Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise? In a world where nothing seems sure anymore what would you do? Would you bother getting an education? When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn? |
Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise? In a world where nothing seems sure anymore what would you do? Would you bother getting an education? When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn? |
Algorithms is the endpoint of all knowledge.
If sleep is a struggle, then see a mental health counselor to help you learn the habits and treatments for good sleep, i.e. not one that will just give you a pill and tell you to get lost
I've got a few in my extended family. They have some zen calmness about them I can't quite describe. And from the sounds of things, they made a lot of money and had a lot of adventures. Sure beats cubicle work.
Plumbing for example, requires both knowledge, and hands on work. Plumbers won't be replaced until both AI and Robotics advance cosiderably.
Consider this — there’s more and more rental properties, and so less people who want to maintain their plumbing properly. There will likely be more “lowest bidder” work, and so the rates will drop. The quality of plumbing will drop, the pride in the trade will drop.
Subjects/Skills I would prioritize in no particular order:
- Writing code
- Economics
- Psychology
- Personal Fitness / nutrition
- Statistics/Probability
- Reading great authors
- Philosophy
- Public Speaking / Leadership
- Marketing
It all starts with curiosity. Good luck!
In 2016 I was fresh out of college, meeting people, looking for a job and I met a neuroscience PhD who had been having such bad luck that he was asking me, who was basically a kid, if I knew any places hiring. And now just a few months ago one of my college classmates who had gone on to get a PhD in materials science is career-changing into software because of the grim job market for his field.
In the 90's you could walk into an office in jeans and a t-shirt, say you knew programming, and get a job (or so I'm told). In the 2000's, after the dotcom bubble crash the job market for software developers seemed bad but I think it recovered quickly. In the 2010's demand for software devs was insanely high; VC's were over-funding tech startups, unicorn companies boomed, and older companies were giving more respect to their own tech stack so as to not fall behind. By the late 2010's though, the labor market started catching up to demand for software devs so junior positions were getting harder to obtain. In 2023 I think software jobs for junior devs are very hard to get. I do think this trend will continue.
On the flip side, the recent government initiative & funding for bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the US has brought a lot of new jobs to my hometown, some that sound really cool. A lot of new software jobs for automation, mechanical engineer jobs for manufacturing, and probably in the near future once things are set up and running they'll be hiring chemical & electrical engineers if they aren't already.
So yeah I have no idea what advice to give to a 16 year old. But I think it's better to have multiple skills than to try to be an expert at one thing. It's less of a gamble to you if one of your skills doesn't work out, and possibly you can combine the 2 skills into something that really is unique.
"In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward."
The world changing is the one thing thats constant! When I went to college computer science saw so few students the entrance points were the lowest in the university, they nearly shut it down due to low class sizes. And the subsequent tech revolution was an still amazingly tame and uneventful period compared to the previous decades of social upheaval. Hell even improvements in tech right now are probably less mind blowing than most of the industrial revolution.
Knowledge hasn't changed due to recent events, it doesn't become cheaper or more expensive. You never had to be smart, its just the smart thing to do as it makes filling the bottom part of mazlows hierarchy of needs a lot easier for us humans.
So do what you wanna do and challenge yourself in a nice way. If your sensible get into a career that provides and doesn't bring you down, then do a passion on the side. If you wanna go all-in on painting or acting or indie game design go for it - just realise its gonna be tough.
I will say that the psychological positive of having financial stability >35 cant be overstated. But in saying that Ive rarely met a person who regretted what they did in their 20s, unless is was working all the time.
I think doing something they're interested in has a lot of merit, though at age 16 they may not have experienced enough different things to know for sure.
I'm not sure why you think knowledge is meaningless. Everyone is panicking about AI, but honestly, I've yet to see an AI produced document that's competent or a line of AI generated code that's useful. Yes... it can produce things that are at 80% of what you might want and that means that you (the human) may only have to spend half your time editing AI generated content.
I don't think Lawyers or Doctors or College Professors are going to be replaced with AI. But I think each of these professions will need to develop expertise in working with evolving technology.
How 'bout Literature? Granted, it's not the royal road to wealth my creative writing instructor implied, but it's great fun. And if you love reading and writing, you'll probably maintain the level of motivation needed for an advanced degree, so maybe Literature Professor?
Or spend some time in the military. I spent a few years in the Marines in the middle of my college experience. It made me realize a few things: 1. I don't want a career in the military and 2. I would love to have a job that got me out of the office on a regular basis. But there are plenty of people who love the military and make it a career.
Have you asked your 16 year old what they want to do?
StrengthsFinder / CliftonStrengths and Sally Hogshead's _How the World Sees You_ are great examples to look into. The USG also offers free career testing tools that are definitely worth a shot. Many schools also have career learning paths that offer other resources of this kind.
