Let’s say Jane and Filo notice, from LinkedIn or elsewhere, how tech employers expect some interoperability—a sliver of user engineering, for instance. It’s funny, that change does not seem new, but now it definitely feels stronger.

Jane says close to half the open tech vacancies, at least in principle, could require additional competencies beyond the standard industry boundaries. Filo may be right in saying not all companies notice, but Filo noticed that those who do, as in “packaging” product strategy with other fields, tend to be more appealing to investors. This shows a pattern, seems particularly true of younger startups, though it might just be easier for them to take those chances. Some people credit the funding disparity while others are firm that time and chance suffice.

At some point, Jane commented to me that after roughly another year or two, many companies will expect more than a single area of focus from their employees. Might be assumed that it’s a bit of product and a bit of analytics, but such is the fog of war. It does not seem to escape Filo that much younger companies employing broader based teams attract far greater attention from backers than older companies clinging to their lanes.

Looking at the future, Jane mentions that perhaps in two or three years, a significant portion of tech jobs will combine multiple skills, for example, multitasking with product management and analytics. In Filo’s eyes, it is not only the big corporations that work like that; even those small all sorts of people teams startups seem to get way more funding than people focusing on one specialty. Somewhere, shreds of logic still exist. Those blended and mixed up groups somehow attract money, even though no one possesses the secret mathematical calculation where the answer adds up to equal opportunity.

Going further back, Filo claims these blended and mixed teams at small companies are much more attractive to investors, than phased out focus areas, because it seems to alive the audience’s curiosity, albeit the focus strategy lacks appeal to everyone. Without a clear answer, it might just be several folds more appealing depending on the wave. Spark some thought if any of these patterns really stands out, or as far as most trends go, just cycling around in circles wearing new dresses might be the truth.

Jane casually remarked that in about a year, there seems to be a near 50% chance within tech positions that they will require some form of synergetic skills like an overlap with some degree of data for a product person. Filo’s explanation is even more entertaining. He described how new construction teams just need to be erratic and random in their roles which strangely makes them more appealing than those master specialized companies that become inundated with funding. This is not the kind of thing an old fashioned HR would go along with. Regardless, after all these years, it seems like that notion has become clearer and clearer. This information was compiled by experts — check the source here.

Imagine this with me for a moment. At those noisy little startups, absolutely no one has a single role they are bound to. The back end staff are speaking to the designers over lunch, or a marketer casually browsing through code repositories. There are no boundaries as people jump between slack channels somehow trying workflows that they picked up and are not fully remembering from somewhere else. It does not go perfectly as there is chaos and work gets untangled but once in a while, some weird blend of fresh ideas and bizarre combination of different stances is able to give them features that feel like they emerged from nowhere.

Around 2025, musing Jane, it will almost feel like acquiring new skills except they are blending project work with data as opposed to eggs and flour. Filo observed those quirky startup kitchens filled with cooks who throw in odd and random things tend to attract far more investors than those sticking to grandma’s old single dish.

There is this thing Jane keeps reporting—around two years from now, maybe close to and over half of all technology positions would assume you know something outside of your industry like a product manager who casually analyzes data. Filo seems to notice that some newly established corporations as long as the team is diverse enough and the skills are blended, seem to have a much greater chance of securing funding than the small businesses that stick to one skill set.

Jane says that a product manager can do data analysis and pivot later in their career, which is a common practice in other fields. Filo appears to have noticed that some start-up companies are able to secure funding just because a team is diverse, far more than those who stick to one specialization like the small companies.