There is no skill that doesn't require upkeep over 20yr.

Everything that was valuable in 2001 is still of about the same value now. But the mechanics who didn't want to diagnose electronics and the accountants who refused to learn computers and the programmers who only wanna write php have seen their skills reduced in value because they did not maintain currency.

Being responsible for the work output of other people and doing your job somewhere unpleasant or dangerous pretty much always increases your pay.

This is so hard to do in an industry that also heavily rewards specialists.

I've been regularly asked by my employer to change role to help some other part of the business. Whether it was switching from mobile to server, server to front end web, or switching frameworks / tools within those domains, I always made the switch.

The problem is that now I'm a jack of all trades, and a master of none.

Redine yourself as a problem solver vs. just a tool box.

“I’m a master generlized problem solving machine, how can I be of service?”

Yes, well, I can't help but look around at people who have chosen to specialize and see how much quicker they climb into leadership roles, and getting to work on mission critical features.

If you're the jack of all trades guy, you'll always be asked to cleanup, or take care of small feature requests. When the company needs the big guns for a mission critical feature, you will never be called.

This is an important point for people to realize. There's risks at specializing for sure, but there's also a lot of risk to being a jack of all trade.

Despite the semi trolly comment history on this profile, i was able to climb the ladder by knowing ONE thing extremely well and then being a generlist in everything else.

Granted i climbed the ladder in mid size non-hot companies so may not be applicable.

Im currently a consultant in my trade and I appear to sell this ONE thing but in every case i end up solving problems as a generilist.

Is there a chance that you can claim that you are already an expert in one the things you do? sometimes other people’s bar for expertise is lower than yours.

How diverse are the experiences you are generalizing from? Companies are different, so you'll need to sample from lots of different ones. You can also try talking to your manager about what your career goals are and what needs to change to get there. It sounds like you might just need to be in a team / company where your skills and matches the mission critical features, so you could look for transfer opportunities. Or if you don't care about the "leadership" route, you can opt out and try contracting / consulting. Every client wants a different set of experiences, so jack-of-all-trades is more likely to hit on multiple skills.

Maybe this is a bit out of the spirit of the question, but I think of a lot of "domestic" skills this way, like cooking, cleaning and home maintenance, and knowing specialized dressing and hygiene. This stuff requires considerable time and effort to be good at, and you wind up paying a lot to get someone else to do it for you. Covid has forced me to actually live in my apartment (instead of just sleeping and showering here) and I've increasingly learned that the housewives of yore were actually a lot like managers and process engineers - they constantly need to take inventory and think ahead in order to efficiently keep ahead of all the entropy added in regular life.

It might also be considered a "soft skill", but there are some communication skills I think are really valuable in a technical space; like knowing which diagram to make which will most effectively summarize the complexity of your system and is appropriate for your audience. The tools for constructing that drawing will change, but the activity of sketching for communication isn't going anywhere.

Plumbing, electrical, basic construction skills, most trades, really.

Skills around software and IT - not just developers. There might be a lot of churn within that industry, but if you can solve problems in those industries industry with any tools, you're going to be valuable. It might take longer to find a job depending on the current times and your own retraining speed, but it will be there in some form. Nothing is likely going to make all software and IT workers obsolete like automation does to factory workers.

My evidence is that we still have a lot of legacy and technical debt around, and it's likely to still be there in 20 years, so even if you don't work on the cutting edge (which may now have stratospheric requirements for entry like a PhD and Github projects and 8 rounds of interviews), you can still take legacy work.

Security and defense (physical and IT/software) will also likely be around forever.

I’d love to believe this, but dev and IT people are not paid exceptionally well in most of the world. That says to me that the high salaries are a consequence of social structures and the current economy, not that the skills are super valuable. It’s proximity to money that actually matters.

Developers are paid pretty well in most of the world, usually well above median income for the country. Just because they’re not paid at 90-95th percentile incomes as in the U.S. doesn’t mean they don’t have valuable skills.

Also, you'd better believe that a tsunami of smart, motivated young people are coming through the education pipeline to pump up the labor supply for the IT/dev sector.

Maybe the demand will increase fast enough to keep salaries from dropping in real terms.

Welding?

Welding is probably bit multi-modal. Traditional stuff isn't likely going away, but already there is already advanced robots for the job. Though it's unlikely they will be entirely AI controlled.

No doubt a lot of "assembly line" welding operations have already become highly automated. This is, however, already the area requiring lesser skilled and more easily replaced workpeople. I was thinking more about on-site and craft-associated welding which I imagine will continue to be highly valued until extremely portable and versatile high-DOF robotic manipulators become commonplace.

Its also getting payed for grinding through your body (like a lot of trades but welding especially.)

A fair point, though a lot of office jobs aren't too kind on your body either.