My daughter will graduate next year and, having always been technically inclined, has indicated that she would like to pursue a career in some aspect of the technical industry. I think this is wonderful.
However, having recognized the importance of your industry tragically late I feel like I am letting her down when she wants to discuss specifics, i.e. What do I think about the future of AI, which programming languages will remain relevant etc.
I've started to regularly read here (often with a search page pulled up to research some of the terminology) and have begun subscribing to newsletters etc, but I'm wondering if anyone resources or pages they would recommend to help me better educate myself in her chosen field of interest. I am not seeking to be an expert, but I would love to be a somewhat informed sounding board as she switches into adulthood.
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There are things i can think of that you may try:
1. Try and do something techy yourself. Getting your own hands dirty will give you much better insights into what she’s getting into. Something that’s useful to you. I don’t know what you’re into, but if you have a hobby, it’s usually easy to find an idea for a tool that will help with that hobby. Just make sure you don’t try and take her place or something.
2. Probably better: Ask HER, if she could make something useful to you, or even better for your whole family / community. You may go for something a little more complicated, cause she’ll have more time to devote to this. IoT projects are very rewarding and touch a lot of aspect of tech. Home automation projects are great, like connected lightbulbs that respond to voice or if you have emails. Small games like wordle are cool too. Or things like community websites. When I was 18 (22 years ago!), I built a message board for me and my friends. It was really fun and then i could customize it for things we liked to do, like rating movies, and plan holidays. We used it for years, and only stopped when the ISP stopped supported the backend tech I was using.
In any case, the sooner she starts the better off she’ll be. The first thing is to pick up anything: a book or a tutorial online, and give it a shot.
Good luck, and have fun!!
Most important is to find something she likes to do.
Tech is only a tool to enable things to happen. When you do woodworking, it’s because you like nice furniture, not nice chisels.
Some people just like chiseling.
Some woodworkers like their product, others like the process. Recognizing the things that resonate with you is key.
Just being someone who has actually built anything at all immediately puts you in the top 50% of grads.
If she's interested in electronics, feel free to shoot us an email (link in bio) and I can set you up with a free USB Oscilloscope (debugging hardware for analog circuits).
In particular have her browse https://learn.adafruit.com/ to look for stuff that interests her
That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know?
This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience).
If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey.
Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business.
Bits About Money: https://bam.kalzumeus.com/
Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/
She may also appreciate other women in tech, since it can be hard for women. Rachel is pretty popular: https://rachelbythebay.com/
I generally agree with your post but I would argue that the content on this site is likely (though not always) to be too advanced to hold the interest of an average HS graduate. But to the right person it's practically an institution.
I guess I'm just cautioning that resources recommendations would probably work best when tailored appropriately for knowledge and skill levels.
My mom inspired all of my early learning about computing, officially starting at age 9 when she brought me to Barnes & Noble to get the RedHat Linux book because our internet was too slow to download the full OS. Her only contingency was that I actually read the book and pay for it with my own money. She taught me the value of a dollar and how to stick with something, even if it's hard. She chewed my teachers out when they'd say I was "wasting time" on computers, she bit back when I got into video gaming that invited disingenuous allusions from teachers about Columbine, and she listened when I'd babble on about what I did or learned.
My mom isn't good with computers at all, but my #1 champion when it came to chasing my dreams.
Like a lot of other folks have already posted, I was also the weird sort of kid that spent time "playing on the computer" and talking about what I'd learned and asking about "modems" and "BBSs" or "the Internet". My parents would listen, supported getting an extra phone line to run my own BBS, would drive me places to support my hardware and books habits--and that all was important to continuing to explore this niche.
As a parent, well, I have an interesting mirror experience. My oldest daughter got really into basketball. This is absolutely inexplicable to me, because neither I nor my wife ever played, nor did we ever watch a basketball game at home before her interest developed. (Schools these days, exposing children to strange new ideas!) I knew the basics (orange sphere through orange ring = points; double dribbling and traveling are bad; no tackling) but really had no interest. But we've enabled her interest: let her join the school team, signed her up for summer camps or 3-on-3 leagues, encouraged her to practice in the driveway (oh, yeah, bought a hoop for the driveway), have watched or taken her to college women's games.
