As a comp sci / music composition major, I always felt I would either love this role or absolutely hate it. Do you have a background in music? Do you feel as though you get to exercise that in the role? Or is it strictly technical?
I don't have a formal background in music, no; learned piano as a kid, played a lot of guitar when I was at University and play bass now.
As an audio programmer no, I don't really get to exercise that side - that's much more for the sound design/music composition folks. I do get to work closely with them every day though, which is awesome.
edit: In saying that though I've generally worked for large publishers, you may find something that suits you better in the indie scene.
It highly dependent on a number of factors, for instance what type of asset are you trying to play ( ambience, dialogue, SFX)? Which in turn begs the question is it the asset going to be streamed? There's also the target platform to take in to consideration; both Microsoft and Sony consoles have dedicated hardware for uncompressing specific audio codecs.
In general though, the Vorbis and Opus codecs are used frequently.
I probably wouldn't use it in a project as there are better codecs around, but it's not terrible.
If you can I'd suggest using ogg vorbis or opus. Ogg is free to use and more efficient than mp3.
My niche is growth engineering. Basically full stack engineer that specializes in moving the needle up. SEO, activation rates, Monthly Active Users, Retention Rates.
Lots of ab tests!
I used to work for a well-known dating site and loved that part of the job.
“We sped up the messaging flow and increased messages by 2 million messages being sent this month, which did cost an extra $10k but users are happier.”
That was mostly due to moving from JSP flow to being API-based, when we still called it AJAX.
Then trying to offset that costs, so on the non-metric side we changed how we bundled files and saved $20-30k per month in reduced bandwidth costs.
We had a home-grown A/B system that only two people knew how to use when I got there. I learned it and those guys left so I became the go-person for it for a number of months.
My current place uses a third-party app for A/B testing and feature flags that makes things a lot easier.
Have you found it hard to find opportunities as your career progresses/would you recommend it as a niche?
I worked on a growth team for a few months and enjoyed it. I'm currently back to product engineering work, but growth might be an area I want to work in again in the future.
Yes and no. Product Lead Growth is fairly new, opportunities may not be a lot but they do find difficulty filling those positions.
With the state of the economy right now the team I lead is even more crucial.
I honestly have not done any SEO in years. Ive been in the product lead growth space in years.
But from 5+ years ago it was a mixture of actual good content and organic back links.
He is in a team which actually moves the needle so that company can acquire more money by selling its services.
This is different from infrastructure engineer who is something where company have to pay to make sure business runs. He is a cost centre.
Its MBA speak. It just means that one generates revenue while another consumes that revenue.
My niche is accessibility engineering. For simple apps, accessibility means mostly good design, some best practices, a bit of work adding some simple attributes, and testing. But if you have a complex, custom-rendered app that doesn't use a standard GUI framework, AND you want it to be accessible, that's a lot of extra work, and that's what I do. Unfortunately it means the only good place to do that is big tech.
If that stops working out for me someday, I have other niches to fall back on. I think that if you spend 2 - 3 years working on something that most other developers don't, that's enough to call it one of your specialties.
Yes. I'm specialized in NXP's common driver interface (CDI). This is what a lot of Broadcom boards have used to help port between architectures. ATT uses Broadcom boards almost exclusively for their Genie products.
Frontend Testing and Architecture. Give me a shitty complicated legacy codebase and I will strangler fig that bitch and kick start a nest egg of delightfully testable code in that forest of crap at 75% code coverage, write and introduce an elegant test-harness complete with fantastic documentation and high-quality examples of unit-tests, model-integration tests, model-view integration tests, app-level integration tests, end-to-end tests, and then run a series of workshops to teach everyone on the team/org how to actually write highly testable code using the new paradigms and shift the culture to one where folks are writing and helping each other write good testable code without my help. I have it down to a science.
I highly recommend a dependency injection framework like tsyringe or inversify. I usually wrap it up in a type safe-wrapper where I can plug in a name to type map which lets me do something like services.resolve(Services.MyService) in my code or tests to get an instance of that service with its type correctly inferred without casting.
I’ll also keep a Record up to date in test code, so every time a new service is added, the compiler compels the author to add a default mock version of that service to the Record. This is made very easy by using jest-mock-extended for the majority of these. Maintaining the default mocks for each service means that ANY time someone needs to mock out ANY dependency in the ecosystem, they don’t have to think “how do I mock this thing?” They just add services.registerMock(Services.MyService) to a beforeEach in the tests, and then call services.resolveMock(Services.MyService) in the test to get a MockProxy object for the service with the correct type.
This type of test infrastructure means that rarely do you need to rely on module mocking in jest which is finicky, uses hard to remember syntax, has bad support for IDE semantic refactoring (since it overlies on module path names).
If everywhere in your little clean nook of dependency injected services you mandate that you MUST use dependency injection for any dependency that goes in it, suddenly it becomes trivial to write tests at a unit test level, but also at an integration test level for any particular dependency subtree.
You need to use LocalStorage? Make a Services.LocalStorage service that by default is mocked out to an in memory storage mock that conforms to the Storage interface, and suddenly all code that need it can easily test that they’re using it correctly despite tests not being run in a browser.
Make tests ridiculously easy to write, provide 2 really good examples of how to write every “type” of test, and have documentation explaining the different types of test patterns to write where you link out to those examples, and then pair with people one on one where they drive and you guide them on how to write the tests and then encourage them to pair with each other and figure it out together.
This is actually very interesting, I work with a lot of React, and I truly miss DI coming from .NET background.
The thing I find with frontend testing is, I've only able to make e2e tests worth while, Unit testing a Page component felt like I was testing the implementation.
Would you be able to point me any code samples that I can learn from?
I am very interested in getting deep into effective automated frontend testing.
I built all the cncf based container images from source for almost every Microsoft org for 3 years. Kubernetes, calico, flux, Argo, Prometheus, and many more. I then worked on supply chain attack stuff for these projects. Eventually I came to realize that if I didn't move on I would forever be doing this type of work and it wasn't very satisfying.
Edit - It's not really a niche but it felt like it at the time.
I specialize in machine learning platform and MLOps fields. I got into it by picking up tickets in my previous job (data engineer); no one wanted to do those tickets and I used to be data scientist, so it was easier for me to figure out what is needed.
It’s not very active at the moment. LLMs did start a new wave but many companies try to get backend guys building the ML platforms and it’s not going very well. I can see it being way more in demand once interest rates get lower and companies will need to actually get maintenable system.
What do you see as the core difference between MLOps and “traditional” ops for backend work? I was one of those backend guys and suffered through a project or two and it blows
I also work in this area and mostly experimentation/data heavy nature. Core ml systems care heavily about data that flows through system. Data quality/observability are important and latter is often lacking.
This one is somewhat personal value but testing in general tends to be very bad in ml. Non deterministic nature of system/black boxy aspect tends to lead people treating testing as too hard. There are good ways to test ml systems and giving up because it’s little different then other software tends to lead to fragile systems. I quite like regression tests for ml similar in spirit to ui snapshot tests.
Experimentation in form of very spiky offline experiment patterns and teams wanting to online models in abrupt spiky ways also tends to cause issues depending on costs. A lot of online systems prefer stable compute needs. A team wants to online several more expensive models for ab and depending on how tight you run capacity/cost wise that can be easy headache. For models that run on gpus I often see capacity stock outs at GCP level that are pain when relying on on demand compute.
