Ask HN: Most Valuable Jobs of 2025?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27335359

by sjperez • 5 years ago

22 16 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Four years from now, what will be the most valuable job fields? AI? 6G? Biotech? Clean energy? Quantum computing? Something else entirely?

zx2391• 5 years ago

The smarter tool (i.e. AI) mega-trend will continue and there is a lot to automate across the globe. This will sprawl into biotech (drug discovery) and energy management.

yuppie_scum• 5 years ago

It’ll still be fintech.

rdtwo• 5 years ago

Yeah always finance

browningstreet• 5 years ago

I work in banking. The entire technical underpinnings of banking will change dramatically over the next decade. See OpenBanking and real-time transactions, to start.

giantg2• 5 years ago

I don't see anything changing that much in less than 4 years. I think the most common jobs will still be boring CRUD and support. The highest paying stuff will likely be AI/data related in fintech or some other highly rewarding and nonproductive area.

greatemulsifier• 5 years ago

or some other highly rewarding and nonproductive area

Yeah I second this

afarrell• 5 years ago

Emotional telepresence.

cztomsik2• 5 years ago

probably not what you meant but I think multiverse (VR being commonly used instead of going somewhere in person) is going to be a big thing.

quantumofalpha• 5 years ago

Same jobs as today.

Maybe just AI/ML would become less and less lucrative due to a huge glut of people graduating into it.

sdevonoes• 5 years ago

Software engineer. You can work in any field (AI, Biotech, Clean energy, ecommerce)

muzani• 5 years ago

My picks:

1) Fintech. It'll be messy with the aftermath of COVID, moratoriums, etc. Combine it with new and old banking regulations, islamic banking, ways to finance the poor, bubbles popping, crowdfunding. Then you have crypto and retail investors. It's going to be a bloodbath. And there's plenty of space for the young and hungry.

2) Remote work. Not just non-offices, but working internationally. If you're going to hire someone who doesn't come into office, why not just hire someone whose living costs are 10x lower? Inversely, there are a lot of problems with it; who's solving them?

3) AI creativity. It's more creative than humans now. Where will it be 4 years from now? We're seeing the side effects of too much creativity - it turns your brain into mush. It'll be a new revolution, like assembly lines, but in the opposite direction. We're experimenting how much we can totally delegate to AI and how much support infrastructure we need to build around it.

softwaredoug• 5 years ago

I think the ML bubble will become increasingly more realistic, and those that can turn ML into scalable, performant, and maintainable solutions will “win”. Additionally those that focus more on the training data being learned from and it’s quality over the model and how the full product fits together will win...

I think another frontier is knowing how to manage and build organizations that understand data and ML. In the same way software caused traditional engineering orgs to rethink processes, eventually data expertise will infiltrate management. The processes we use to deliver working, well performing data-based solutions will change and cause traditional software orgs to rethink how they deliver work. These processes will be more about running frequent, repeatable experiments and less about iterative feature dev.

So, to sum up:

- ML engineering

- Data scientists that can deliver working code

- managers with data expertise

And I’d emphasize less:

- research, “fancier model” oriented ML and data science

Other random bets:

- office space for remote workers that just want a quiet, private place to work. Boring class A office space converted into single offices rented individually.

- home tech support for remote workers to improve reliability, etc of tech and network experience.

cztomsik2• 5 years ago

+1 for affordable, come-and-go but private office space

strikelaserclaw• 5 years ago

which is why i think it's important for software engineers to have some idea about the current state of machine learning.

fishingisfun• 5 years ago

no one can guess

mikewarot• 5 years ago

Someone has to figure out how to shoehorn everything that used to run on systems that let an application do anything the user could do, into the new paradigm where the default is to allow nothing. A lot of applications need to be upgraded, and a lot of new systems need to be installed.

Network security, with a focus on the use of unidirectional networks to make infiltration of control impossible will be required for protecting infrastructure that needs to be monitored.

Multiple skill sets will come into play, the more general the knowledge set you have, the more valuable you'll become.

Ask HN: Most Valuable Jobs of 2025?

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