From that point, you should have a good starter set of tools that allow one to design the needed career outcome no matter what has changed in the world.
In addition to strengths, it's also a good idea to pay special attention to the "not interesting" and "less strengths in this area" measures/results, since those will helpfully indicate exhausting careers or jobs to avoid, even if they may seem interesting for hobby-type energy.
Good luck to you both, I know a lot's been changing recently.
1. These kinds of strengths are more about the energy one can consistently and flexibly commit to a specific set of perspectives on life and creativity, like for hours each day without prompting, and less about "is a talented artist," "can code," etc.
Try to narrow it down. Do you want to work in a cubicle/office? Work outside? Do you want to work with people all day long? Work with animals? Tech industry? Humanities? Healthcare? Even then there's a lot of overlap (e.g. IT in the healthcare industry).
And deciding what you don't want to do can narrow it down a lot.
Are you willing to relocate? That will greatly open up your possibilities, especially if you want to work for a big company but grew up in a small town.
Is there a company you want to work for? Tesla? Lockheed Martin? SpaceX? Find out what kind of positions they are hiring for.
As others have mentioned, don't forget trade skills. Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs) has a lot to say on that matter.
If you can narrow it down, message boards like this can help with more specific suggestions. You left it pretty wide open. And I would always recommend an education.
Knowledge hasn't become meaningless. It's not going to, either. Even if we wind up in a world where an AI knows more than you (for whatever "knows" means), it's still worth having knowledge, having more understanding of the world around you.
Knowledge is a multiplier. Knowing how things work multiplies what you can do. It opens multiple doors that would otherwise be closed. It's still absolutely worth time and effort to get.
Even if AI knows everything, it will be something to learn. It will be a force multiplier; learning how to use it effectively will be like learning to drive a car after you already know how to walk. That will also be a part of knowledge.
At 16, you don't need a specific direction. Get broad (learn many topics) rather than deep (focused on one topic). There will time to become deep later, preferably after you find out which area interests you.
Imagine wanting to be a professional videogame... anything in 2000? Or thinking there is a way to make money on, gasp, Fantasy Football? etc. etc.
I firmly believe if there is a subject that interests you deeply and you know there are other people also deeply interested in it, there is money to be made there not to mention a purposeful, impactful life to be enjoyed around it.
There is a fine line between landing on something that allows you to capitalize on your passion (e.g. VR in 2010) and doing something truly obscure (e.g. collecting memorabilia or something) that nobody except for a handful other people would truly care about.
If you're 16 and see something that resonates with you, that's also something a sizable amount of your friend care about, but nobody in the higher age bracket understands, chances are you are privy to a secret map to a generational goldmine.
Or you can just bury yourself alive in finance sector.
Knowledge isn’t meaningless. It’ll never be meaningless. Or rather, there will always be experts, it’s just not clear in what and how many. Stay agile and get good at something you see as there being a demand for one day. This probably isn’t something that there’s demand for today. You have to use your imagination a bit, but you can’t really go wrong with mastering basically anything. You always learn. Make sure you do something you can be passionate in and hold interest in. Focus goes a long way. You will, after enough time of navigating this, have accrued a very unique set of skills that can be crossed with one another to solve very interesting problems. You’ll always do well if you can be a good problem solver.
(Don't get me wrong... for me, "very droll" is a complement.)
One thing that should be emphasized to children is the necessity to earn a decent livelihood with a job that leaves them enough time to pursue their other interests. It is important to do something remunerative, but also balance it with occupational outlook and individual interests. Of course, individual interests can and do change over time, so they should be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly as a 16-year old.
#4 fastest growing is "Motion picture projectionists" and is expected to grow by 40% by 2031. Which looks to mean that it will grow from 1,620 to 2,268 jobs.
AI is assisting work but that just means we can do bigger things.
I think of work like this: do you see anything in the world that doesn’t work right? Anything broken or not how it should be? That’s available work. Fixing it will be satisfying and will create value. The world will never be perfect. That just means there’ll always be work to do.
Find the things in this world that sing to you that they could be made better. Go and fix them and you will discover a life worth living and work worth doing.
Will things change? Sure. Learning to deal with uncertainty is one of the great lessons of life. Do I think we should all give up and go sit on the couch? Sometimes, but I suit up and show up the next day.
A friend of mine is a high-voltage electrician working on grid infrastructure. That job ain't going anywhere.
Most important thing: Learn to make things happen. Learn to "do stuff". A lot of people never understand this is what people pay for (they think it's just their qualifications or some such).
Learn how to take a task, stick with it and make a result, even when it is hard. Learn how to work. How to deal with other people who can help you or are in your way. Learn how to learn on the fly.