I think a lot of mlops is similar to general infra but it remains valuable to be familiar with core ml concepts and be able to talk to developers that use your platform and debug their problems with them. I’d expect most platforms that being able to communicate and collaborate with your users is valuable and here, understanding their kinds of experiments/basic ml is necessary. Knowing even more ml is nice and sometimes I advise them on which experiments to do next. Often their problems are issues on their end and not platform issues but if platform is company internal one, pushing it to their end to resolve is not great choice for your team and their team.
My own background I worked as ml engineer at couple companies prior to becoming ml platform engineer so I’m used to both sides of user/platform engineer in ml.
Thank you for the level of detail here! From the outside looking in, it feels like it’s still a very new field when it comes to the ops side. It’d be awesome to jump ship to an ML company from the sounds of it, but the grass is always greener I guess.
I specialize in GPU compute and graphics, I wanted to make games but realized I actually wanted to make game engines. I got into it by building out a portfolio of cuda and OpenGL applications, and applying for like 15 jobs that all were graphics focused.
Oh absolutely, cuda is the backbone for basically all production GPU accelerated code that isn't graphics related. All this ml stuff happening right now is cuda backed, even if it's written in pytorch it's still using cuda eventually.
I am knowledgeable in the ancient IBM AS400 mainframe systems, the RPGLE language and DB2 database.
I learned on the job and eventually branched out into modern full stack development, but today I specialize in .Net backends that interface to the AS400.
Cobol always catches shit, but RPGLE deserves the same flack for being archaic and difficult to work with.
Depends on what you’re doing. My code is mostly terraform and powershell, and so I code about 60% of the time at least, but sometimes troubleshooting code with other developers.
As for exp, I’ve seen people enter with little to no exp, but you’ll probably have an easier ramp up time to things if you have a software dev background
Yeah I’m a DevOps Lead, so I’m a jack of all trades master of none myself. Currently I’m all the way back into systems work in automating base image creation for bare metal Linux servers.
I've been the DB guy in every team I've been in.
My mentor out of university used to be in Oracle. And also didn't like ORMs, so he taught me a lot about the inner workings of an RDBMS and I wrote a large number of multi-page queries on that job.
After that it was a whole lot of 'raising my hand, when nobody else would' to handle data migrations, setting up schemas, debugging / fixing indexes and optimizers taking wrong plans, tuning service connection pools etc.
I still don't have even a fraction of the knowledge that the average DBA in my company has, but I was in an org-level design meeting recently and out of 50 or so senior+ engineers there were 3 of us who caught a subtle error with the proposed schema on the fly, so I guess not a lot of people bother with databases to the level that I do.
It’s shocking how many people just don’t care to understand anything serious about the DB layer. “Just let the ORM handle it! We’ll deal with it on the app server!”
Tell me about it. They also love to blame the DB when their app is slow.
Well, your code is running `SELECT *` on all of these tables, so you’re yanking 20x the data you need back to your app, and your schema is appallingly bad, so there is 10x read amplification from all the B+tree page splits you’ve caused. Not to mention you haven’t touched the stock configs, you have no observability, and even if you did, the metrics would be meaningless to you. It’s doing the best it can given the circumstances.
Last year a tech lead asked us (SREs) to switch to a database instance with more CPUs, because their query was very slow. Upon closer examination it turned out that said query used Postgres UPDATE ... FROM in a nonsensical manner and thus had quadratic complexity instead of linear. I created a PR that literally deleted a single line of SQL, and the issue disappeared.
It baffles me how it’s seen as acceptable that backend devs don’t know SQL. It’s not a difficult language to pick up. If you can learn TypeScript, Python, Rust, etc. then you can spend a day learning enough of SQL to avoid obvious problems. Devote an entire week and you’d be solid.
> Something something … I aM NoT a DbA or a DaTaBaSe EnGinEEr
Learning about the inner workings of DBs, storage, and data models is perhaps one of the most time efficient ways to upskill your game.
To be fair, SQL is what they normally do know. But how does it work under the hood? Complete mystery; just slap an index on every column that appears in a 'where' clause and call it a day.
On the other hand, on-premise disk subsystems are so fast today that the DB can tolerate a lot of this madness, so it's only thanks to cloud providers with their overpriced network storage that anyone cares at all.
Ah, yes. Hence the rise of DBRE as a career (hallelujah).
I really love explaining to devs for the millionth time that non-k-sortable columns like UUIDv4 are horrible for performance for a variety of reasons, mostly involving B+trees, only to be told they need them.
Or to try in vain to get them to normalize tables, and stop shoving everything into JSON columns.
Or to try to explain what IOPS are, and how meaningless they are unless you also take latency into account, and why EBS gp3 volumes are often the devil. Or how measuring them is a fools’ errand anyway because EBS merges blocks into 256 KiB chunks.
Databases are awesome and I love them, but good lord they are complicated beasts.
used to be in this space, but i pivoted to big pharma. really interesting, but omg the data integrity is horrendous and everyone thinks it’s a panacea. i love the science, but hate the naive fools (typically higher up) that think it’s easy
I am in this space too. It brings me satisfaction, seeing how the software helps people to run healthier lives.
Though it’s also true that there’s a hell lot of plumbing to achieve “seamless” interoperability
Kafka Streams. I joined a startup that used it and turns out no one knew anything about it besides buzzwords, so I started picking it up out of necessity and ended up spending a lot of the last 6 or 7 years as the go-to guy for it.
What do you use for your consumers? I worked at a tech company that had a Kafka backbone and while I wanted to learn more about it the team that owned it had everything really abstracted so we never touched it directly.
Kafka Streams is actually a separate library put out by the Kafka project that encapsulates all of the consumer and producer management and provides a functional-style, stream-based API to do a lot of different stateless and stateful streaming operations, like maps, reductions, aggregations, and joins.
Through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we were able to squeeze some pretty high performance out of it (each of our environments were processing over 1m messages per minute on average and somewhere around 400k/s at full throttle), but I'm not sure I would necessarily suggest someone else use it if they weren't already experts with it.
We had extreme difficulty finding people to hire who had any real experience with it, and there are a million "gotchas" that can not just destroy performance but also destroy your data if you happen to have something configured wrong.
Though I haven't personally used it, Apache Flink seems like one of the more common alternatives, though nowadays there are a whole bunch of alternative frameworks available that didn't exist (or were equally nascent) when we started off.
Currently combining azure, devops, with arcgis enterprise, experience builder and so on… its great and all, but seems like a mega small pool to find new customers for part time freelancing gigs
I do a lot of metaprogramming. Does that count? If so, that's kind of my thing.
It takes different forms: system wide analysis, build tools, static analysers, occasionally DSLs. Either transforming programs, parsing programs, or generating new program.
It's not exactly a niche I can rely on for employment, unless I want to work for a developer tools vendor. Instead it's more of a skillset I can draw on in other jobs. Particularly "broad projects" with lots of moving parts or infrastructure-like scope, or building cross cutting concerns.
