One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university. Specially if you are already a software engineer that makes a lot of money for hand coding things that seems obvious to not be a hard problem to solve.
I personally believe that the state wr are in right now is temporary. Nobody can make a living in future by coding simple web pages or CRUD backends. It's gonna get automated way more that what we can imagine today.
Why? You need to put in significant time to do well, but are the needed resources (books, people to talk to, etc) really not available outside of a university?
The two obvious paths I can see are: a) quit job and get masters or even PHD in robotics; b) become rich and found a company like Elon Musk.
If you read in the article he even concedes that very effective people do many of these things, which is why it is an effective cover for incompetence.
Now, I know what you’re thinking — that might actually be productive. And, well, it might be, nominally so. But do you notice that you’ve got a very tangible plan of action here and there’s been no mention of what the project actually involves? A great way to appear useful without being useful is engage heavily in an activity completely orthogonal to the actual goal.
So if the goal aligns with the plan of action and there is "overcommunication" there could well be value added.
[1] http://www.daedtech.com/the-7-habits-of-highly-overrated-peo...