I don't know what the future is 20 years out, nobody does. Any specialized skill might go by the wayside at any time. But what you gain acquiring mastery of a skill is a skill itself.
Knowledge will only become meaningless as a means to pursue wealth, it is still meaningful in terms of understanding the human experience since that relies on perception, and only humans posses and will ever posses human perception.
It all depends - advice for these matters is more about listening. If you’re in a headspace where ChatGPT has you freaked out, pass on giving advice.
Assuming you have several interests like most people - choose the one to start from based on your intuition.
It’s as simple as that.
It’s dangerous to follow any more specific advice from anyone, they will never be in your shoes and nobody in this universe can predict the future.
But the future is created every day by billions of small decisions like this.
I don't know what the future holds, but a Github profile with a history of AI experimentation seems like it would look good on a resume.
When has that advice ever worked, except for a very privileged few?
Because doing so will force you to degrade your passionate goals to mere everyday tasks, and that'll ultimately ruin your passion.
I loved writing code, but discovered exactly the point you are making; I hated doing what work wanted me to do with that passion. It did not fit, so I stopped writing code professionally and I'm much happier doing it on my own terms in my own time.
However, the idea that you should find things to do that you find some satisfaction in is maybe better advice. I now work in information security (I know, not everyone's cup of tea). It's challenging, there's always something new to learn, and it's occasionally exciting.
Career-wise, keep your expenses as low as you can, and do whatever you want for awhile.
Finally remember that essentially all advice you get is terrible. Most people are very wrong about most things.
The AI tools we have now are actually quite limited and are tools that humans need to learn how to employ.
There will be a lot of opportunities to learn how to employ the new tools though.
You also don't need to run out and learn how to build houses and grow food unless that is what you're actually interested in.
Road construction might be worse, though.
Note well: No roofer or road construction worker would tell someone to skip college. If college is in the cards, just go to college and get it over with. Even if you never use your degree, it would still be the right decision, so long as you didn't take on a ton of debt going to a private school. (If the thought of slogging through college is off-putting, know that a lifetime of manual labor will be even worse. School is work, and if you can't make yourself suffer through that, you are very likely going to be even more disappointed with the choices manual or unskilled labor throw your way.)
Blue collar work is the back bone of our material world, but I just cannot see it as a smart choice for a 16 year old. There is a lot of crap attitude among blue collar workers, and if you don't fit in culturally you'll be miserable, even if you're good at your job. Maybe things will have changed in a couple of years, who knows? But the skills are great to learn and know!
Starting a business is very sound advice for those who have it in them. Learning skills by working for yourself gives you a better paying business, while learning skills by working for somebody else gives them a better paying business. But you need to know at least something if you want to have a real business.
Most of those people are making extremely bad life decisions and you will be significantly more wealthy before they've even left college. The best way to make money is to have money, you have a massive edge if you literally just start working early, live with your parents and stay the hell away from debt. It's a simple formula, and it's how I managed to climb my way into the middle-class.
A good thing about blue-collar is that it will make you tough and keep you fit, and you will also learn to socialize properly with people from different generations, as well as being able to absorb whatever experience they might have gained over the decades they've lived.
Every job has it's hazards. I say try a number of them myself. Manual work is good for people, especially young people (in my opinion). I don't know about 30 years of back breaking labor though.
Starting a successful business is not easy.
As with software you can get competent quickly, but quality comes with time and effort.
Remember that everyone starts off by having very limited knowledge (on any specific topic). They gain wisdom and experience through their life. They may become competent master practitioners with experience (but still remain novices in some other aspects).
When and why would knowledge ever become meaningless?
It's all about selling stuff by capturing attention these days. Who makes more - the people building most software, or the people selling it? The people I know in B2B sales (software and not) make a killing.
Sometimes more so, sometimes less, but its probably always going to be a thing.
Obviously harder than it looks
Option X - Surgeon/Scientist: Age 18-21: Caltech Undergrad Age 22-29: Harvard/MIT MD-PhD (8 yr dual program with Harvard MD and MIT PhD) Age 30-36: UCSF Neurosurgery Residency (#1 in US) Age 37: NYU Langone Hospital Neurosurgeon Scientist (#1 in US)
Option Y - PE/VC/Lawyer: Age 18-21: Harvard Undergrad Age 22-24: Blackstone Private Equity Analyst (3 yr program fresh new grad, skipping investment banking) Age 25-28: Stanford GSB JD/MBA (4 yr dual program JD and MBA program) Age 29: SCOTUS Fellow (straight to SCOTUS, directly skipping appellate clerkships) Age 30: Tiger Hedge Fund Manager or Sequoia Venture Capitalist or Wachtell Lawyer
Option Z - Software Engineer / AI Researcher: Age 18-21: MIT SB/MEng (4 yr program combining Master's Degree with Bachelor's) Summer after Sophomore Year: DeepMind internship Summer after Junior Year: Hudson River Trading internship Summer after graduating, before entering PhD: SpaceX internship Age 22-24: Stanford CS PhD (3 yr program for Master's holders, skipping the intro 2 years before Qualifying Exams; Google Researcher during summers) Age 25: OpenAI Research Scientist or Founder CEO (Unicorn/Decacorn before Age 30)
I did do a MEng in a high rating university, but they'd have been equally happy if I'd been a plumber.
