What are current high demand skills?

I think there's 2 angles here:

1. What recruiters and hiring managers are looking for
2. What is more universally useful after getting the job

For context, my answer is going to lean heavily into software engineering.

What The Job Market Is Looking For

This is generally what I've seen be valued at this layer:

1. Brand name of your company (working at FAANG or a FAANG-level company like Snap/Airbnb often gets you free pass through the resume screening layer)
2. Modern tech, which comes in 2 flavors
   1. The overall space: Some examples are ML and Blockchain. I personally like ML a lot as it has that good balance of being on the cutting edge while also being quite proven in the industry.
   2. The frameworks within a stack: For web, this would be React, and for Android, this would be Kotlin and maybe Jetpack Compose.

While I think optimizing for #1 makes sense earlier-in-career, I heavily recommend against over-optimizing for #2, which I talk about more in this video.

What's In-Demand After You Get Hired

For those, I recommend this discussion around software engineering fundamentals.

From my personal experience, I couldn't find enough software engineers with strong leadership and communication skills back when I was at Meta/Robinhood. This is something most engineers don't prioritize learning, and a lot of companies are unfortunately pretty bad at cultivating these skills among their engineering org.

Hard to predict which specific technologies will be high-demand (that could be one interpretation of "legos"), it's hard to know about the future of things like Android, iOS, Flutter, etc.

One way to evaluate is to judge in what domains smart people are working, and copy them. Whatever legos they are refining, do the same :)