation.

As people often say, matter, energy, and information are the fundamentals of everything. I think we need mathematics, analytic philosophy, the arts and humanities, and physics too. Sorry we need every skill. /s