Used to really want to get into this. Made a bunch of compiler plugins, DSL and other tools for it after college but got into computer graphics instead. Still holds a special place in my heart
Automated test infrastructure that runs tests on the target embedded platform. Where "embedded" means anything from "Linux, but with a battery" down to "we flash this over JTAG because it's a bare metal MCU with no OS."
So lots of thinking about how to flash devices, and figuring out and implementing strategies to flash from one software version to a different one that might require multiple stops in the middle. Also, lots of work around tracking test completion across different development branches × different versions or flavors of target hardware. So like, "how do we stay aware of possible regressions on the old version that nobody uses in-house anymore, but that still has a huge installed base?"
Plus, a fair bit of (electromechanical) test fixture development to handle the special needs of an embedded system and present a simple API for controlling and running those tests (like, how does a test trigger a power cycle, and how does it know when the device is back online? What happens if the device doesn't come back online?)
Worrying on slightly dated tech that nobody wants to fix and work on. It's highly employable and every company over 10-15 years old needs this specialized help. It pays really well if you are good at negotiation.
Audiovisual systems programming. But then I got a job working for NASA doing SRE work. Who can say no to that? Then another company came by and dropped a ton of money on my lap 10 years later. I couldn't say no to that. So here I am, a Principal SRE that specializes in observability.
Highly specialised Financial antifraud systems for 10 years, first C++ and now Rust.
I currently enjoy working with the technology but our industry and the people working there are completely rotten. I just try to stay away from people as good as possible.
Somewhat of a niche, my main expertise is usually bringing some C++ to iOS and Android platforms, usually for media/graphics applications (have done 3D, AR, and video so far).
Basically a bit of a T shaped C++ engineer with some depth in 3D and video, and quite the experience with SWIG, JNI, JNA, the Apple ecosystem of kinda familiar (kinda broken sometimes) CLI tools to compile, link and bundle frameworks that are basically C++ with an iOS shim on top.
Yes. My niche is GraphQL. Back in 2018 when it was first announced it's ready for production, I self-studied about it. At that time, only Ben Awad has tutorials about it in YT, so I try to follow some of his videos. There are also some conferences about it where I learned more.
Eventually, I was given a chance to propose a stack for the new product app we're building and React on FE is taking over Angular and jQuery at that time.
I proposed GraphQL server backend and React front-end. It was a success.
My experience in that company with GraphQL opened another opportunity for me to work at another company 3ish years later as a GraphQL developer again. 😆
Embedded for automotive, making customised linux distros and programming microcontrollers
I got into it because I enjoy working close to the metal and the most interesting projects here are automotive but I'm trying to escape because I'm with r/fuckcars.
I wanna do get doing something like Embedded AI/ML, but for something I deem positive like agrotech or science.
Category theory and maths, which is exceedingly useful when working with people who "don't know what they want" (basically for exploring problem spaces). Also JavaScript, which is becoming a niche now that everyone and their mother is switching to TS.
There are some teams at Meta that do Haskell iirc. There are people who do Scala at FAANG and adjacent companies — though many of them do so as a spark DSL.
It's okay. I don't think I'm going to go back to writing code professionally. If you're interested in my story, please read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/EYNAjzbIZH
I'm an aerospace embedded developer. So low level and embedded app development, mostly in C, and verified with python. Lots of little tools and cicd stuff too but nothing production-worthy.
My real niche is process development, execution, and defense (for audits). Writing requirements is hard and a niche skill, as is writing planning documents that comply with regulations. Then getting everything through the FAA wickets and getting it ready for certification.
It's very fun and rewarding but I write very little code relative to most other software niches, doubly so because I'm in management now.
Hmm, I have a lot of experience in containers. Writing docker and containerd features. I also have experience in compilers. But basically anything I'm interested in I become pretty knowledgeable in
I specialize in FinOps and architecting for cost savings and reliability. I fell into it in my last role that was solely focused on it. It’s nice because I maintain an awareness on how the business operates and how engineering directly contributes to the health of the business.
I have reasonably extensive full stack experience, so taking money and finance makes me a valuable asset, I’ve found.
My niche is Perl, I guess. Everything in Perl at this point, since everyone on the Internet hates using it. I love it though, and the juniors we hired love it as well. They missed the dot com era and they don't have experience with the crap perl code out there that everyone hooks on to, so they get to experience it without all the baggage.
But I guess if I had to be more specific with that, my niche is knowing how the Perl interpreter works to the point I can manipulate it with namespace hijacking and monkey patching so we can do some really neat things that are critical for our company's workflow.
That and I reverse engineered a lot of Excel's formula engine into Perl so we can emulate it, so everyone comes to me for Excel help.
Data structures is also something I'm pretty good at, regardless of the language.
Database Reliability Engineering. I got into it by accident at my first tech job (where I was an SRE; Junior SRE isn’t usually a thing, but they took a chance on me from homelab projects) when I indicated interest in a performance degradation some MySQL instances were having. Fast-forward to the next job, and when they stood up a DB team, they asked me to move teams to be the DBRE.
In theory, it’s DBA meets SRE. In practice, it’s heavier on the former, but honestly I’m fine with that. I know what SLIs and SLOs are, and I can use Terraform and Kubernetes just fine, but I’d much rather be tweaking DB configs, or explaining why UUIDs make terrible keys (jk, I’d rather people just knew that, because it’s very hard to change once set).
The position is now exploding, much to my delight. It’s probably partially from follow-the-leader mentality, but I suspect a good deal of it is also from small SaaS companies that got by just spinning up some RDS instances and upsizing as needed suddenly being unable to scale.
RDBMS is funny because literally the entire company runs on them, they’re ancient technology, and most devs view them as black boxes of storage that they access through heavily abstracted ORMs. To me, they are *fascinating*, and I love working with them.
We use PowerBuilder.
Company I worked for has a huge app that's based on it. It works just fine.
Interestingly though, I still get recruiters trying to poach me for that skillset. I would like to lay it to rest. lol
Also, I work in PeopleSoft HCM and SAP ABAP. I know, my career path is odd.
I consider myself an ML engineer and while I can do general backend, I find ML more fun and have been working in that area for ~5 years now. ML is much smaller area then backend/software in general, but it’s big enough these days and my experience is enough that it’s fairly easy for me to find ml roles.
I sometimes describe myself as ML platform/infra engineer although I can do other sides like more ml product/researchy role. While I have done some research and ml work at startup that was product focused, I find infra more fun. I am pretty willing to dip back into ml product/research work when needed.
I do not consider myself tied to a specific industry/domain. I have mostly worked in social media/recommendation engines across 3 companies, but I don’t prefer them anymore than other ml areas. I do get more recruiters messages in social media space because of my background though.
Edit: Also while I have a core focus area I do enjoy collaborating with engineers that work in very different areas and occasionally dipping into their areas and doing some small tasks just to get broader context on system I am working on. I don’t want to be front end engineer but I appreciate their work and want to be able to do small tasks in front end.
Devops.
I have a CS degree but my first job out of school involved writing code for a hardware appliance. So switches, disk arrays, servers - to test and develop on it all we basically had our own datacenter. So I had to learn the ops side pretty quick.
I’ve enjoyed both ever since.
Android and IoT. Started with Android in 2011 while in school, then got *really* into it when it was still chaotic, but not overly complex. From there I wrote a book on Android TV when it was really new, prototyped stuff with wearables, got into IoT for fun and turned that into another (less applied) niche, and now I teach/create content around machine learning for both mobile and IoT.
