from Hacker News

Ask HN: Software jobs with high barriers of entry?

by Poomba on 9/25/25, 10:29 AM with 3 comments

Are there any software jobs that actually have a high barrier of entry? Besides maybe an LLM Engineer?

I feel like no matter what type of engineer you become there is always gonna be a bunch of ppl who you’re competing with. Perhaps someone are slightly more competitive than others like a devops person, but overall, i feel like the entire SWE field has become a commodity

Are there actually any software jobs that require a ton of schooling, or a ton of self education? Like literally years and years like you need to become a pediatrician or a lawyer

  • by blackbear_ on 9/25/25, 12:31 PM

    You are looking at jobs where you are paid to deliver something and where coding is just a tool towards that end, but not the deliverable itself.

    For example, consider computational research in a domain like healthcare: the job is to find new insights about patients or diseases that allow you to develop better treatments. Most of the time is spent on coding data analysis pipelines, but the truly vauable professional also knows enough about the domain that they are able to interpret the results, conduct follow up analyses and talk at eye level with medical doctors and biologists. The skill ceiling for this kind of position is thus quite high since you need to be proficient in three distinct domains (coding, biology, statistics).

  • by ensocode on 9/26/25, 8:15 AM

    You could go into "low code" integration platforms, the ones where you code with your mouse (i.e. webMethods) As it is a mess this is probably pretty LLM save at the moment. On the other hand they will probably serve some tools for that in the future :-D

  • by liqilin1567 on 9/26/25, 10:30 AM

    from my perspective some 'low level' job like compiler, os kernel, performance tuning may require rich experience.