Comment by 10111001
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.
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.
I can relate! I once joined a team that worked on "Analytics" when I was naive and didn't realize that meant "remarketing and ad targeting."
Just keep an eye out for something different. I'm sure there are jobs that you can do and feel good about.
> 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
You could've got out sooner once you caught a whiff of this?
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> 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.
From an employment perspective those are irrelevant industries. Number of actors and professional athletes that can earn a good living while doing it is in the low thousands, and even then it may be for a couple of years only.
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.