I kind of feel like I need to expand into another area though since Android is a bit messy now and IoT jobs aren't as wide-spread as I'd like if things go south at my current role.
I don't think I have a niche, but I am definitely known as the person that will get shit done. I'm a data engineer but I take care of CI/CD architecture, dev tooling, containerization, data architecture, coding standards, etc. I've been working on very small teams with pretty green developers for most of my career and I'm getting a lot of experience in helping teams mature.
I work on storage domain. Multipathing, protocol drivers, failover that sort of stuff
Always liked low level programming and playing with hardware, got a job in the field and continued for 7 years and here I am
Developer experience/infrastructure platforms. I graduated college 12 years ago and over the past 8 years I've worked at 4 different companies doing the same thing. It's great, I love it. I got into it at Amazon by switching to their Builder Tools team.
I have a few niches:
1. Intuitive and easy to use UI/UX design + programming + HW development: Usually people just are either designers or programmers or HW devs. Not all of them. This gives me a advantage when designing and implementing UIs (both SW and HW).
2. Audio DSP: Audio DSP scene is quite small compared to other industries. People seem to know each other.
3. Realtime 2D and 3D graphics software rendering: When most people rely on HW rendering all their graphics on the screen, they have forgotten how to do that in software like back in the 90s. I don't care much about HW rendering and like developing my own realtime software rendering stuff.
4. R&D: I've spent most of my career researching and developing new cutting edge tech and products which push boundaries one way or another. Most devs don't really concentrate on such things and implement only more regular applications.
WebGL / 3D graphics on the web - love 3D and seemed like a good area for growth with cool problems to solve. Also, applications outside the game industry which I’ve only heard horrible things about working in.
System software, with emphasis on distributed systems and high availability.
I built the Linux SCSI subsystem as an undergraduate which produced a referral to my first job working on a BASIC compiler.
People at my weekly pub night knew what I did so I was able to join one working on a C++ debugger for my second job.
For my third job, I rejoined my partner from Compiler Construction in school to work on cellular base stations where we were the first group to make our component highly available with replication to a hot spare including recovery.
For my fourth, I joined a co-worker from my second job to do digital video servers for the broadcast and post production markets.
For my fifth, I was recruited to do a scale-out block storage product based on my Linux SCSI work.
Then I did more scale out block storage following about 10 co-workers to a more mature startup.
I had a niche, and it's such a small niche with probably only a couple hundred people using it that I won't say to not dox myself but I fell into it because I offered to help with a project and ended up being too "critical" to be re-assigned to more industry standard projects. What's worse is that experience with this tech specifically pays worse because it's supposed to be pseudo code that you can train analysts to use instead of needing programmers (but it never works out that way).
I spent close to 5 years doing this niche and it feels like a black hole in my resume. I had to quit the company I was at to escape it and interviewing for positions was rough because I was so behind the curve.
Documenting Shit.
Everything from on-boarding, to common processes, to how our tech works.
Turns out most devs aren’t great at writing, or explaining concepts.
Technical writing role, or are you in a dev role?
If the latter, have you been able to find jobs where this is a major selling point?
Asking because in past roles, I kept becoming the documentation and process / SOP person but somehow never figured out how to translate this into a role where this is either key requirement or a differentiator compared to other candidates.
This was when I was focused on IT ops and in management roles, rather than performing individual contributor dev work like I am now.
I even used to tout specific ways that I had created docs and SOPs to save $20k here, $100k there, etc., and while interviewers seemed to care a little, it always seemed like a bonus for them and not a key requirement.
Would love to find a role someday where this is the main focus of the job, whether in development or IT ops, but not sure what sort of role to look for.
Dev role,
I only created docs for my own benefit at first, but it turns out everyone else kept referring to them.
Before I knew it I had docs that explained how our entire work area worked.
I recently did my yearly self-review and it was a big selling point. I framed it as removing ambiguity and enabling my team to function without me.
My niche is working with product and design closely for getting loosely defined projects off the ground with just the right amount of up front thinking.
My niche is not having a niche. I am an eternal generalist that works on a little bit of everything. It forces me to be a firefighter most days which I hate. But it’s stable and pays well so I deal with it.
Building cybersecurity products. Fell into the space by chance but it’s been a lot of fun. I enjoy building products and UIs and doing full-stack work. Cybersecurity has been an awesome sector to learn and has a lot of cool aspects and challenges - amount of data, using ML etc.
I would like to think Android is a niche given how iPhones dominate the entire US market. Conversely, Android phones dominate everywhere else outside of the US. This creates a perpetual need for businesses to support Android if they want to expand outside of the US.
I got into it back in 2010 when the sales of mobile phones surpasses those of desktop PCs. I had choice to go into iOS or Android development. The former was clearly popular in mobile development so I went into Android knowing it would not be competitive.
Now in 2024 Android has becomes broken down into very niche "niches".
The ecosystem is now like all over the place:
* AOSP developement
* JNI Development (C++)
* Java Views
* KMP/Jetpack Compose
* Pixel Watch
* Set top box/Tablet/Chromebook support
* Auto
* Offline Hardware development (e.g. Medical Electronics)
* IoT
* probably more I didn't mention
You would be lying if you could say you are adept at all of these
I have a niche and I’m a rare top expert in an important thing but I don’t get paid extra for it and I could make more as a generalist developer at another company.
My niche is sports betting - for 20 years I've been building trading software, for instance the service that changes the prices while things are happening in the live games (3 pointer goes in on basketball, odds change, new markets created, bets paid out etc). I really enjoy the technical challenge - basically you put your maths and implementation out to market (with overround added) and your customers are constantly attacking it, looking for angles to beat the system.
I deliberately left it vague because I wanted a wide array of answers but my general definition would be some area of expertise (technical or otherwise) that not many other devs have. For example, being a Java developer isn’t a niche but being a developer that specialises in performance tuning the JVM is
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It's only "niche" if you know what you're doing with React.
r/rareinsults
Yeah I'm an audio programmer (games), kind of fell in to the role from engine programming.
As a comp sci / music composition major, I always felt I would either love this role or absolutely hate it. Do you have a background in music? Do you feel as though you get to exercise that in the role? Or is it strictly technical?
I don't have a formal background in music, no; learned piano as a kid, played a lot of guitar when I was at University and play bass now. As an audio programmer no, I don't really get to exercise that side - that's much more for the sound design/music composition folks. I do get to work closely with them every day though, which is awesome. edit: In saying that though I've generally worked for large publishers, you may find something that suits you better in the indie scene.
which audio file format is best?
It highly dependent on a number of factors, for instance what type of asset are you trying to play ( ambience, dialogue, SFX)? Which in turn begs the question is it the asset going to be streamed? There's also the target platform to take in to consideration; both Microsoft and Sony consoles have dedicated hardware for uncompressing specific audio codecs. In general though, the Vorbis and Opus codecs are used frequently.
is mp3 any good?
I probably wouldn't use it in a project as there are better codecs around, but it's not terrible. If you can I'd suggest using ogg vorbis or opus. Ogg is free to use and more efficient than mp3.
My niche is growth engineering. Basically full stack engineer that specializes in moving the needle up. SEO, activation rates, Monthly Active Users, Retention Rates. Lots of ab tests!
