Even if she is interested in programming, I'd warn her about burnout, about the ultra long feedback cycles, about the exhausting rate of technology progress. Make sure she knows the path ahead. It's weighted, I know, because I can only tell her about this path and not others. On the other hand, there's weight to the other side by seeing me doing that, being able to get advice and direction.

I want her to be happy. Fulfilled if possible. Good work-life balance, preferable on the side of "life" than "work". If I can leave her enough money to choose her profession rather than have to follow the money.

But I do want them to learn from my mistakes (as well as the mistakes of everyone else they are exposed to). One of the things I've tried to instill in them is "Make your own mistakes, not someone else's".

Only in my adulthood I started to explore Architecture, and ooohhh boy, I freaking love it. And I would have loved worked with my mom, taking clients, etc.

So, just be careful on what you say to your kids about a career, or how you say it.

I'm not complaining btw, just a fact of life from a very simple comment mom made one random day.

We should work on our faults, yes. But we should also strive to accept them, so that our children learn to accept their own faults as well.

If you treat any imperfection as an intolerable flaw, you will teach your children to treat any of their own flaws as intolerable.

- John Adams

I do soulless and artless crap like programming so my kids maybe don't have to. I'm doing it to acquire "fuck you money" so my kids can come out of the womb saying "fuck you" and then they can go pursue more virtuous, noble, artful things.

Then there's the countless times you have to bang your head against the wall whilst coding because of some unrelenting problem/bug that just won't go away and you've spent 5 hours straight combing Google for a solution, but you need the grit to solve it all by your lonesome. No savior of a snippet will solve it for you.

Then there's the mental gymnastics required to envision the end result of your code and the delayed gratification you endure when everything is in prototype mode for long periods of time. You have to have the vision of the end product and execute accordingly.

Coding is not for everyone, but imitate at your leisure.

I made up my mind a long time ago that my children can be anything they want, as long as it is good, as long as what they want does not hard others.

I want to introduce my kids to programming, but I also want to see them experience art, sport, and music and everything else the world has to offer. I don't care if they are programmers, I care that they get a bit of an experience at it.

I would rather they grow up to be better than me.

The major downside is the Aladdin problem. Vast cosmic power. Itty bitty living space (& mortal lifespan to spend). These capabilities we have could be better spent, do end up entangled in so many frustrating stifling enterprises. But they're still amazing abilities. I'd wish such great adventures for anyone.

Don't be a programmer sweet child o' mine. Unless you wanna go bald.

/s

When I was a kid in the late 1950s, we had a typical TV of the day, with a dozen or so tubes that would often burn out, so the TV would "go on the fritz".

Dad would pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box, take them to the corner grocery and plug them into the tube tester one by one, and buy a replacement for the bad tube. And I would tag along with him.

The next time the TV went on the fritz, I asked him, "Dad, can I pull out the tubes and test them and find the bad one and put the TV back together?" He said "Yes, you can!" So I did.

He was also an avid fisherman and took me and my sister on his fishing trips. I didn't take much interest in that, but he never pushed me into it.

Mom was an accomplished seamstress but didn't have a knack for mechanical things. So when her sewing machine needed oiling or minor adjustments, I found the manual and took care of it for her.

She also had a Smith-Corona Portable Electric Typewriter that came with a touch typing course: a little paper easel with exercises and a set of phonograph records with voice instructions. Given my interest in machinery, I thought this was cool and worked through the entire course, learning to touch type at the age of eight.

Fast forward 40 years.

I will call my late wife Carol, and our two daughters Alice and Becky.

I was working one evening when Alice walked in and asked, "Dad, whatcha doing?" I said "I'm working on some JavaScript code." She asked, "Can I do that?"

My eyes lit up and I said "Yes! You can!"

I grabbed another laptop and set her up next to me and showed her how to write a simple loop and an if statement.

The next evening, Becky asked, "Dad, what was Alice doing last night?" "She was learning to write JavaScript code." "Can I do that?" You can guess my answer.

Over the course of a few days, they started competing with each other! "Dad, am I ahead of Alice?" and "Am I ahead of Becky?"

Around 11 a few nights later, my late wife Carol walked in and said, "Why is Alice up so late?!" I explained that she and Becky had taken a sudden interest in programming and I was tutoring them.

She would have none of it. "They have school at 8 in the morning and we have a curriculum to follow. They can't stay up late doing this!"

We were homeschooling at the time, which I thought was a great idea because it would allow our daughters to find things that interested them and pursue them. But Carol only wanted them to follow a strict schedule with a standardized curriculum that she had bought, even if it bored them to tears and kept them from finding their real interests.

I can't really blame her. She did what she knew how to do. I can only blame myself for not pushing back and insisting that it would be great if our daughters could have an opportunity to dig into something that interested them.

An opportunity like I had when I was young.

Both the girls dropped out of our little programming course after that and never took an interest in it again.

I don't know what could have happened if they had been allowed to pursue this interest.

Any insight on how this part happened? As a total layman, architecture strikes me as only 10% or so art in the painting sense of art. It could be more if you also consider e.g. software design to be an art, but at that point most things are art.

I have plenty friends who do art or art-adjacent things (such as design) as a full-time job, and some of them are actually doing quite ok financially (even among non-design people). Let me tell you, working a full-time employment in those fields tends to be a soul-suck to the level you cannot even probably imagine. You know, quite often (but not always), how exciting and fun programming for your own side-projects feels in comparison to programming for pay? With "more artful things", it is just like that, but with an even higher gap of suckiness. Of course, unless you are in the top 1% (or maybe even 0.1%) of the art world in terms of career success.

I am not saying that your child shouldn't choose "more virtuous, noble things" just because of what I said. Quite the opposite, I believe following what you truly want to do is the move (which is how I went into programming around a decade ago, back when both I and my parents had zero idea that it actually paid well and had good employment prospects). Can I claim that I enjoy my work all the time? No, but outside of a few short bad stretches due to a specific work environment I got myself into (and which wasn't representative of programming as a field in general), it has been generally ranging between "fine" and "interesting". If you expect any profession to be all entirely creative fun and joy, with no occasional "meh" component of work whatsoever, you are deluding yourself.

The grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. But it tends to become blinding neon green level of brightness when one doesn't have much (even second-hand) exposure to the realities of that other side.