Ask HN: What other good careers exist for those without a college education?

Air Traffic Controller. Saw it mentioned in a similar thread and sounds like decent pay for the trade off of high stress and crappy hours. Still it's defiantly something worth looking into if you are willing to make compromises.

Make sure that you have soft skills, the ability to learn by yourself and problem solve.

Coding is obviously super relevant now, and I personally believe for still a while, to remain employed. Yet, if you look at WEF prediction[0], it is soft skills – with obviously technical knowledge (that you already have) – that will matter in the long run.

So what does it means for you? The future of work is not about learning one tool (programming language for instance) and be done for a career. We can actually extend this to a type of job. The key is to be able re-train and re-tool. College education, and in general, lecture/instructor-based education, is generally training us the wrong way: we feed students with knowledge that is the answer for the exam in 2 weeks. In real life, we make money or are paid by solving problems (exams) but it's up to us to find the answer (the lecture). So it's completely backward.

Progressive Education[1], a movement that was created at the end of the 18th century is super relevant for our time. It's advocating for students to learn something by doing, to focus on problem-solving and critical thinking, soft skills and become a life-long learner. I am so in love with this methodology that I created a software engineering school using it, and it's working amazingly![2]

Since you seem to be self-taught, you probably already have this ability to self-learn, that's HUGE! My advice to you would be: try to learn something completely new, on your own. See how it goes. It might be painful, if so that is normal, keep going. I see that with our students who, especially when they start, are frustrated by the fact that we, as a school, are pushing them to find the knowledge by themselves instead of giving the answer by just raising their hand. The key here is not only to learn a new craft, but also and very importantly, to develop the ability to self-learn.

Develop your soft skills: collaboration, coaching, empathy, writing, negotiation, public speaking. Those are key to grow in seniority in the software track, but really, it is for any career.

Finally, I believe that tech isn't going anywhere, it's widely used by retail, finance, transportation, media, healthcare... Considering that you cannot remain employed as a software developer, no matter which position you end up working in, having tech knowledge will make a huge difference or be just essential.

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/the-3-skill-sets-work...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education

[2]https://www.holbertonschool.com/

Expecting a radical downturn in the market for software engineers is irrational. Software is continuing to eat the world.

Are you based in the US? Can’t say much about that then but if you’d be in Germany I would advise you to pick a craft like heating technician (Heizungsbauer), electrician or plumber: Due to the demographic change and the government efforts pushing more and more people to study instead of doing an apprenticeship there are fewer and fewer qualified people around that are able to fix our heating, plumbing or wiring. In Germany (and many other countries) these areas are also regulated so if you made it through your apprenticeship you are somewhat protected from too much competition, which is a nice advantage to e.g. being a programmer where everyone with a computer and some coding skills can compete with you. Also, heating systems and electric appliances are not going away anytime soon and they regularly break, so you have pretty much guaranteed business.

I’ve heard from many friends that have extreme difficulty finding someone to e.g. redo their roof or tile their floor as most professionals can just afford to wait for large, extremely lucrative jobs instead due to the high demand overhang. Single gigs can be in the ballpark of 50 to 100 thousand €, with hourly rates in excess of 100 € not being uncommon. Easily beats the going rate for developers here (which is around 80 € / hour).

I totally support college education because of its numerous benefits. When I studied in college I had to ballance between study and work and deal with all those paper works. I even hired specialists from writing service here https://writemyessayonline.com/ to write my essays on time at the highest level. Because I'm sure with a proper education you are more likely to become financially stable in the long run.