Firefighter, maybe HAZMAT disposal.
Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
51–60 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#52Electrician. The world is going to spend the next several decades electrifying everything. Can’t outsource it, easy on the body vs other trades, good unions.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#53I'd have been a pilot, were I not too tall coming up.
I've got a few in my extended family. They have some zen calmness about them I can't quite describe. And from the sounds of things, they made a lot of money and had a lot of adventures. Sure beats cubicle work.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#54Pursue algorithms research. You can do everything. You can know everything with the right algorithm. You can invent everything with the right algorithm. You can restart the whole civilization after catastrophe by the right algorithm.
Algorithms is the endpoint of all knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#55Knowledge isn’t meaningless. Knowledge is awesome. Maybe it’s more available now, but that just means you can get more of it more easily.
AI is assisting work but that just means we can do bigger things.
I think of work like this: do you see anything in the world that doesn’t work right? Anything broken or not how it should be? That’s available work. Fixing it will be satisfying and will create value. The world will never be perfect. That just means there’ll always be work to do.
Find the things in this world that sing to you that they could be made better. Go and fix them and you will discover a life worth living and work worth doing.
Will things change? Sure. Learning to deal with uncertainty is one of the great lessons of life. Do I think we should all give up and go sit on the couch? Sometimes, but I suit up and show up the next day.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#56I would ask you to introspect what you truly love doing and figure out how you can do it (by learning, practice, experiments etc.,).
Remember that everyone starts off by having very limited knowledge (on any specific topic). They gain wisdom and experience through their life. They may become competent master practitioners with experience (but still remain novices in some other aspects).
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#57Prompt engineer
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#58Electrician. The world is going to spend the next several decades electrifying everything. Can’t outsource it, easy on the body vs other trades, good unions.
Trades are definitely in demand and will continue to be
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#59> In a world where nothing seems sure anymore what would you do? Assuming you're talking about the job market, nothing was sure at any given point in time. Of course, after the fact everything seems "obvious" but I assure you at the time it wasn't. The only thing I would be my cards os is studying medicine: If you become a surgeon you'll most likely make lots of money, the downside is that it takes lots of work and t…
> make sure you're good at what you do and you won't have to worry about the market
No... make sure you strive to do the best you can in whatever you do. It's not about being "good enough". If you care about your work (whatever it may be), be a good human, and put in effort to learn and do the best you can at your given job - you will succeed.
Don't be afraid to take chances when you're young.
Being good at what you do is a side effect of caring about what you do and putting in the effort to learn about your job, your industry and the people around you.
Re: Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?
#60I got by first job in software just when the first big software bubble started popping and companies started falling left and right.
I still stuck with it and I'm still here. You start seeing the signs of downfall when you're made redundant for the 3rd or 4th time. =)
If I could do it all over again, I'd get an actual degree in a trade. Electrician, plumbing, carpentry. Both as a backup job (that I would never really do) and as something I can do with my hands and make actual physical things.
Oh, and get a job in retail, even for a month or so over summer. It'll give you a new respect for anyone who can do it for over a year without murdering anyone.
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As for education in general I'll leave you with a Donald Rumsfeld quote[0]:
"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
Getting any kind of education lowers the number of unknown unknowns in your life and gives you some known-knowns and a ton of known unknowns.
Known unknowns are the things you know exist, but don't know how to do or solve. But because you know they exist and are a solved problem, you can study them further if you need to.
If you have a ton of unknown unknowns you might spend a long time reinventing something that has already been solved. Your solution might be better because you didn't know it couldn't/shouldn't be done a certain way, but in 99.99% of cases it's not. You've just wasted time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns