Cake shop worker remains dream job for many children starting school

It’s no different from kids in the 80s and 90s wanting to be rock stars or basketball players. Kids often have impractical career ideas based on what they see in pop culture until they are old enough to know themselves and the world more.

YouTuber is just “movie star” or fame adjusted for era. I bet interest in that has been roughly constant over time.

Video is probably the future of all media. People under 30 don’t read all that much, for better or worse.

Being good on camera is probably going to be a general useful life skill, in the way reading and writing are/were.

A fair number of people I grew up with wanted to be some sort of celebrity. Either an athlete or some sort of performance art.

"YouTuber" is just another specific type of celebrity to them.

I have the opposite problem... As a solo bootstrapped founder, I feel like it would be extremely useful to create a few videos to promote the product, however getting in front of a camera feels like a nightmare.

“YouTuber” is another way of saying “small business owner” and regardless of your perspective on the platforms in general, they have cause an explosion of independent businesses

Indeed, I remember saying "astronaut" at about age 10 to shut my grandmother up. I didn't want to be an astronaut. In fact I resented the question, because it seemed to have a subtext of "get your ass in gear and think about work". Hence I chose something implausible.

I kind of wanted to try to make games, though. And now here I am, many years later, kind of trying to make games! Mission accomplished.

I definitely didn't.

I don't know where it came from (as both my parents seemed to like their work) but I was sure from a very young age that working was one of the dumbest ideas I'd ever heard of. I was always shocked when classmates would have some plan or idea for what they wanted to do as adults.

My parents would be like, "If you want ______, you'll have to get a job to pay for it." So I just made the decision to not want things lol.

And so I just figured out how to live pretty simply and be happy with less so I could care less about work. Of course things get more complicated over time but it's served me pretty well.

I have a job that passes the time well enough and keeps me stimulated mentally, but as I tell people I work with, "If I win the lottery tomorrow, it's been nice knowing you!"

If I'd have said the truth, it would be that I didn't dream of labor (I wasn't the happiest or most agreeable of children). I probably just said firefighter because that's a pretty basic "what to be when you grow up" type job, but also my father was one.

"Did anyone else not have a dream job when they grew up?"

I probably had a few over the years. Being a dev was one, I guess. How wrong I was. Maybe it wasnt really a dream job but just a job that I thought if be good at and could make some money. I can't even imagine what a dream job would look like today - they all seem like shit.

I had no idea what I wanted to do, I still don't really.

Ideally, I wouldn't work in the traditional sense, I'd love to just grow veggies, work on my house and surf.

I still have a dream job that is completely outside my current career. It's far less grand than the dream jobs that I had as a kid, and pays less.

Yeah, I wanted to be a "nuclear physicist" because I thought explosions were cool, and obviously nuclear explosions were the biggest kind. So obviously a nuclear physicist will be researching how to be able to make even bigger explosions!

Obviously as I grew up, knowing that a) ostensibly the point of being able to make those explosions is to ensure they don't actually happen and b) knowing what we'd use that deterrence power for really took the wind out of my sails. Plus somehow it pays less than software, which I actually had more of a passion for than explosions (though I still respect a good explosion to this day). So yeah. Kids will give pretty arbitrary answers to this question even if they think they do have one.

I wanted to work on satellite operations or planetary science as a kid. Writing code for, and remotely operating and debugging space hardware from millions of miles away felt like the "ultimate" software job.

Same for me. I had plenty of interests as a kid but none that readily mapped onto a good job.

I definitely felt some jealousy towards kids who always knew what they wanted to do.

Ninja cop.

Nope, I definitely wanted to be a Wizard ala Gandalf or Raistlin.

I dreamed of being an engineer from the start, honestly, although I didn't have a preference as to what specialization. I just always dreamed of using science to humanistic ends and optimizing things within constraints.

Your younger self was right about sanitation workers. In my city it also pays well.

I knew a Navy cook. He told me a story about how he'd get sick when the food was good because he'd gorge himself on e.g. an entire tray of chocolate pudding that was about to go bad.

