Ask HN: What would you recommend a 16 year old to pursue career wise?

When has that advice ever worked, except for a very privileged few?

I loved writing code, but discovered exactly the point you are making; I hated doing what work wanted me to do with that passion. It did not fit, so I stopped writing code professionally and I'm much happier doing it on my own terms in my own time.

However, the idea that you should find things to do that you find some satisfaction in is maybe better advice. I now work in information security (I know, not everyone's cup of tea). It's challenging, there's always something new to learn, and it's occasionally exciting.

When and why would knowledge ever become meaningless?

You can do the same thing while on the job. Presumably, you could even learn faster, as you will be in a real-life environment, with real responsiblities, real people, real constraints etc. Whereas college is basically a bizarre form of retirement - a 4 year long "retirement" young people take before starting working. Yes, they learn some things there as well, but most of that knowledge is not needed and is just an excuse to spend time in college (for students) and to charge hefty fees (for universities).

Historically, US colleges were finishing schools for the wealthy - and now, most of us are wealthy enough to spend 4 years like this [1]. Unfortunately, since so many people finish college, a college degree is now a requirement for many fairly basic jobs - which means that not going to college closes many doors for people.

[1] Tragically, many people can only afford it through crippling student debt, which they take because they can't see the big picture at 19 yo. We don't allow 19 year old people to drink beer because they're too young to handle it, but we allow them to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt... European (where I am from) solution is to just fully cover college from taxes. This way, we probably have even higher college attendance than in the US (i.e. even more wasted time and money in total), but at least the amenities are very basic and there's no parasitic admin overhead - so, I'm guessing we spend much less on higher ed per capita.

Obviously harder than it looks