alt Hacker NewsHow? This is what I never understood. Every domain expert I’ve ever knowing is because they’ve already I can spend all the time I have reading and toying around in a subject, but until I have real concrete experience to guide me, it’s usually pretty difficult to become an “expert” in anything. I know how to become an advanced hobbyist, but thats never in my life translated to someone being willing to pay me over say, and already established expert
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I've drifted across projects in different industries (FMCG, investment funds, ad agencies, startups of various sorts) and like I said I had a long project (over two years) for an executive search firm and got to see the ins and outs of how everything works from strategy to technology. I could be drifting to find clients in yet another vertical but I've decided to stay put for at least a few years. So to answer your question, in my particular case: I drifted, stumbled upon something by chance, and then took a conscious decision to stay.
how?
From GP comment: “either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one.”
If you're a dev, one approach to specialization is to align with the tooling associated with common "profit center" processes. Become a Salesforce/Hubspot/Odoo/Shopify developer. If you're not interested in developing, you can specialize in learning one specific ecosystem really well and then teach companies -- typically SMBs -- how to set themselves up and organize their operations around it.