Comment by fxwin
7 hours ago
> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list. Things like encouraging curiosity, agency and freedom to pursue things that I showed interest in even if it meant spending many weekends and many eurodollars on me that they would no doubt have found ways to spend otherwise come to mind first, along with general values about society and how (not) to treat people.
Edit: there are "hard skills" they taught me, but they are more along the lines of "we want you to be a self sufficient human being capable of dealing with life" (cooking, cleaning, how to budget and think about money,...) and less about increasing my value as a participant in the labor market
>> My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son?
> Maybe that's just me, but this strikes me as a bit odd. When i think about my parents and what i appreciate about them and how they raised me, hard skills are not very high up the list.
For better or worse, parents with lucrative professions have been able to give their kids a leg up to enter those professions. They know the path to get there, have connections, etc. That's especially important in increasingly competitive environments (like we have today).
Thinking you had such an asset to offer your kid, then being forced to doubt its value, is a loss.
That's only for an extremely small set of professions, for most people their parent's professions were not lucrative by the time they grew up.
My dad was in a lucrative and booming industry: the printing press during the digital transformation. By the time I got to college it was a dying industry. I was in a lucrative and booming industry: programming during the 2000s. By the time my son is in college it might be dying too.
What you're talking about is mostly about timeless industries like health care, some types of engineering, finance, etc.
Medicine and finance have both reinvented themselves within the last generation. The skillset of a top practitioner now looks very different from the top practitioners in the 80s.
I think what you mean by a "timeless industry" is one that defines itself by the problem it's solving rather than by the solution. Tech and the Internet was so powerful that for a brief couple decades, the industry defined itself by the solution: just use computers. But really, AirBnB is in the hospitality industry, and Uber/Lyft/Waymo are in the transportation industry, and Zillow/Redfin/Trulia are in the real estate industry, and Stripe/Square/Paypal/Zelle/Plaid are in the payments industry, and Flexport is in the shipping industry, and so on.
The depressing part for me, who went into one of the consumer tech giants, is that I thought I was going into the tech industry and it turns out I'm really in the addiction industry. I now know a lot about how to deliver hits of dopamine at scale that bump up daily engagement, but that's not really what I thought I was going into, and the actual technology I use has completely shifted underneath.
5 replies →
> My dad was in a lucrative and booming industry: the printing press during the digital transformation.
Same, but what I lucked into as a result of that was that pops bought a computer for the house back in the early 90's in a curious attempt at learning what was happening with desktop publishing (to keep up with what was going on in the wider industry), and computers never really clicked with him, but they did with me.
I think there's often definite overlap in what's happening now with what's coming next, and I can only wish that my son will benefit from some kind of comparable serendipity in the same way that I did.
Sports and entertainment come to mind.
1 reply →
FWIW I don't think programming changing devalues the experience you give your kid.
I grew up poor and as an adult I'm surrounded by silicon valley engineers who grew up wealthy. The biggest differences in our upbringing is their knowledge of the system and their connections within it. Their parents knew college admissions officers, knew what kind of test prep mattered and what didn't, knew the competitive clubs that their friends who were admissions officers looked for and how to get their kids into those competitive clubs. They have friends who are VCs and hedge fund managers and their kids can get high school internships working for their friends where they can learn about those industries and gain the warm connections needed to start startups or court investment. They know doctors when they need medical advice and their doctor doesn't have the time, lawyers who will give them free advice on legal issues, etc etc
And now, as a well-to-do adult in the tech industry, I have the same connections. Generally speaking the privilege you can offer your kids is the knowledge and access to highly qualified individuals.
that's fair, i haven't thought about it that way.
Speaking for myself, although I never expected that I'd pass on hard skills to my child (unless they showed a particular interest), at least up until 2019 I felt confident that I could guide them in a general direction to be successful in life. How to do well in school, how to develop a work ethic, how to learn and pursue the things that interest them, how to approach planning a career, how to market their skills, how to manage risk, how to balance doing what they love vs what pays the bills, how to approach relationships... things like that. Regardless of whether they wanted to become a piano tuner or a park ranger or an astronaut or a homemaker.
But right now I know almost nothing at all for what to tell them. I don't know if any moticum of the experience I have that put me on a successful path will be valuable in the future at all.
Basically my plan is to just spend time enjoying time together and having fun, and cross my fingers and hope that things turn out alright.
Yeah, agency is never more available than it has been now. These skills of talking to the machines make you far more capable than it used to.
Spellcasting used to be incredibly rote magic. Welcome to a new age of spellcasting in the fly. Not required either but knowing the true names and the true forms: I can't imagine any path other than your true understanding directly corresponding to your true agency.
I hate to be “that guy” - but I truly believe there is a degree of so-called privilege in that perspective.
Not that I don’t value or agree with it, those soft skills are incredibly important, but one can I hope have both the soft and the hard skills.
Family and romance have evolved quite a bit in recent years - but all things equal are you wanting to marry into a family with productive skills, assets, etc? Would you pick true love with the peasant girl or marry to strengthen the alliance with Normandy? Would your answre to the latter change if you were the pauper?
I don't doubt my comment comes from a place of privilege, but the OP seems like there is some privilege there too so maybe in a way, that makes it an even better fit ;)
I also think both hard and soft skills are important, it just feels to me that a parent's job is primarily the latter, not the former. There are plenty of places that can teach your child very well how to become a programmer/electrician/younameit, but not many places that you trust to teach your child how to be a good human (amplified by the fact that a lot of social conditioning happens and is engrained before we really go super deep down the "tech tree" of hard skills in life)
But all things aren't equal. Love is not a formula to see how one can improve their social status.
There are people who see it that way, who marry for money and clout. We call them the unhappy ones.