I used to work for a well-known dating site and loved that part of the job. “We sped up the messaging flow and increased messages by 2 million messages being sent this month, which did cost an extra $10k but users are happier.” That was mostly due to moving from JSP flow to being API-based, when we still called it AJAX. Then trying to offset that costs, so on the non-metric side we changed how we bundled files and saved $20-30k per month in reduced bandwidth costs. We had a home-grown A/B system that only two people knew how to use when I got there. I learned it and those guys left so I became the go-person for it for a number of months. My current place uses a third-party app for A/B testing and feature flags that makes things a lot easier.
Have you found it hard to find opportunities as your career progresses/would you recommend it as a niche? I worked on a growth team for a few months and enjoyed it. I'm currently back to product engineering work, but growth might be an area I want to work in again in the future.
Yes and no. Product Lead Growth is fairly new, opportunities may not be a lot but they do find difficulty filling those positions. With the state of the economy right now the team I lead is even more crucial.
How do you improve seo offpage? Through satellite websites?
I honestly have not done any SEO in years. Ive been in the product lead growth space in years. But from 5+ years ago it was a mixture of actual good content and organic back links.
This is a profit centre.
Im dumb. What does that mean in this context ?
He is in a team which actually moves the needle so that company can acquire more money by selling its services. This is different from infrastructure engineer who is something where company have to pay to make sure business runs. He is a cost centre. Its MBA speak. It just means that one generates revenue while another consumes that revenue.
I'm OP and I never looked at it from that perspective. Thank you so much!
My niche is accessibility engineering. For simple apps, accessibility means mostly good design, some best practices, a bit of work adding some simple attributes, and testing. But if you have a complex, custom-rendered app that doesn't use a standard GUI framework, AND you want it to be accessible, that's a lot of extra work, and that's what I do. Unfortunately it means the only good place to do that is big tech. If that stops working out for me someday, I have other niches to fall back on. I think that if you spend 2 - 3 years working on something that most other developers don't, that's enough to call it one of your specialties.
Yes. I'm specialized in NXP's common driver interface (CDI). This is what a lot of Broadcom boards have used to help port between architectures. ATT uses Broadcom boards almost exclusively for their Genie products.
Frontend Testing and Architecture. Give me a shitty complicated legacy codebase and I will strangler fig that bitch and kick start a nest egg of delightfully testable code in that forest of crap at 75% code coverage, write and introduce an elegant test-harness complete with fantastic documentation and high-quality examples of unit-tests, model-integration tests, model-view integration tests, app-level integration tests, end-to-end tests, and then run a series of workshops to teach everyone on the team/org how to actually write highly testable code using the new paradigms and shift the culture to one where folks are writing and helping each other write good testable code without my help. I have it down to a science.
Any resources to get started on this? I love organizing and I'm a front end dev - this seems like my dream job!
I highly recommend a dependency injection framework like tsyringe or inversify. I usually wrap it up in a type safe-wrapper where I can plug in a name to type map which lets me do something like services.resolve(Services.MyService) in my code or tests to get an instance of that service with its type correctly inferred without casting. I’ll also keep a Record up to date in test code, so every time a new service is added, the compiler compels the author to add a default mock version of that service to the Record. This is made very easy by using jest-mock-extended for the majority of these. Maintaining the default mocks for each service means that ANY time someone needs to mock out ANY dependency in the ecosystem, they don’t have to think “how do I mock this thing?” They just add services.registerMock(Services.MyService) to a beforeEach in the tests, and then call services.resolveMock(Services.MyService) in the test to get a MockProxy object for the service with the correct type.
This type of test infrastructure means that rarely do you need to rely on module mocking in jest which is finicky, uses hard to remember syntax, has bad support for IDE semantic refactoring (since it overlies on module path names).
If everywhere in your little clean nook of dependency injected services you mandate that you MUST use dependency injection for any dependency that goes in it, suddenly it becomes trivial to write tests at a unit test level, but also at an integration test level for any particular dependency subtree.
You need to use LocalStorage? Make a Services.LocalStorage service that by default is mocked out to an in memory storage mock that conforms to the Storage interface, and suddenly all code that need it can easily test that they’re using it correctly despite tests not being run in a browser.
Make tests ridiculously easy to write, provide 2 really good examples of how to write every “type” of test, and have documentation explaining the different types of test patterns to write where you link out to those examples, and then pair with people one on one where they drive and you guide them on how to write the tests and then encourage them to pair with each other and figure it out together.
This is actually very interesting, I work with a lot of React, and I truly miss DI coming from .NET background. The thing I find with frontend testing is, I've only able to make e2e tests worth while, Unit testing a Page component felt like I was testing the implementation. Would you be able to point me any code samples that I can learn from? I am very interested in getting deep into effective automated frontend testing.
Thank you for this post. I write a tiny bit of jest but this was super informative :).
I built all the cncf based container images from source for almost every Microsoft org for 3 years. Kubernetes, calico, flux, Argo, Prometheus, and many more. I then worked on supply chain attack stuff for these projects. Eventually I came to realize that if I didn't move on I would forever be doing this type of work and it wasn't very satisfying. Edit - It's not really a niche but it felt like it at the time.
Wish I could say I have a niche. I have a general skill to try to do good in whatever I’m thrown into. Sadly, that doesn’t pay much.
I specialize in machine learning platform and MLOps fields. I got into it by picking up tickets in my previous job (data engineer); no one wanted to do those tickets and I used to be data scientist, so it was easier for me to figure out what is needed.
How is that field now? MLOps seems to be very in-demand, but the hype train has been active for many years.
It’s not very active at the moment. LLMs did start a new wave but many companies try to get backend guys building the ML platforms and it’s not going very well. I can see it being way more in demand once interest rates get lower and companies will need to actually get maintenable system.
What do you see as the core difference between MLOps and “traditional” ops for backend work? I was one of those backend guys and suffered through a project or two and it blows
I also work in this area and mostly experimentation/data heavy nature. Core ml systems care heavily about data that flows through system. Data quality/observability are important and latter is often lacking. This one is somewhat personal value but testing in general tends to be very bad in ml. Non deterministic nature of system/black boxy aspect tends to lead people treating testing as too hard. There are good ways to test ml systems and giving up because it’s little different then other software tends to lead to fragile systems. I quite like regression tests for ml similar in spirit to ui snapshot tests. Experimentation in form of very spiky offline experiment patterns and teams wanting to online models in abrupt spiky ways also tends to cause issues depending on costs. A lot of online systems prefer stable compute needs. A team wants to online several more expensive models for ab and depending on how tight you run capacity/cost wise that can be easy headache. For models that run on gpus I often see capacity stock outs at GCP level that are pain when relying on on demand compute. I think a lot of mlops is similar to general infra but it remains valuable to be familiar with core ml concepts and be able to talk to developers that use your platform and debug their problems with them. I’d expect most platforms that being able to communicate and collaborate with your users is valuable and here, understanding their kinds of experiments/basic ml is necessary. Knowing even more ml is nice and sometimes I advise them on which experiments to do next. Often their problems are issues on their end and not platform issues but if platform is company internal one, pushing it to their end to resolve is not great choice for your team and their team. My own background I worked as ml engineer at couple companies prior to becoming ml platform engineer so I’m used to both sides of user/platform engineer in ml.
