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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

People who hire engineers say there should be a surfeit of engineers.

Meanwhile have you seen the bloodbaths going on at IBM and HP? This is not a field I could recommend in good faith to any young person. Go into something that can't be offshored, without the rampant ageism...

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What profession would you advise young people go into, if you are dissuading them from one of the few careers that can pay a living wage right out of the bat with almost unlimited upside potential (second only to law/medicine).

Yep, law or medicine. Maybe biotech.

Don't be mislead by Silly Valley - most working programmers sit in cubicles cranking out code for the same salary as any other office worker while their managers plot and scheme day and night how to offshore their jobs.

I think you're severely overestimating how much an office worker makes or you underestimate how much a decent programmer makes. Though likely both.

If you only consider salaries at major companies in SF/Seattle/NYC/Chicago, or you only look at the salaries of graduates from top programs, then sure. But the average programmer, graduated from an average school and working at an average company, probably makes a salary not too different from anyone else with a STEM degree.

Unemployment among lawyers is high and increasing. Some of that may be due to the sheer numbers of new lawyers but that's kind of the point.

I have two kids under three. My mindset is not to advise them towards a particular profession but to teach them how to learn, explore, fail safely, and get back up again. When they start thinking about jobs in 12+ years, hopefully they'll have a variety of skills and understanding and a willingness to experiment to find something that fits.

I'm more worried about our teenager who will be considering college in the next couple years.. I suspect this transition will be painful.

Having had a mother that took a very hands-off approach to guiding me towards a career, I highly recommend giving as much guidance as you can as early as possible. Describe how difficult something like medical school is, but how you can easily expect to start earning 200k once you get a job. Talk about the legal profession (where I work) having a steep learning curve for any job, with schooling that is entirely inapplicable to practice, but you can start earning 60k-110k right off the bat and do some pretty cool stuff.

If you wait too long, a kid can get listless or behind (I did) and it is then harder to figure things out. If kids are not taught the concrete realities of adult finances and vocations when young, it tends to never really stick.

Obviously none of that is relevant to a 3 y/o, but I so wish my mother would have repeatedly explained some of these things when I was younger. Even teenagers understand the benefit of earning six-figures, and can it light a fire under their asses if they appreciate the value of that. And the freedom it provides.

I don't think it is happenstance that all my (mostly Indian and Asian) friends whose parents pushed them to be doctors... are now great doctors, and doing financially well. While many of my (Caucasian) friends languished in their family wealth and are still listless in their mid-thirties.

/end anecdotal directionless rant.

No, the parent is right. Being able to evaluate choices and take reasonable decision is extremely more important that being "guided" in life.

> If kids are not taught the concrete realities of adult finances and vocations when young, it tends to never really stick

citation needed.

Well meaning people try to predict the future and fail. When I was in college in the early seventies the hot ticket was learning Russian. No one was learning Chinese because we even lacked a diplomatic relationship with the mainland and besides they had little of an economy or the income to purchase anything. If you'd suggested then that by 2020 they'd be the largest capitalistic economy in the world while still remaining a communist country you would have been considered stark raving mad.

Engineers were being laid off in droves and I was actually counseled to study journalism instead of engineering because there were no jobs. Newspapers were creating jobs faster than available graduates.

Four years later when I graduated with a degree in Journalism there were no jobs and engineers with a 2.0 GPA were fielding multiple offers. The young should not listen to anyone advising them to go into one field over another because they're more likely than not to be receiving bad advice.

I would say law, finance, medicine or management. These professions seem to best at protecting themselves.

We already have too many lawyers for the number of law school graduates.

A huge chunk of routine legal work is going to be automated, similarly to how millions of people use TurboTax for their taxes.

There's a reason why so many banks are investing in blockchain technology: they'll be able to eliminate many thousands of humans currently involved in clearing and settlement in financial institutions.

All of them! The focus should be on career flexibility, not pigeonholing oneself into a single career that can lose viability in an instant.

There is a saying: Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. It is especially pertinent when it comes to jobs. Things can change very quickly, as many people have learned over the years. When there is a concerted effort to push people towards a certain career, as we are seeing with software engineers right now, one should be especially leery about the future.

But at the same time one may as well capitalize on these careers while they are viable. Flexibility allows that and readys one to move into the next big thing when the shift comes.

Beware 'almost unlimited upside potential'. So has the lottery. I abandoned my small business that had made a quarter of a million dollars over the years (gross) to convert it to Patreon: decimated my income, but made it way more stable and predictable.

If I wanted to advise young people in such a way that they'd be secure, I'd tell them to (a) go into trades and (b) study some of the entrepreneurial types but apply it to marketing their merits as a tradesman, not as an 'inventor' or 'programmer'. Some of Guy Kawasaki's stuff is quite good that way, generally useful.

Anything with 'upside potential' is balanced by a very real risk of getting gruesomely hosed through pursuing that bait. It seems like 'being a human' is one of those 'upside potential' things, and on the whole we're set up to fail.

go into trades

Absolutely. A plumber is never going to see business dry up, if you'll forgive the pun.

"Unlimited upside potential" is another thing said by people who want to hire engineers for less than they're worth...

Not quite true: when we're all living in modular robot houses that aren't human-maintainable, the plumber's got no purpose anymore. But for the time being, he's got a very large installed base of stuff to maintain, and he's going to be as secure as he wants to be (if he knows enough of the entrepreneurial thing to manage a personal business and his reputation).

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