It's a useful bit of caution to remember transferrable fundamentals, I remember when Oracle wizards were in high demand.

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sigbottle 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

There are tons of ML compilers right now, FlashAttention brought back the cache-aware model to parallel programming, Moore's law hit is limit and heterogeneous hardware is taking taking off.

Just some fundamentals I can think of off the top of my head. I'm surprised people saying that the lower level systems/hardware stuff are untransferable. These things are used everywhere. If anything, it's the AI itself that's potentially a bubble, but the fundamental need for understanding performance of systems & design is always there.

	▲	woooooo 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Im actually doing a ton of research in the area myself, the caution was against becoming an Nvidia expert narrowly rather than a general low level programmer with Nvidia skills included.

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NikolaNovak 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, I'm in Toronto Canada, a fairly big city and market, and have an open seat for a couple of good senior Oracle DBAs pretty much constantly. The market may have reduced over decades but there's still more demand than supply. And the core DBA skills are transferable to other RDBMS as well. While I agree that some niche technologies are fleeting, it's perhaps not the best example :-)

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woooooo 5 days ago | parent [-]

That's actually interesting! My experience is different, especially compared to the late 90s and early 00s, most people avoid Oracle if they can. But yes, its always worth having someone who's job is to think about the database if it's your lynchpin.

	▲	kjellsbells 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, there's the difference. Maybe demand has collapsed for the kind of people who knew how to tune the Oracle SGA and get their laughable CLI client to behave, but the market for people who structurally understood the best ways to organize, insert and pull data back out is still solid. Re Oracle and "big 90s names" specifically, there is a lot of it out there. Maybe it never shows up in the code interfaces HNers have to exercise in their day jobs, but the tech, for better or worse, is massively prevalent in the everyday world of transit systems and payroll and payment...ie all the unsexy parts of modern life.
	▲	NikolaNovak 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it's famously said that 5% of IT is in the exciting new stuff that's on Hacker News front page, and 95% is in boring line-of-business, back office "enterprise" software that's as unglamorous as it is unavoidable :-). Even seemingly modern giants like Google or Amazon etc - check what their payroll and financial system is in the background. And wait until I tell you about my Cobol open seats - on modern Linux on cloud VMs too! :-)