I took 5 years and did a co-op job experience with my degree. I was able to socialize a little, but I’m not going to lie—-the program demands a lot of study time. So there isn’t much time for partying on weeknights.
With an engineering degree, you can go and do so many different things for work. I can’t imagine the skills you learn ever getting stale. And it’s great for future entrepreneurs.
You'll also likely have more interesting hobbies.
EE gives a high level knowledge about how the modern world works instead of assuming it's all magic.
I complete agree! Manual work is great for the mind and spirit. That's why gyms and sports became so popular in the 80s and forward. But getting a job in manual labour, odds are much higher that you will be doing the back breaking stuff - or working for an asshole boss. That inverts the situation and the work becomes bad for the mind and spirit.
Manual work is best done for yourself, or being the boss, or for a good company with decent pay if you're extremely lucky to find it. I'd switch IT to manual work in a heartbeat if it came with competitive pay and some decency and respect in the workplace.
My kids are 19, 17, 12. I tell them- you're not going to college to get an education that is about knowledge out in the world. You are going to get an education about you. To learn about your person- your body, your brain, your own mental model of your self and other selves and the world.
Your person is still in physical growth mode until at least 25, and then you have lots of other changes and challenges coming after that. You will continue learning, including about your self, throughout the entirety of your life. To be set up to do that is why you're going.
(Yes, college is not the real world, in any way. But in important ways it is real enough.)
==
The most important things to be able to do are- build relationships, focus and concentrate, organize your self and your thinking, communicate, have fun, and take care of the physical self. You don't have any idea, really, how well you do those things as a teenager. It's the job of the adults around you to help. College is an opportunity to expose your person to more unique, distinct, varied, skilled adults and peers than at any time previous, and for some, more than they will ever get again (unfortunately). That exposure is the most intense learning the self can do.
For each of my kids, they have things they are good at now, and things they are not good at. Not just skills- capabilities. Biases. Potentials, not actuals. As their parent I have a good sense of possible distinct and unique trajectories for each of them given those potentials, and I do what I can to coach them onto those various trajectories and in specific work domain disciplines that are potential fits (to my eyes) for them. But that's a conversation that is specific to our relationship. And their lives are their own.
For you, I would encourage you to see yourself not even at the beginning of your adventure, and to think hard and figure out good ways, with the guidance of adults you currently respect and trust, to avail yourself and position yourself to be exposed to and learn from new adults worthy of respect and trust. And pay it forward, too.
You can do the same thing while on the job. Presumably, you could even learn faster, as you will be in a real-life environment, with real responsiblities, real people, real constraints etc. Whereas college is basically a bizarre form of retirement - a 4 year long "retirement" young people take before starting working. Yes, they learn some things there as well, but most of that knowledge is not needed and is just an excuse to spend time in college (for students) and to charge hefty fees (for universities).
Historically, US colleges were finishing schools for the wealthy - and now, most of us are wealthy enough to spend 4 years like this [1]. Unfortunately, since so many people finish college, a college degree is now a requirement for many fairly basic jobs - which means that not going to college closes many doors for people.
[1] Tragically, many people can only afford it through crippling student debt, which they take because they can't see the big picture at 19 yo. We don't allow 19 year old people to drink beer because they're too young to handle it, but we allow them to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt... European (where I am from) solution is to just fully cover college from taxes. This way, we probably have even higher college attendance than in the US (i.e. even more wasted time and money in total), but at least the amenities are very basic and there's no parasitic admin overhead - so, I'm guessing we spend much less on higher ed per capita.
Oddly enough, most countries think that a person who is legally responsible for their own decisions is also mature enough to handle alcohol [0]...
Learn to share your learnings with others, publicly. Do it 1-1. Blog, speak, share on social media. This will create public engagement and if you are enthusiastic and positive, will lead to many opportunities. Don’t hoard knowledge. The more generous you are with knowledge, the more people will want your expertise.
Work on the hardest problems. For example, do you specialize in crafting prompts for LLMs or do you understand the math behind LLMs themselves? I’d argue try and do the latter, and share and learn enthusiastically. You’ll find higher paying and more interesting work.
