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Comment by rusteh1 | Hacker News Reader

What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.

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My kids' school has just been taken over (in the UK) by an academy group whose other local schools were telling 8 and 9 year old that they needed to know what career they were going to have so they could study the right subjects...

I'm 47 and I still don't really know what I want to do with my life. How the hell does an 8 year old?

Is it a bad thing to get kids thinking about this? I mean, this is what they have to do when they select what subjects they want to do. This has happened all over the world for at least 30 years.

Kids at 9 are absolutely not able to choose what career they will actually want to do when they are old enough to work. They just don't know enough of the world to make this choice.

What they have to do at this age is discover as much of the world as possible in order to be able to make a better choice later on.

It always puzzled me that the same kids who are expected to think that far and be able to take "career" decisions are not allowed to watch any movie they want or drink alcohol. There's a bit of a dissonance there.

I think it’s also interesting how a lot of very successful people in the field of engineering identified that they want to be engineers when they were very young and just started pursuing it.

If you mean software engineering, those people must be completely unlike myself. I started spending serious time programming at 13. But it took me well into my first job 10 years later until I thought, "well, shit, I guess that's how I'm gonna be making money". My choice of software as a study field when I was 18 was literally made like this: "oh, I can get degree by doing what I like, and hopefully pick up some more interesting knowledge along the way, sign me in!".

For some reason (probably upbringing and local environment), some people start to think about their careers very late. And I don't feel like thinking about it much earlier is productive. When you're 15, or 9, you don't really have enough information (or arguably sapience), to make a reasoned choice.

I feel the "compound interest everything" thinking is infecting our lives too much. I've heard arguments that Soviet times were bad because it was government that told you where to go to work, and free societies let people choose for themselves. But if kids are forced to think about their career at 9 and make decisions that become binding because of sunk costs, that's essentially market choosing for you. You're not free either way, it's just a different optimization system optimizing you.

I've heard arguments that Soviet times were bad because it was government that told you where to go to work

In some ways that must be quite freeing, assuming that the selection is reasonably correlated with your abilities and temperament.

Even then, AFAIK you weren't "told" what kind of career you were getting, but at times people would get assignments they could take for a job in their field?

When I was 8-9 year old, I wanted to become aeronautical engineer and in university to get "MSci-Engineer in Aerodynamics".

People change a lot since that age ;)

I think the bad thing is that we have allowed our social and economic structure so that kids have to think about their career this early.

Thinking about careers is fine, but if they're choosing subjects then they're potentially making some life long decisions and shutting themselves out of many career paths early.

Thinking about it, sure. Making meaningful decisions about it, absolutely not. Most people can barely manage to successfully decide what career they want at 18, much less 8.

There are too many invisible jobs in the world for even a high schooler to accurately decide. I was way to far into software when I discovered I would have rather have become a food packaging science. I didn't take anymore than the bare minimum chemistry and biology courses in high school instead opting for programming self study. The only people I know ended up going to a few select programs they discovered via proximity to the schools that had them.

That is only one job in one niche industry. I'm trying to figure out how to expose my children to a volume of careers that extend beyond programmer, fireman, astronaut, etc.

I'd imagine the most common careers they want were firefighter, youtube streamer and race car drivers.

But seriously, how many kids have more than a surface level knowledge of what various occupations do, or even what occupations were available? How many have practical dreams like becoming an accountant? There were adults in my programming class that became disillusioned with the career path when they discovered it wasn't all about manipulating green scrolling text like the matrix. My 13 year old nephew went through this stuff but has had a change of heart after discovering Architecture was a math intensive profession.

They simply don't have the depth and breadth of understanding to be specializing at that age.

My cousin is raising 2 kids in a major urban center. Discussions of what pre-K they needed to prepare for starts around the time they are able to independently walk. Social calanders are decided weeks in advance. Play dates are heavily documented on social media and 'bucket-lists' of rites of passage such as photo session at a historical landmark, baseball stadium, etc are turned into holiday cards. My cousin might be an outlier, she is an incredibly driven business woman who juggles a full time lucrative career with family life, but I can't imagine her lifestyle is worth the stress. As far as I can remember the kids have always been dressed in coordinated outfits, hats, vests, capes, etc.

She is definitely a loving mother and cares the worlds for her kids, but I feel incredibly uneasy if this becomes the new norm for kids to succeed in our society.

This is not objective but my brother in law's extended family lives in the suburbs far from a much smaller metro area, spend their time primarily outdoors lightly supervised, and to me are far more confident, articulate, and fun kids.

I don't think that's a very subjective observation. It's really challenging to let urban kids be unsupervised (and, in some places - it's borderline illegal)

I mean, maybe? Walk around Brooklyn and you'll see tons of unsupervised kids. Seem to be doing fine to me.

YMMV. How old are said kids?

Maybe like 10? I don’t see that many kids younger than that walking alone in NYC.

This is more a “certain type of rich people” thing than an “urban center” thing, I think. Picture-perfect boring sheltered childhoods are common in the suburbs, and there are plenty of city kids who control their own time.

I don't disagree, but I also think that 11 year olds are incredibly capable beings and it's exciting to see tooling emerge that helps us stop thinking of everyone under the age of 18 as being incapable of living a full and rich life.

Expect different, not necessarily less.

The context is obvious: Parents get less house time, do more house-irrelevant things during said time, and most importantly - the outside is more hostile, so more and more kids life is organized and initiated by parents.

Where is the evidence that suggests outside is more hostile?

Aren't our cities, generally speaking, safer now than they were at most times in the past?

They are. It's just that outrage media is 100x more powerful and present and as a result every small crime and mishap is shouted from the rooftops 24x7.

They needed paper planners 50 years ago. This is the same thing only digital.

Yup. Many of us had chores magnetically attached to the family fridge with a red and black dry-erase marker conveniently nearby. Sure, we didn't have 'sprints' or weekly meetings like the families in this article, but if I missed my chores my parents were absolutely going to take some time to talk to me and ask what was going on.

I actually like the idea of weekly “sprints” for a family. That’s a pretty cool way to set goals and actually work towards achieving them as a family. Life and personal development is iterative, the “sprint” concept fits into that perfectly.

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