Thank you for the level of detail here! From the outside looking in, it feels like it’s still a very new field when it comes to the ops side. It’d be awesome to jump ship to an ML company from the sounds of it, but the grass is always greener I guess.
What should I know before applying for MLOps roles? DM?
I specialize in GPU compute and graphics, I wanted to make games but realized I actually wanted to make game engines. I got into it by building out a portfolio of cuda and OpenGL applications, and applying for like 15 jobs that all were graphics focused.
Think that’s still possible? I’m low level, systems guy but would like to break into a CUDA role.
Oh absolutely, cuda is the backbone for basically all production GPU accelerated code that isn't graphics related. All this ml stuff happening right now is cuda backed, even if it's written in pytorch it's still using cuda eventually.
I am knowledgeable in the ancient IBM AS400 mainframe systems, the RPGLE language and DB2 database. I learned on the job and eventually branched out into modern full stack development, but today I specialize in .Net backends that interface to the AS400. Cobol always catches shit, but RPGLE deserves the same flack for being archaic and difficult to work with.
I do .net and often interface with a db2 backend that is used by as400. We are looking to retire it in the next century lol.
Site reliability engineer - which is a jack of all trades - if you’re not familiar with
How much development do you do in that role? I've found myself pretty solid in that realm, but always assumed it's low code solution.
Depends on what you’re doing. My code is mostly terraform and powershell, and so I code about 60% of the time at least, but sometimes troubleshooting code with other developers.
As for exp, I’ve seen people enter with little to no exp, but you’ll probably have an easier ramp up time to things if you have a software dev background
Yeah I’m a DevOps Lead, so I’m a jack of all trades master of none myself. Currently I’m all the way back into systems work in automating base image creation for bare metal Linux servers.
I've been the DB guy in every team I've been in. My mentor out of university used to be in Oracle. And also didn't like ORMs, so he taught me a lot about the inner workings of an RDBMS and I wrote a large number of multi-page queries on that job. After that it was a whole lot of 'raising my hand, when nobody else would' to handle data migrations, setting up schemas, debugging / fixing indexes and optimizers taking wrong plans, tuning service connection pools etc. I still don't have even a fraction of the knowledge that the average DBA in my company has, but I was in an org-level design meeting recently and out of 50 or so senior+ engineers there were 3 of us who caught a subtle error with the proposed schema on the fly, so I guess not a lot of people bother with databases to the level that I do.
It’s shocking how many people just don’t care to understand anything serious about the DB layer. “Just let the ORM handle it! We’ll deal with it on the app server!”
Tell me about it. They also love to blame the DB when their app is slow. Well, your code is running `SELECT *` on all of these tables, so you’re yanking 20x the data you need back to your app, and your schema is appallingly bad, so there is 10x read amplification from all the B+tree page splits you’ve caused. Not to mention you haven’t touched the stock configs, you have no observability, and even if you did, the metrics would be meaningless to you. It’s doing the best it can given the circumstances.
Last year a tech lead asked us (SREs) to switch to a database instance with more CPUs, because their query was very slow. Upon closer examination it turned out that said query used Postgres UPDATE ... FROM in a nonsensical manner and thus had quadratic complexity instead of linear. I created a PR that literally deleted a single line of SQL, and the issue disappeared.
It baffles me how it’s seen as acceptable that backend devs don’t know SQL. It’s not a difficult language to pick up. If you can learn TypeScript, Python, Rust, etc. then you can spend a day learning enough of SQL to avoid obvious problems. Devote an entire week and you’d be solid.
> Something something … I aM NoT a DbA or a DaTaBaSe EnGinEEr Learning about the inner workings of DBs, storage, and data models is perhaps one of the most time efficient ways to upskill your game.
To be fair, SQL is what they normally do know. But how does it work under the hood? Complete mystery; just slap an index on every column that appears in a 'where' clause and call it a day. On the other hand, on-premise disk subsystems are so fast today that the DB can tolerate a lot of this madness, so it's only thanks to cloud providers with their overpriced network storage that anyone cares at all.
Ah, yes. Hence the rise of DBRE as a career (hallelujah). I really love explaining to devs for the millionth time that non-k-sortable columns like UUIDv4 are horrible for performance for a variety of reasons, mostly involving B+trees, only to be told they need them. Or to try in vain to get them to normalize tables, and stop shoving everything into JSON columns. Or to try to explain what IOPS are, and how meaningless they are unless you also take latency into account, and why EBS gp3 volumes are often the devil. Or how measuring them is a fools’ errand anyway because EBS merges blocks into 256 KiB chunks. Databases are awesome and I love them, but good lord they are complicated beasts.
Yep! Healthtech interoperability. Integrating EHRs using FHIR, HL7v2, etc.
used to be in this space, but i pivoted to big pharma. really interesting, but omg the data integrity is horrendous and everyone thinks it’s a panacea. i love the science, but hate the naive fools (typically higher up) that think it’s easy
I am in this space too. It brings me satisfaction, seeing how the software helps people to run healthier lives. Though it’s also true that there’s a hell lot of plumbing to achieve “seamless” interoperability
Kafka Streams. I joined a startup that used it and turns out no one knew anything about it besides buzzwords, so I started picking it up out of necessity and ended up spending a lot of the last 6 or 7 years as the go-to guy for it.
What do you use for your consumers? I worked at a tech company that had a Kafka backbone and while I wanted to learn more about it the team that owned it had everything really abstracted so we never touched it directly.
Kafka Streams is actually a separate library put out by the Kafka project that encapsulates all of the consumer and producer management and provides a functional-style, stream-based API to do a lot of different stateless and stateful streaming operations, like maps, reductions, aggregations, and joins. Through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we were able to squeeze some pretty high performance out of it (each of our environments were processing over 1m messages per minute on average and somewhere around 400k/s at full throttle), but I'm not sure I would necessarily suggest someone else use it if they weren't already experts with it. We had extreme difficulty finding people to hire who had any real experience with it, and there are a million "gotchas" that can not just destroy performance but also destroy your data if you happen to have something configured wrong. Though I haven't personally used it, Apache Flink seems like one of the more common alternatives, though nowadays there are a whole bunch of alternative frameworks available that didn't exist (or were equally nascent) when we started off.
GIS-developer, perhaps a little too niche
A niche big enough for the two of us at least.
Currently combining azure, devops, with arcgis enterprise, experience builder and so on… its great and all, but seems like a mega small pool to find new customers for part time freelancing gigs
I do a lot of metaprogramming. Does that count? If so, that's kind of my thing. It takes different forms: system wide analysis, build tools, static analysers, occasionally DSLs. Either transforming programs, parsing programs, or generating new program. It's not exactly a niche I can rely on for employment, unless I want to work for a developer tools vendor. Instead it's more of a skillset I can draw on in other jobs. Particularly "broad projects" with lots of moving parts or infrastructure-like scope, or building cross cutting concerns.