Find others that love learning. The coworker who doesn’t value their growth, who turns their nose up at the “nerd” who dares to spend time on their growth is toxic. OTOH the colleague excited to grow will drive you to be better and be an invaluable connection your whole career. You can find great collaborators at many places: university, job, whatever.
Be humble. You’ll never master even your chosen field. Stay close to people smarter than you. Don’t assume you can’t learn from somebody. A great quote is “we are called upon to teach when asked to learn when we are fortunate”
When I was getting into programming, everyone was warning me that the jobs would all be outsourced soon. That didn't happen, or not in any kind of apocalyptic way.
I'm not certain what you're concerned about, so I'll address a couple of things.
The job market is in a rough place. This happens. It's a pendulum that never stops swinging. Make yourself useful somewhere and hope for the best. If you're paid well and smart with money, you can weather the storms.
AI is making crazy, disturbing advancements right now. However, it is not even close to being able to fully replace a human in a programming or similarly technical job (I'm not an AI researcher, but that's my observation). It's a good time to get familiar with these tools, because it seems very likely that we'll all be using them in some capacity, rather than working for them. This is not hugely different from the computer revolution we already went through.
So yes, get an education. For your own enjoyment/self-fulfillment if nothing else.
1) PEOPLE: The relationships you make early in your career can end up being the most valuable thing you take away from your first couple of jobs. Go places where a) you like the people, b) they challenge you and you learn from them, and c) they share your values. People that were throwing up in the back of my car in college became lifelong friends -- now they are industry leaders, and we'll never lose that bond...
2) RISK: Take as much risk as you can stomach. You literally have nothing to lose right now, and you can try and fail at a bunch of things before other priorities (mortgage, wife, kids, whatever) make you risk averse. If you go to a startup right now, and it totally bombs, so what?! You just dust yourself off and do it again. It would be a shame to take a "safe" job early in your career, there will be lots of time for that.
Here's an example of how they conflict: if you go to a big company, there will be lots of opportunities to meet people, but no risk. If you go do a startup, there are only a few people, but lots of risk/opportunity.
For the next 10 years, expose yourself to as many experiences as you can, at some point something will click and you can run down that rabbit hole.
But that isn't a very hacker news response. I guess you would also develop these sorts of skills in eg. industrial engineering.
There are plenty of other options if what you're spooked about is automation and language models erradicating all of our jobs. If you enjoy baking you might consider getting into it.
On the other hand, it might be best to ignore all the hype about LLMs and automation and go into whatever you feel most passionate about. Learning and working in whatever field will always lead to growth. It may eventually be GPT'd away, but then I know a lot of people who have completely changed career later in life and achieved success and satisfaction.
I still stuck with it and I'm still here. You start seeing the signs of downfall when you're made redundant for the 3rd or 4th time. =)
If I could do it all over again, I'd get an actual degree in a trade. Electrician, plumbing, carpentry. Both as a backup job (that I would never really do) and as something I can do with my hands and make actual physical things.
Oh, and get a job in retail, even for a month or so over summer. It'll give you a new respect for anyone who can do it for over a year without murdering anyone.
--
As for education in general I'll leave you with a Donald Rumsfeld quote[0]:
"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
Getting any kind of education lowers the number of unknown unknowns in your life and gives you some known-knowns and a ton of known unknowns.
Known unknowns are the things you know exist, but don't know how to do or solve. But because you know they exist and are a solved problem, you can study them further if you need to.
If you have a ton of unknown unknowns you might spend a long time reinventing something that has already been solved. Your solution might be better because you didn't know it couldn't/shouldn't be done a certain way, but in 99.99% of cases it's not. You've just wasted time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
Unless you have psychological issues you want to resolve, "make friends" makes this part redundant.
The idea that everyone needs to pay a professional to talk to unnecessarily medicalises the human condition.
1. They arent going to find it gossip worthy and spread it to one or more people in your social groups.
2. You get to unburden yourself without burdening friends on the regular.
3. Sometimes there is real benefit to having a neutral 3rd party to help provide a different perspective on something that may be blocking some minor thing - and gets you on your way quicker
Assuming you're talking about the job market, nothing was sure at any given point in time. Of course, after the fact everything seems "obvious" but I assure you at the time it wasn't.
The only thing I would be my cards os is studying medicine: If you become a surgeon you'll most likely make lots of money, the downside is that it takes lots of work and time to do so.
Whatever you do, from chef and small business retail owner to startups - make sure you're good at what you do and you won't have to worry about the market.
> Would you bother getting an education?