Not a bad gig.

Same here, ever since I was 12. Still not disillusioned by the field having graduated college two years despite all the doomsaying. I feel like a wizard!

Hexediting games to bypass or neutralize copy protection helped me become a programmer (on top of copying code from magazines and books onto a Timex Sinclair and ZX81).

I remember the first game: BattleTech Crescent Hawk Inception. IIRC the copy protection involved typing words from pages in the manual, and I "defeated" it by changing every word to the same string.

I actually owned the game, I just didn't want to get out the paper every time I wanted to play.

For me it was realizing what autorun.inf is for, from that realizing some programs load texts and images off the same CD they came with and I can change those and change the program that way, then I discovered a few programs built around displaying unbundled HTML files and that I could change those in Notepad leading to the discovery of HTML and later JavaScript and by that point I was too far gone. So not exactly games, but these CDs and programs I was messing with were shareware CDs and their launchers so still kind of a +1 for games.

Yes. I wanted to be a UPS driver as a little boy. Because I loved getting packages.

Being a cake shop worker seems entirely aligned with five year old me. I just had never been to a cake shop at that time. :)

I've never seen a kanban board in a bakery

Indeed. The pay is shitty though. Probably more suitable for kids from rich families who do not want to follow their parents.

Hopefully that stat is for kids who are at least a bit older than these

I wanted to grow up and become an adult.

Be careful what you wish for.

We took some goofy career test in high school, and my top choices were 1) Lighthouse Keeper 2) Mortician and 3) Librarian. Wound up becoming a librarian for the past 24 years. So I guess the test was accurate.

I did, and I am sure a lot of you are too.

Programming is a passion for a lot of young nerds, and it is quite exceptional in that it also makes for well paying jobs even without being part of an elite. I consider myself very lucky. Many other "dream jobs" can be fiendishly selective, don't pay, have hard to overcome barriers if you didn't win some lottery, or may be way worse than you think.

I am not saying that programming is the absolute dream job, I hate Jira as much as everyone else, but honestly, if I didn't have to work to get paid a good part of my days wouldn't be that different than a regular work day. Not 100% of course, work is not all just fun, and I don't always want to be in front of a computer, but it is definitely more than 50%. For many people, it is 0%. And I get paid for it, enough for pretty much everything that is not luxury. And even though my skills are not that exceptional, there is enough jobs available for me to be picky, it is even true for people lesser skilled than me. It is almost unfair (but I take it!).

If you are on HN, there is a good chance you are passionate about tech, that it is more than just a job. And chances are that it started from a young age.

I picked up on web development and started doing it freelance by 17 or something, but ironically was getting more work then than I am now at 32, and someone looking at my spotty resume would think I'm a lunatic for not finding something else. Problem with obsessions is they tend to be hard to pivot from.

I have a middle school career aspirations sheet from the mid 90s, where I said I wanted to be a software developer at a particular place (now out of business). I came really close, ended up doing software dev in the same industry by 22, but moved on long since.

Carpenter as a small child. Found programming around 10 or 12 but I realized I found it boring at about 15. Decided I wanted to run big servers and networks about then.

Still administering systems at 32. I think I wanted to build things from birth.

Pretty much. I wanted to be a software developer, although I think I specifically wanted to work on games (I've mostly done web dev, buh.) I also wanted to retire at 30, which didn't happen.

I wanted to be an astronaut, animator, inventor, back to stop motion and time lapse animation and then physicist. I can't be an astronaut, but those other things are still achievable.

Me, more or less. I knew in 4th grade wanted to be a scientist. And I went on to get a few chemistry degrees. Currently work in the pharmaceutical industry.

Always wanted to do cool stuff like Jimmy Neutron, I guess programming is as close as I can get, not bad at all.

I did it twice. A decade as a working musician, then as I got older, pivoted back to "plan A" in IT.

I wanted to be an inventor since like 8... Programming feels close enough. :D

Well, I am not a veterinarian or a ski instructor so I failed.