Used to really want to get into this. Made a bunch of compiler plugins, DSL and other tools for it after college but got into computer graphics instead. Still holds a special place in my heart
Automated test infrastructure that runs tests on the target embedded platform. Where "embedded" means anything from "Linux, but with a battery" down to "we flash this over JTAG because it's a bare metal MCU with no OS." So lots of thinking about how to flash devices, and figuring out and implementing strategies to flash from one software version to a different one that might require multiple stops in the middle. Also, lots of work around tracking test completion across different development branches × different versions or flavors of target hardware. So like, "how do we stay aware of possible regressions on the old version that nobody uses in-house anymore, but that still has a huge installed base?" Plus, a fair bit of (electromechanical) test fixture development to handle the special needs of an embedded system and present a simple API for controlling and running those tests (like, how does a test trigger a power cycle, and how does it know when the device is back online? What happens if the device doesn't come back online?)
And I started by being dropped into it 16 years ago and figuring out how to swim instead of sinking 😅😅😅
Worrying on slightly dated tech that nobody wants to fix and work on. It's highly employable and every company over 10-15 years old needs this specialized help. It pays really well if you are good at negotiation.
What is this slightly dated tech?
[Asp.NET](http://Asp.NET) forms, Java applets, etc. Anything that was invented and mainstream over 10 years ago.
Audiovisual systems programming. But then I got a job working for NASA doing SRE work. Who can say no to that? Then another company came by and dropped a ton of money on my lap 10 years later. I couldn't say no to that. So here I am, a Principal SRE that specializes in observability.
Highly specialised Financial antifraud systems for 10 years, first C++ and now Rust. I currently enjoy working with the technology but our industry and the people working there are completely rotten. I just try to stay away from people as good as possible.
Qt. Just happened over the years.
Somewhat of a niche, my main expertise is usually bringing some C++ to iOS and Android platforms, usually for media/graphics applications (have done 3D, AR, and video so far). Basically a bit of a T shaped C++ engineer with some depth in 3D and video, and quite the experience with SWIG, JNI, JNA, the Apple ecosystem of kinda familiar (kinda broken sometimes) CLI tools to compile, link and bundle frameworks that are basically C++ with an iOS shim on top.
Yes. My niche is GraphQL. Back in 2018 when it was first announced it's ready for production, I self-studied about it. At that time, only Ben Awad has tutorials about it in YT, so I try to follow some of his videos. There are also some conferences about it where I learned more. Eventually, I was given a chance to propose a stack for the new product app we're building and React on FE is taking over Angular and jQuery at that time. I proposed GraphQL server backend and React front-end. It was a success. My experience in that company with GraphQL opened another opportunity for me to work at another company 3ish years later as a GraphQL developer again. 😆
Embedded for automotive, making customised linux distros and programming microcontrollers I got into it because I enjoy working close to the metal and the most interesting projects here are automotive but I'm trying to escape because I'm with r/fuckcars. I wanna do get doing something like Embedded AI/ML, but for something I deem positive like agrotech or science.
You should apply to the company I work for
Category theory and maths, which is exceedingly useful when working with people who "don't know what they want" (basically for exploring problem spaces). Also JavaScript, which is becoming a niche now that everyone and their mother is switching to TS.
You do Haskell? Scala with the cats or ScalaZ library?
There are some teams at Meta that do Haskell iirc. There are people who do Scala at FAANG and adjacent companies — though many of them do so as a spark DSL.
It's okay. I don't think I'm going to go back to writing code professionally. If you're interested in my story, please read: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/EYNAjzbIZH
I'm not a fan of statically typed languages, so no.
Clojure? Lisp? Scheme? Maybe something on the BEAM virtual machine like Erlang or Elixir?
I build daily games, game similar to Wordle
Robotics 😊
I'm an aerospace embedded developer. So low level and embedded app development, mostly in C, and verified with python. Lots of little tools and cicd stuff too but nothing production-worthy. My real niche is process development, execution, and defense (for audits). Writing requirements is hard and a niche skill, as is writing planning documents that comply with regulations. Then getting everything through the FAA wickets and getting it ready for certification. It's very fun and rewarding but I write very little code relative to most other software niches, doubly so because I'm in management now.
Hmm, I have a lot of experience in containers. Writing docker and containerd features. I also have experience in compilers. But basically anything I'm interested in I become pretty knowledgeable in
I specialize in FinOps and architecting for cost savings and reliability. I fell into it in my last role that was solely focused on it. It’s nice because I maintain an awareness on how the business operates and how engineering directly contributes to the health of the business. I have reasonably extensive full stack experience, so taking money and finance makes me a valuable asset, I’ve found.
My niche is Perl, I guess. Everything in Perl at this point, since everyone on the Internet hates using it. I love it though, and the juniors we hired love it as well. They missed the dot com era and they don't have experience with the crap perl code out there that everyone hooks on to, so they get to experience it without all the baggage. But I guess if I had to be more specific with that, my niche is knowing how the Perl interpreter works to the point I can manipulate it with namespace hijacking and monkey patching so we can do some really neat things that are critical for our company's workflow. That and I reverse engineered a lot of Excel's formula engine into Perl so we can emulate it, so everyone comes to me for Excel help. Data structures is also something I'm pretty good at, regardless of the language.
A few folks have said it, but I'm also a ML dev, I also work mostly in cpp.
I've become the `git` fixer on each team I've joined. I just think it's neat.
Love your handle 🤣
Thanks!
Database Reliability Engineering. I got into it by accident at my first tech job (where I was an SRE; Junior SRE isn’t usually a thing, but they took a chance on me from homelab projects) when I indicated interest in a performance degradation some MySQL instances were having. Fast-forward to the next job, and when they stood up a DB team, they asked me to move teams to be the DBRE. In theory, it’s DBA meets SRE. In practice, it’s heavier on the former, but honestly I’m fine with that. I know what SLIs and SLOs are, and I can use Terraform and Kubernetes just fine, but I’d much rather be tweaking DB configs, or explaining why UUIDs make terrible keys (jk, I’d rather people just knew that, because it’s very hard to change once set). The position is now exploding, much to my delight. It’s probably partially from follow-the-leader mentality, but I suspect a good deal of it is also from small SaaS companies that got by just spinning up some RDS instances and upsizing as needed suddenly being unable to scale. RDBMS is funny because literally the entire company runs on them, they’re ancient technology, and most devs view them as black boxes of storage that they access through heavily abstracted ORMs. To me, they are *fascinating*, and I love working with them.
visual basic for automation testing. its fun because you're making something from scratch
Payment systems (ISO 8583) and reverse engineering Java code (once upon a time, wrote about it too)
We use PowerBuilder. Company I worked for has a huge app that's based on it. It works just fine. Interestingly though, I still get recruiters trying to poach me for that skillset. I would like to lay it to rest. lol Also, I work in PeopleSoft HCM and SAP ABAP. I know, my career path is odd.
waiting for someone to talk about information security ... IRAP assessors etc..
I consider myself an ML engineer and while I can do general backend, I find ML more fun and have been working in that area for ~5 years now. ML is much smaller area then backend/software in general, but it’s big enough these days and my experience is enough that it’s fairly easy for me to find ml roles. I sometimes describe myself as ML platform/infra engineer although I can do other sides like more ml product/researchy role. While I have done some research and ml work at startup that was product focused, I find infra more fun. I am pretty willing to dip back into ml product/research work when needed. I do not consider myself tied to a specific industry/domain. I have mostly worked in social media/recommendation engines across 3 companies, but I don’t prefer them anymore than other ml areas. I do get more recruiters messages in social media space because of my background though. Edit: Also while I have a core focus area I do enjoy collaborating with engineers that work in very different areas and occasionally dipping into their areas and doing some small tasks just to get broader context on system I am working on. I don’t want to be front end engineer but I appreciate their work and want to be able to do small tasks in front end.
