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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem.

"Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.

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I disagree with your disagreement!

Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations scratch some very different itches.

One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.

I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.

Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to the engineering or programming parts. They are general facts of life you can't escape regardless of your vocation.

> You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others.

You mean, like, parents? :).

I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the treehouse stuff.

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