Comment by protocolture
5 days ago
>That motivation still manifests only in a small percentage of kids. Maybe we're making that percentage go up slightly, but it's a small effect.
Yeah its not exactly predictable.
I know very few people in my high school who even attempted technology careers, and all of them from my year who tried, other than myself and one other, went in with scholarships. And all of them, left when the scholarship money ended. Its literally the 2 of us out of 6, and we are the 2 who werent funded by scholarships.
And one of the blokes who bailed was consistently turning in better quality coding assignments, and also had access to a pre uni IT pathway, and was studying for it. He just got bored and wandered off when no one wanted to finance it anymore (and this is australia, where full time students of that age are already eligible for money)
My impression of Australia (as an American who is living in New Zealand) is that there isn't the same financial benefit to working as a software engineer vs other careers as there is in the US, and there isn't the same stigma towards the trades.
We very almost followed the UK into a trade armageddon, sending all our kids to do tertiary subjects. But somehow we sort of lucked out of it. Tradespeople ended up being extremely well awarded anyway. Electricians especially do really well.
But yeah we push out a lot of engineers, just mostly Mining, Electrical, Structural. Much fewer software engineers.