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A comment on Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by bluGill on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @11:36AM (#21335703)
Being a specialist isn't enough. You along - no matter how good you are - are not enough. Either you need to control enough money that you can hire many specialist (Elon Musk with SpaceX), or you need to convince someone with money that is the right path. The skills for each of these are people skills not technical. Either way you will spend all your time in management activities so technical skills are not worth learning (beyond enough to understand what is feasible).

If you want to focus on technical skills, then you need to find a specialty that someone with good management skills will think important so that you can work with many other experts to develop things.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by johnmorrison on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @04:18PM (#21338531)
Companies that change the physical world require a lot higher specialist:founder ratio. There is enough capital and ambitious managerial types around, what we really have a shortage of is specialists in new technical areas.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by strls on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @11:43PM (#21341477)
How does a former software engineer get into nuclear tech? What specific skills and positions would be required?
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by johnmorrison on Thursday October 24, 2019 @08:35AM (#21344001)
Well, there are engineers needed to develop new CAD / sim software to better model liquid nuclear fuels. That basically would require you to have a very good understanding of software engineering + fluid mechanics, nuclear physics, thermodynamics and chemistry
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by strls on Friday October 25, 2019 @12:21AM (#21351856)
Thank you. I'm part-time studying applied maths to be able to work on something like that one day.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by johnmorrison on Sunday October 27, 2019 @05:48PM (#21372647)
Great! Feel free to update me in the future :)
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