She still knows more about the game than I do. Even with years of watching, "volunteering" for scorebook duty at some of her home games, talking with coaches and refs, there are still a lot of subtleties of the game that escape me. But it's okay. She plays, she enjoys it, and she knows her parents support her strange, strange interest.
Even if you don't really, completely "get it" as a parent, supporting and enabling ("enabler" is such a good word here) is worth a lot.
Offer to drive the kids somewhere to like minded people, maker spaces and such, museums or exhibitions. Lookout for possible events like lectures, presentations, meetups, evening schools, summer courses. Help to find good deals on some used equipment and materials (whatever that might be) and try to provide some space to work on. Help to create financial support for tools and materials, even if it is just arranging for mowing the neighbour's lawn so that they can earn the required money.
We have tons of short courses from great providers. My favorite is one which pairs teenagers like your daughter 1:1 with a postdoc at Cambridge University on a two week project e.g. creating an AI for categorizing blog posts. At the end of the two weeks your daughter gets a reference from that same postdoc on their enthusiasm, aptitude and preparedness for that technical subject. You find that if you and your daughter go through 2 or 3 such programs together the process of selecting among them and the references you get from academics give you a ton of context that genuinely prepares you both for the bewildering world of technical professional and academic careers.
Last year I remember in particular we helped one kid navigate the maze of "Computer Science vs Videogame Design vs Computer Art vs Chemical Engineering" this exact way. It was great to see his parents learn all about the nuances of the videogame business and careers in CS despite having a Chemical Engineering background.
Do consider reaching out and also checking out our social media where we talk about situations exactly like yours all the time.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder - my wife is the founder of that marketplace.
Some caveats about HN. The conversation here can be a little too focused on money, success and being an entrepreneur. My daughter is a similar age. This generation is smitten with comparison. I read mega success stories here in the same light as the chance of someone becoming a pro athlete i.e. very unlikely.
In saying this, tech can be a wonderful field to work. I was a tech hobbyist who got to spend the last 25 years working in technology. I'm now a lecturer teaching non-tech grads hoping to get jobs in tech companies. My advice to young people is to make a plan. The plan probably won't work out as you expect. Work hard and be kind.
My personal 2c is at that age super high level advice on "how to learn" is going to be more useful than "what programming language is best". A lot can change in 4 years and it's better to set your daughter up to succeed at building a solid base of knowledge that will be adaptable to whatever trend is popular 4 years, or even a decade out, rather than take even an extremely well informed person's guess as gospel.
your role can be more about supporting her curiosity and ensuring she doesn't over-index on any one piece of advice.
ps: glad you're asking this question. i shoe-horned myself into a finance role bc that's what my dad did and i lacked awareness to wonder what i wanted to do
I don't know all of the professional orgs for women, but as a Black person, I am a member of several orgs, like /dev/color, which create safe spaces for us as underrepresented people to ask candid questions and pool experience.
That said, I hope you find it interesting to engage with the tech world, which may help you continue to relate to her as she gets into the career. My parents start dozing when I tell them what's up in my professional life, haha. Even my wife, who is tech-adjacent, has limited patience for engineering talk.
On the other hand, I've had friends and family who simply never started. They didn't have that spark, so they didn't take the first step. Or they did and it was hard and they didn't come back. They didn't have the motivation to get over that first hump to see what was on the other side. It didn't matter how many suggestions I made, or how much advice I gave them, it just wasn't enough to compensate for a lack of desire to go further.
For me, that motivating factor was Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham, a sort of eclectic book that covers topics as far and wide as why nerds are unpopular in school to some of the fundamental aspects of programming languages. I don't honestly know if this is an approach that would work for anyone else, but I mention it because it's the sort of thing that might spark an interest that would be self-sustaining (or at least it was for me).