Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

I must say right now I'm pretty envious of even semi-prolific broadcasters. For example, stream 4-6 hours regularly of me massing ladder in a competitive game while interacting with other prominent members of the community (who probably have their own streams so we essentially advertise for each other) injecting the occasional few hours of variety streaming that I can even utilize from time-to-time to develop personal interests, e.g., play guitar.

Of course, the best strategy here would be make it on a proteam and become a personality. This has the added pros of my daily needs and equipment being maintained for me while in the roster (and probably better health benefits than I have now if I get a gym membership to regularly exercise and, also, no team wants an "injured" player). Whether I win a big prize pool or not, I then secure some momentum for my stream. I don't see my stint lasting for more than 2-4 years for either some external or intrinsic reason, but options are pretty open from there. If I made near the amount the top, say, 30% make, then I estimate I have a healthy cushion for at least a couple more years given my relatively modest desires. I can go back to the tech world (honestly I'll probably still contribute to open-source projects even during this period), become a content creator of a different kind or use my clout/connections I've built to find my way in a similar scene.

More than I expected to type for this prompt.

Averages alone don't give you the full picture; surgeons can rack up >$250K of debt which is probably about as high as it goes (the average medical school debt for 2015 grads was $183K, mind you). On the other end, plenty of young adults don't have any debt coming out of college (worked numerous jobs, parents paid, scholarships paid, some schools don't charge for people under certain circumstances, etc.) It just turns out that once you take the one-and-a-quarter trillion dollar student loan debt, add the 44 million-ish college grads up and do the division, the average lands you around your number (albeit I'm seeing $28K with newer data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html).

You'd need a lot more data than I have on-hand or care to track down bit-by-bit, but from the number of doctors and lawyers we mint yearly I wouldn't be surprised if 1/10 college grads were well over $50K in debt; MBAs make up something like 10% of graduate degrees and cost around $40K on average by themselves. To me, one in ten is not all that uncommon - student loan delinquency rate more than that ;).

On top of that, it's not "uncommon" for two people who are both surgeons or doctors or lawyers or MBAs to find each other and get married; these people, very much like most of the software engineers I've met, live around their jobs. The people they meet are quite often in their same fields, and have similar financial backgrounds as a result. Two young MBAs? Easily $80K in the hole together.

We in the Bay Area just get this warped sense of perspective because everyone here has to make absurd gobs of money just to make rent, reenforced by the demand for good software engineers being so high. Most of the other people we deal with or interact with are either software engineers themselves or are directly in support of software. We get insulated and siloed from differing perspectives by our monocultured Silicon Valley society.

(And yeah, doctors and lawyers don't usually become doctors and lawyers from the goodness of their hearts alone; they understand that eventually they will come back and get way ahead of their massive debts, especially as the government keeps piling on incentives like debt forgiveness and restructured repayment plans to keep people choosing these avenues of work.)

The gloves could pull the hand along the trajectory of the blade.

Thank God you're here to police these threads otherwise women would sully their eyes with such filth! /tips fedora

- Architect (of buildings)

- Farmer (been there; my fallback option)

- That person who works in the IS18 infrasound station that detects nuclear explosion sound waves in Greenland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vULUkp7Ttss) or something similarly monk-ish. I could be a monk but i cant stand religion.