Green energy - wind, solar, hydro, hydrogen etc has a lot of life left in it- there will be work installing wind farms and maintaining them.
Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
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Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#12You answered your own question — the future is too uncertain to give you a great answer to that question. Suppose you go to college and hit the job market at 22. You’re trying to predict 6 years out, which is really hard.
Knowledge isn’t meaningless. It’ll never be meaningless. Or rather, there will always be experts, it’s just not clear in what and how many. Stay agile and get good at something you see as there being a demand for one day. This probably isn’t something that there’s demand for today. You have to use your imagination a bit, but you can’t really go wrong with mastering basically anything. You always learn. Make sure you do something you can be passionate in and hold interest in. Focus goes a long way. You will, after enough time of navigating this, have accrued a very unique set of skills that can be crossed with one another to solve very interesting problems. You’ll always do well if you can be a good problem solver.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#13This may sound odd but I would recommend a trade that cannot be easily replaced by AI. Something like an electrician or roofer. Then try to get an apprenticeship with an older professional and learn as much as you can. Skip college completely and just start a business instead. You will be so much better off financially compared to say, a lawyer who will be in debt for a while and who’s job is about to be made obsolete by AI.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#14Do you.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#15Skilled trades pay well, and are harder to automate than jobs that can be done remotely. Plumbing for example, requires both knowledge, and hands on work. Plumbers won't be replaced until both AI and Robotics advance cosiderably.
I agree that plumbers will always be valuable, but the market we’re in is in no way efficient. People are not compensated by their value. The ideal rate to pay a plumber is as little as you can get away with, and that could just drop.
Consider this — there’s more and more rental properties, and so less people who want to maintain their plumbing properly. There will likely be more “lowest bidder” work, and so the rates will drop. The quality of plumbing will drop, the pride in the trade will drop.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#16This may sound odd but I would recommend a trade that cannot be easily replaced by AI. Something like an electrician or roofer. Then try to get an apprenticeship with an older professional and learn as much as you can. Skip college completely and just start a business instead. You will be so much better off financially compared to say, a lawyer who will be in debt for a while and who’s job is about to be made obsolet…
Have you ever done roofing? There are few occupations which will destroy your back faster than roofing. Everybody in construction knows you always outsource roofing if you can; better to feel sorry for the poor folks (usually literally quite poor) stuck doing that work than to be the one people feel sorry for.
Road construction might be worse, though.
Note well: No roofer or road construction worker would tell someone to skip college. If college is in the cards, just go to college and get it over with. Even if you never use your degree, it would still be the right decision, so long as you didn't take on a ton of debt going to a private school. (If the thought of slogging through college is off-putting, know that a lifetime of manual labor will be even worse. School is work, and if you can't make yourself suffer through that, you are very likely going to be even more disappointed with the choices manual or unskilled labor throw your way.)
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#17With that worldview, you should pursue banking.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#18Resounding yes for getting an education. Learning to think and being thrown in with random other people will serve you well. I agree that learning a hands-on skill adjacent to whatever you study is valuable.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#19This may sound odd but I would recommend a trade that cannot be easily replaced by AI. Something like an electrician or roofer. Then try to get an apprenticeship with an older professional and learn as much as you can. Skip college completely and just start a business instead. You will be so much better off financially compared to say, a lawyer who will be in debt for a while and who’s job is about to be made obsolet…
Have you ever done roofing? There are few occupations which will destroy your back faster than roofing. Everybody in construction knows you always outsource roofing if you can; better to feel sorry for the poor folks (usually literally quite poor) stuck doing that work than to be the one people feel sorry for. Road construction might be worse, though. Note well: No roofer or road construction worker would tell someon…
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Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#20I think the unspoken context here is you want the aforementioned 16 year old to have a decent income over their lifetime.
I think doing something they're interested in has a lot of merit, though at age 16 they may not have experienced enough different things to know for sure.
I'm not sure why you think knowledge is meaningless. Everyone is panicking about AI, but honestly, I've yet to see an AI produced document that's competent or a line of AI generated code that's useful. Yes... it can produce things that are at 80% of what you might want and that means that you (the human) may only have to spend half your time editing AI generated content.
I don't think Lawyers or Doctors or College Professors are going to be replaced with AI. But I think each of these professions will need to develop expertise in working with evolving technology.
How 'bout Literature? Granted, it's not the royal road to wealth my creative writing instructor implied, but it's great fun. And if you love reading and writing, you'll probably maintain the level of motivation needed for an advanced degree, so maybe Literature Professor?
Or spend some time in the military. I spent a few years in the Marines in the middle of my college experience. It made me realize a few things: 1. I don't want a career in the military and 2. I would love to have a job that got me out of the office on a regular basis. But there are plenty of people who love the military and make it a career.
Have you asked your 16 year old what they want to do?