If you are _really good_ at programming (e.g. you already know how to program relatively complex CRUD applications) my advice is to study something else e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Sciences, etc. Diversified profiles are the most sought after.
Going to college is not just about learning CS (or whatever) fundamentals. It is about friendships, having fun, entering adulthood. Try to take advantage of the Erasmus system, travel as much as you can, as cheaply as you can, meet ppl, do crazy shit while staying on track with your classes. It is important to "exit" student's life within the expected time frame, helps a lot.
> When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn?
Knowledge is _never_ meaningless. Most of the _experts_ on any given field have lots of knowledge that at first glance might seem irrelevant but they're able to mix and match in order to advance the knowledge on a specific field.
My guess is that you're referring to modern tech stacks. Often times seasoned users complain about how "this" or "that" stack has nothing new to offer apart from X which was already a thing 15 years ago with a different name. That's part because of age - we all become a bit of a whiners when getting old - but primarily because the already knew the old tech stack inside out so they can analyse, break down and understand the decisions (good and bad) of the new stack on the fly. When your time comes you'll have to learn to current tech stack and make your own decisions.
Wish you success in your life.
Both are and will be required skills for the foreseeable future (next 200 years or so).
Knowing how to grow food and maintain a healthy environment is becoming a lost skill. “Grounding” has science now saying it’s a good thing for your blood, heart and brain (don’t have link on hand but when connected to ground scientists have found blood physically changes and can be seen in microscope).
Electricians are usually a licensed trade. This makes it more protected but also makes you more useful.
You can branch into engineering later if you wish, and you usually make for a better engineer cause you know a 630mm^2 cable doesn’t fit in a 20mm gland.
Substation automation based on IEC61850 is everywhere and more common. It consists of servers, gateways, IEDs (which also need programming), Ethernet, VLANS, switches etc. so you get a technology knowledge base you can relate to other areas of yours, or your friends and families life.
You can also learn to program SCL files using python or other such tools. Get bored of big power? Switch over to instrument and controls.
There will always be a need for plants, food and power. Why not set yourself up for success those ways?
(Oh! And you get paid to train when you’re an apprentice and you don’t end up with student debt or university fees)
I would not consider any job that is mostly based on pattern recognition (like medicine). Enter coding only if you think you'll be top 1% because those will be the only people who will still be able to work. Any creative job should still be ok, provided you have a good understanding of AI.
Me, I'm 50 and have been a generalist all my life. People have told me all my life to specialize but I didn’t ever listen.
It's fun, and I never get bored with it. And I've been in the game long enough that I could probably be considered a "specialist" in many different areas. I generally have a better cross-system understanding of things than most.
This can be applied to anything. How can you solve problems when you don’t know about them? How can you find your purpose when you did’t try 99.9999% of possible activities.
Just do it and maybe it will resonate with you.
But please don't forget that university only lasts 4 or 5 years, then for the rest of your life you're in the workforce.
When my son went through highschool all the guidance was about following your dreams, etc. While it's important to like what you do for a job, it's also important (for most people) to be able to support themselves financially.
So unless you're from an independently wealthy family, make sure you do something with a lifetime earning potential.
In spite of recent changes in tech, it's still going to be a major field of economic advancement for many years to come. Someone will have to hurd it. If you like tech, consider an Embedded S/W Electrical Engineering focus.
Good luck!
I've spent most of my professional career as a front-end software engineer and started hating it a few years ago--thought I'd be happier as a plumber, electrician, or even a paralegal: I wanted to get away from screens, to do something practical, straightforward, and more people-oriented.
Then I did my research, took a few courses, talked to tradesmen, paralegals, and lawyers, and came out the other side realizing that working in tech isn't so bad, and that a lot of what I disliked about it could be mitigated from within the profession, without my having to start from scratch.
All that being said, to answer your question (which is admittedly very individual and hard to answer as a stranger) I'd say be an entrepreneur. Technology (including AI) empowers us as individuals to be far more productive and capable. Leverage this to your advantage and avoid the bullshit of office politics and bosses. Foster your curiosity and creativity, learn how to think, and how to tackle complex problems. Find cool opportunities that present themselves in the constantly shifting landscape our economy has become. You'll never be irrelevant.
Would be nice if you expanded on this. Lots of people glamorize starting fresh, so it'd be refreshing to understand what you did differently.
About knowledge itself, find something you are interested in and drill deep. I know it's cliche but unfortunately that's the only way to have a meaningful life without relying on someone else (I'm trying to say you can have a meaningful life by doing something different but that usually relies on someone else e.g. getting a kid).
Other than that get healthy and exercise often.
Of course if you have well connected parents then it's a different story.