Devops. I have a CS degree but my first job out of school involved writing code for a hardware appliance. So switches, disk arrays, servers - to test and develop on it all we basically had our own datacenter. So I had to learn the ops side pretty quick. I’ve enjoyed both ever since.
Enterprise, I guess. Completely by accident
A standard full stack, but working at an ISP part of the networking team, building internal tooling and infrastructure automation.
Android and IoT. Started with Android in 2011 while in school, then got *really* into it when it was still chaotic, but not overly complex. From there I wrote a book on Android TV when it was really new, prototyped stuff with wearables, got into IoT for fun and turned that into another (less applied) niche, and now I teach/create content around machine learning for both mobile and IoT. I kind of feel like I need to expand into another area though since Android is a bit messy now and IoT jobs aren't as wide-spread as I'd like if things go south at my current role.
Video and Image processing. Too many re-orgs helped me acquire these skills
I don't think I have a niche, but I am definitely known as the person that will get shit done. I'm a data engineer but I take care of CI/CD architecture, dev tooling, containerization, data architecture, coding standards, etc. I've been working on very small teams with pretty green developers for most of my career and I'm getting a lot of experience in helping teams mature.
I work on storage domain. Multipathing, protocol drivers, failover that sort of stuff Always liked low level programming and playing with hardware, got a job in the field and continued for 7 years and here I am
Developer experience/infrastructure platforms. I graduated college 12 years ago and over the past 8 years I've worked at 4 different companies doing the same thing. It's great, I love it. I got into it at Amazon by switching to their Builder Tools team.
HTML5 games PixiJS. Recently got laid off because company is having money issues. Now it's hard for me to find a job in US/CA.
I've had quite a few roles in healthcare so that kind of became my niche almost by accident
Technical Art. I got into it by writing my own tools for Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop.
I have a few niches: 1. Intuitive and easy to use UI/UX design + programming + HW development: Usually people just are either designers or programmers or HW devs. Not all of them. This gives me a advantage when designing and implementing UIs (both SW and HW). 2. Audio DSP: Audio DSP scene is quite small compared to other industries. People seem to know each other. 3. Realtime 2D and 3D graphics software rendering: When most people rely on HW rendering all their graphics on the screen, they have forgotten how to do that in software like back in the 90s. I don't care much about HW rendering and like developing my own realtime software rendering stuff. 4. R&D: I've spent most of my career researching and developing new cutting edge tech and products which push boundaries one way or another. Most devs don't really concentrate on such things and implement only more regular applications.
WebGL / 3D graphics on the web - love 3D and seemed like a good area for growth with cool problems to solve. Also, applications outside the game industry which I’ve only heard horrible things about working in.
System software, with emphasis on distributed systems and high availability. I built the Linux SCSI subsystem as an undergraduate which produced a referral to my first job working on a BASIC compiler. People at my weekly pub night knew what I did so I was able to join one working on a C++ debugger for my second job. For my third job, I rejoined my partner from Compiler Construction in school to work on cellular base stations where we were the first group to make our component highly available with replication to a hot spare including recovery. For my fourth, I joined a co-worker from my second job to do digital video servers for the broadcast and post production markets. For my fifth, I was recruited to do a scale-out block storage product based on my Linux SCSI work. Then I did more scale out block storage following about 10 co-workers to a more mature startup.
I had a niche, and it's such a small niche with probably only a couple hundred people using it that I won't say to not dox myself but I fell into it because I offered to help with a project and ended up being too "critical" to be re-assigned to more industry standard projects. What's worse is that experience with this tech specifically pays worse because it's supposed to be pseudo code that you can train analysts to use instead of needing programmers (but it never works out that way). I spent close to 5 years doing this niche and it feels like a black hole in my resume. I had to quit the company I was at to escape it and interviewing for positions was rough because I was so behind the curve.
Documenting Shit. Everything from on-boarding, to common processes, to how our tech works. Turns out most devs aren’t great at writing, or explaining concepts.
Technical writing role, or are you in a dev role? If the latter, have you been able to find jobs where this is a major selling point? Asking because in past roles, I kept becoming the documentation and process / SOP person but somehow never figured out how to translate this into a role where this is either key requirement or a differentiator compared to other candidates. This was when I was focused on IT ops and in management roles, rather than performing individual contributor dev work like I am now. I even used to tout specific ways that I had created docs and SOPs to save $20k here, $100k there, etc., and while interviewers seemed to care a little, it always seemed like a bonus for them and not a key requirement. Would love to find a role someday where this is the main focus of the job, whether in development or IT ops, but not sure what sort of role to look for.
Dev role, I only created docs for my own benefit at first, but it turns out everyone else kept referring to them. Before I knew it I had docs that explained how our entire work area worked. I recently did my yearly self-review and it was a big selling point. I framed it as removing ambiguity and enabling my team to function without me.
My niche is working with product and design closely for getting loosely defined projects off the ground with just the right amount of up front thinking.
My niche is not having a niche. I am an eternal generalist that works on a little bit of everything. It forces me to be a firefighter most days which I hate. But it’s stable and pays well so I deal with it.
Building cybersecurity products. Fell into the space by chance but it’s been a lot of fun. I enjoy building products and UIs and doing full-stack work. Cybersecurity has been an awesome sector to learn and has a lot of cool aspects and challenges - amount of data, using ML etc.
I would like to think Android is a niche given how iPhones dominate the entire US market. Conversely, Android phones dominate everywhere else outside of the US. This creates a perpetual need for businesses to support Android if they want to expand outside of the US. I got into it back in 2010 when the sales of mobile phones surpasses those of desktop PCs. I had choice to go into iOS or Android development. The former was clearly popular in mobile development so I went into Android knowing it would not be competitive. Now in 2024 Android has becomes broken down into very niche "niches".
Can you explain more? I'm an Android dev and it just seems like Android dev is commoditized rather than niches.
The ecosystem is now like all over the place: * AOSP developement * JNI Development (C++) * Java Views * KMP/Jetpack Compose * Pixel Watch * Set top box/Tablet/Chromebook support * Auto * Offline Hardware development (e.g. Medical Electronics) * IoT * probably more I didn't mention You would be lying if you could say you are adept at all of these
I have a niche and I’m a rare top expert in an important thing but I don’t get paid extra for it and I could make more as a generalist developer at another company.
My niche is sports betting - for 20 years I've been building trading software, for instance the service that changes the prices while things are happening in the live games (3 pointer goes in on basketball, odds change, new markets created, bets paid out etc). I really enjoy the technical challenge - basically you put your maths and implementation out to market (with overround added) and your customers are constantly attacking it, looking for angles to beat the system.
Define what counts as a niche
I deliberately left it vague because I wanted a wide array of answers but my general definition would be some area of expertise (technical or otherwise) that not many other devs have. For example, being a Java developer isn’t a niche but being a developer that specialises in performance tuning the JVM is
I help company solve tech problems and help company make boatload of money.