Sorry, what does "this" refer to when you write "This is a very sensible mental model"?

I'm trying to read your whole comment, it's interesting especially since most hackers are somewhat self-taught and there are many fields we can become proficient in (such as dozens of resume keywords) if we want to invest the time.

So I'm interested in how people make these choices. Could you elaborate?

this was the downvoted parent saying "I can't go learn everything so i look at the likely ROI. Learning hard complex up and down stack optimisation that benefits a few hundred companies globally and they are already massively oversubscribed with brilliant 25 year old mathematicians is not a good ROI".

but take a month of hourly commutes in learning basics of NLP or bootstrap or PGP or ... is likely to have much higher ROI

my mental model is

- There are few fields that are wide open right now - it's ML (vision 90%, text 50%), process automation, robotics, security.

- It's got to be widely applicable to more than one industry

- It's got to not involve going back to college for a year of maths training.

- It needs some kind of moat. Learning to use bootstrap better is nice cos your stuff looks better and is cleaner. It's kind of table stakes, but it has zero most. Intel secure enclaves looks interesting to dive into and will have some decent moat factor.

- it's really got to be uISV suitable. This means I can come up with at least two businesses that conceivably will work, selling element extraction from text is not a business but "capturing ten kpis from your base of legal contracts" is (and probably a hotly contested area)

I did the whole "walking through lists of industry SICs to generate ideas - even read every ycombinator investment. no dice" Good business opportunities are hard to imagine.