He was dropping me off at a mechanic shop for an automotive Boy Scout merit badge and I think he thought I was interested in becoming a mechanic. He told me before dropping me off that if I wanted a trade electrician was the highest paying and easiest on the body.
Same goes for sozializing and organizing. The problem is though, that teaching such abstract tools, without a usecase tends to look pointless from a beginners perspective. Same way math looks pointless in school.
But that said, you can get paid good enough for most desires and inclinations you have.
But taking a step back here, what I have seen with kids that age is either they already have a passion or you need to shove them very hard towards different directions and see what they like. They're usually lacking in exposure. Maybe they'll like coding and computer stuff but they have no exposure. At that age I was barely fostering a coding hobby but haven't really gotten into infosec myself. Down the road I tried different things and I was very surprised at what I liked and did not like. I apparently don't have a fear of heights (scary but I can manage) and I hate long-haul trucking.
But my standing advice is to get a degree in something practical no matter what.
If they lean to technical stuff have them pursue EE, social justice? Law or languages and literature, like to work with hands? Mechanical engineering, medicine? RN
If you are an EE grad for example it is not hard to get into coding, IT or security. Or manufacturing and designing hardware, and anything with electrons. Plan to get two degrees, one before you're 23 and another before 30 after you figured out what you really like.
If you seek to understand the massive changes our world is going through then the answer is the same as it's been for ~20 years now, learn to write software and keep on top of what is cutting edge.
Generally speaking if you want to know why the world moves in such ways then you should seek to understand finance as the answer to almost every why (rather than how) can be summarised crudely as "because money".
These two branches of knowledge will be enough to survive and if you are any good at either of them thrive in a changing world.
The serious stuff aside at 16 there is plenty of time to invest in things that will make you happy regardless of how the world changes. Get out and see the world, travel, be amongst nature, meet new and interesting people, persue hobbies, make things with your hands, etc. Experiences contain knowledge but they are more than that, they are the intangible that make life worth living.
Even if AI takes over everything those things will still be rewarding.
The purpose in life is to find your purpose. You need to try lots of different activities to find out what you like and dislike. Then you need to spend time doing the things you like so you become better at them. Things are more fun the better you are at doing them.
All your questions are grounded in this latent statement that the world around you is evolving and this is happening to you. But you are in charge of your life. You can choose to do whatever it is you want to do.
I suppose maybe you look at hacker news a lot and have been influenced by the AI hype. Stop looking at hacker news. The AI hype is nice and all but it's never going to replace the joy you feel when you open your sketch notebook and look at the pictures you drew. Nor will it replace your desire to learn about some topic that interests you.
But that aside, what you should do with your life is a question that only you can answer. What are your goals? The cliched questions of "Who do you want to be when you grow up?" and "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" are actually great questions. But we cannot answer them for you.
If you tell us your goals, we can guide your steps to help you get there. If you are having a hard time defining your goals, that is why you get an education - to understand more about the world and about yourself in order to figure out what direction you want for your life.
I live in Mexico now and from what I’ve heard from every person I know who owns a house or manages a rental it’s just as hard to find a reliable one here, so it’s not like immigration or AI will have a huge effect.
Don’t get into tree cutting. It’s extremely dangerous. General contracting can be very lucrative but is much broader.
With these trades you can eventually “hang your own shingle” and become a business owner.
As I was writing this I was thinking “fuck maybe I should become a plumber”
But just be aware it's going to put you in a different social class (blue collar) than others your age who go to college. There's a lot of 18 and 19 year olds who go this route and brag about how they're making 50k a year, but fail to see the bigger picture. You only get to be those ages once, don't piss them away working 60 hours a week unless you have to.
And guard yourself - a lot of people who do this type of labor are into heavy drugs (especially meth) or have criminal pasts. Alcoholism is also rampant. Just be aware of those things as pitfalls and try to stay away from it. Stick with the "winners" - form relationships with the people you find who don't have these issues. If you have another social "group" to draw from in the form of college friends, it'll be easier.
The fields mostly impacted by recessions are those that never had a business in the first place - lots of tech has been built on "growth & engagement" freeloading off VC money with no actual businesses paying for that "engagement", and now the free money ran out.
However I do agree 100% with what you said. Witnessing them fixing a newborn infant was an insane experience for me and I was super jealous.
What they recommend is still medicine, but the non-practical fields - prescribing medications, designing and administering complex treatments from the comfort of an office.
My personal take is that everything and anything medical will never ever go away as long as there are humans. I love the fact I get to work in both a software dev world and the medical world. Software still can do so much for that.
No... make sure you strive to do the best you can in whatever you do. It's not about being "good enough". If you care about your work (whatever it may be), be a good human, and put in effort to learn and do the best you can at your given job - you will succeed.
Don't be afraid to take chances when you're young.
Being good at what you do is a side effect of caring about what you do and putting in the effort to learn about your job, your industry and the people around you.
It really gets old hearing software developers talk about trades yet none of them do them. I've seen what the trades have done to my dad, uncle, grandparents. They earned good livings - but it was real, hard work, and they paid for that hard work.
Getting to this level takes 7-10 years (from a cursory Google search), so he could have it by his early 30s.
Usually the worry blue collar/trades people have is when their body starts breaking down in their 40s/50s and they are still having to directly perform the manual labor. This happens even in kitchens in restaurants. But putting in 10 years in his youth if he stays in shape in a less physical trade mitigates that a lot.
Another alternative if you don't care about making a lot of money is military/USPS. You'll be retired with pension by 40. And with the military, you will have the opportunity to train as a knowledge worker on their dime if your interest skews more in that area than physical labor. Even with those, there's ways to finesse things. Even if you wanted to go that route, it'd probably be better to try to be an officer rather than enlisted. So you'd have to get a bachelor's degree from somewhere, and make sure they will pay off your student loan debt.
But it really just depends on what you're trying to optimize for. All of this advice assumes OP doesn't have any kind of safety net (like a trust fund/inheritance that will vest when he turns X age like 25 or 30 or parents willing to bankroll whatever he wants to do), and that he lives in the US and is solely concerned with having a career where he can eventually make six figures that is unlikely to be made obsolete during his working life by technology.
If he does have those things, then the question becomes a lot harder more philosophical and harder to answer. You can try and fail at a lot of different stuff and it won't matter. So pursue whatever interests you.
The second is that running a business is a different skillset from being a plumber or whatever, one that you won't have learned organically on the way up. And there's still the risk that you launch your business into some 2008 recession shit or whatever just through bad luck and now you're as broke as you were starting at 22 years old but without a body that can do physical work for 15 h/day anymore.
If you're american suggesting people join the military is socially normative but frankly obscene. Look what they've been into the last couple decades. "Assassinate civilians for twenty years and you can retire" is a harsh but realistic rephrasing of that recommendation. That's even aside from the very real risk you'll be sent off to get a life changing TBI, or be gang-raped by your colleagues and then blamed for it by the institution.
If someone is in the situation of needing to figure out their career from the beginning without any sort of support, money, or connections to get it started, I'm not sure what I would suggest either. The trades are maybe a good gamble but be realistic: the opioid epidemic is ground from the souls of the unlucky ones on that path.
This is a good point, but everything in life carries risk. You could make the same argument about cars, but people still drive every day (and some for a living!) Also, this is labor that has to be performed for society to function. The way you're talking about it makes it seem like an absurd proposition.
You can mitigate risk by choosing a safer and less physical trade (plumbing vs. tree service) and by being aware of the other dangers (like avoiding hard drugs.)
If he's a hard worker, sober, and attentive to detail it is likely he would be promoted quickly anyways.
>The second is that running a business is a different skillset from being a plumber or whatever...
The is true for every kind of proprietorship. It's just as true when a lawyer starts a law firm. Starting a business does mean assuming some amount of risk, but a proprietorship generally doesn't require any startup capital. The only adjacent business I can think of is property development, but those companies raise financing for their projects they don't just pay for them out of pocket.
It's also worth pointing out that even without starting your own business the wages that come when you are at the experienced level of a trade are livable and roughly commiserate with a lot of office jobs (obviously not talking about software engineering here.)
Regarding your comments about the military, there are many jobs in the different branches of the U.S. armed forces that would never see combat or even deployment to a combat zone. Unless you're saying that serving in any capacity puts you at that level of culpability (this is not something I care to debate about, it's too tangential.)
You would receive decent pay, a free college education, many other government related benefits, a path to retire by 40 and you get to choose from a wide variety of jobs to do (including many IT/Computer related) if you do well on the ASVAB. Like you pointed out, joining the military can be very risky, but those risks can be mitigated just like with trades. Someone who joins as an infantry soldier is much more likely to die than the person who joins the Navy to cook on their ships.
It's like you're looking for something perfect with no potential downsides to contend with, but I don't think that exists. The fact that the kid posted on here asking for advice shows he's clearly thinking about his future.
Personally, I wouldn't go for programming if I was his age at this point. Not because I think the job will be replaced by AI, but because the field is such a pain now. Entering it will be hell, even if you get a degree you're going to have to grind LC and you will face completely disparate hiring standards at every company you ever work for. Not to mention the multitude of bootcamp people. All to work in a field that has basically devolved into dealing with ever more complex abstractions on top of other abstractions. I'm sure AI will enter the stack at some point and it will truly be a black box. Programming these days just isn't very much fun anymore IMO.