In a world where nothing seems sure anymore what would you do? Would you bother getting an education? When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn?
Yes. It is your life. It isn't about what is out there. It's about what's in you.
My kids are 19, 17, 12. I tell them- you're not going to college to get an education that is about knowledge out in the world. You are going to get an education about you. To learn about your person- your body, your brain, your own mental model of your self and other selves and the world.
Your person is still in physical growth mode until at least 25, and then you have lots of other changes and challenges coming after that. You will continue learning, including about your self, throughout the entirety of your life. To be set up to do that is why you're going.
(Yes, college is not the real world, in any way. But in important ways it is real enough.)
==
The most important things to be able to do are- build relationships, focus and concentrate, organize your self and your thinking, communicate, have fun, and take care of the physical self. You don't have any idea, really, how well you do those things as a teenager. It's the job of the adults around you to help. College is an opportunity to expose your person to more unique, distinct, varied, skilled adults and peers than at any time previous, and for some, more than they will ever get again (unfortunately). That exposure is the most intense learning the self can do.
For each of my kids, they have things they are good at now, and things they are not good at. Not just skills- capabilities. Biases. Potentials, not actuals. As their parent I have a good sense of possible distinct and unique trajectories for each of them given those potentials, and I do what I can to coach them onto those various trajectories and in specific work domain disciplines that are potential fits (to my eyes) for them. But that's a conversation that is specific to our relationship. And their lives are their own.
For you, I would encourage you to see yourself not even at the beginning of your adventure, and to think hard and figure out good ways, with the guidance of adults you currently respect and trust, to avail yourself and position yourself to be exposed to and learn from new adults worthy of respect and trust. And pay it forward, too.
> I tell them- you're not going to college to get an education that is about knowledge out in the world. You are going to get an education about you. To learn about your person- your body, your brain, your own mental model of your self and other selves and the world.
You can do the same thing while on the job. Presumably, you could even learn faster, as you will be in a real-life environment, with real responsiblities, real people, real constraints etc. Whereas college is basically a bizarre form of retirement - a 4 year long "retirement" young people take before starting working. Yes, they learn some things there as well, but most of that knowledge is not needed and is just an excuse to spend time in college (for students) and to charge hefty fees (for universities).
Historically, US colleges were finishing schools for the wealthy - and now, most of us are wealthy enough to spend 4 years like this [1]. Unfortunately, since so many people finish college, a college degree is now a requirement for many fairly basic jobs - which means that not going to college closes many doors for people.
[1] Tragically, many people can only afford it through crippling student debt, which they take because they can't see the big picture at 19 yo. We don't allow 19 year old people to drink beer because they're too young to handle it, but we allow them to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt... European (where I am from) solution is to just fully cover college from taxes. This way, we probably have even higher college attendance than in the US (i.e. even more wasted time and money in total), but at least the amenities are very basic and there's no parasitic admin overhead - so, I'm guessing we spend much less on higher ed per capita.
I feel like this is not the right message to send to a 16 year old asking what the meaning of life is. Sure college is a scam and no 20 year old needs to go to a learning resort with a lazy river. But also, plenty of jobs are quite useful to go to college (although most of those are stem jobs). Like you probably aren't going to get into biotech, geo-engineering, physics, without at least one degree. Well I suppose you can do biotech without a degree if you are Elizabeth Holmes but she went to jail so maybe it's a bad idea.
I've seen many people struggle and regret their decision to study subjects at university that didn't point more directly to rewarding careers with reasonable market demand, and I worry that the way you describe university education risks falling into the same trap.
Learn to love learning, find enthusiasm in growth and challenge. University Education CAN be huge for that, beyond the 100 level courses.
Learn to share your learnings with others, publicly. Do it 1-1. Blog, speak, share on social media. This will create public engagement and if you are enthusiastic and positive, will lead to many opportunities. Don’t hoard knowledge. The more generous you are with knowledge, the more people will want your expertise.
Work on the hardest problems. For example, do you specialize in crafting prompts for LLMs or do you understand the math behind LLMs themselves? I’d argue try and do the latter, and share and learn enthusiastically. You’ll find higher paying and more interesting work.
Find others that love learning. The coworker who doesn’t value their growth, who turns their nose up at the “nerd” who dares to spend time on their growth is toxic. OTOH the colleague excited to grow will drive you to be better and be an invaluable connection your whole career. You can find great collaborators at many places: university, job, whatever.
Be humble. You’ll never master even your chosen field. Stay close to people smarter than you. Don’t assume you can’t learn from somebody. A great quote is “we are called upon to teach when asked to learn when we are fortunate”
When I was getting into programming, everyone was warning me that the jobs would all be outsourced soon. That didn't happen, or not in any kind of apocalyptic way.
I'm not certain what you're concerned about, so I'll address a couple of things.
The job market is in a rough place. This happens. It's a pendulum that never stops swinging. Make yourself useful somewhere and hope for the best. If you're paid well and smart with money, you can weather the storms.
AI is making crazy, disturbing advancements right now. However, it is not even close to being able to fully replace a human in a programming or similarly technical job (I'm not an AI researcher, but that's my observation). It's a good time to get familiar with these tools, because it seems very likely that we'll all be using them in some capacity, rather than working for them. This is not hugely different from the computer revolution we already went through.
So yes, get an education. For your own enjoyment/self-fulfillment if nothing else.
Two things that still really matter in the (dire sounding) scenario you are painting: PEOPLE and RISK. SO here are my two recommendations -- they somewhat conflict, but depending on what kind of person you are (and are becoming!) one will resonate so just follow it:
1) PEOPLE: The relationships you make early in your career can end up being the most valuable thing you take away from your first couple of jobs. Go places where a) you like the people, b) they challenge you and you learn from them, and c) they share your values. People that were throwing up in the back of my car in college became lifelong friends -- now they are industry leaders, and we'll never lose that bond...
2) RISK: Take as much risk as you can stomach. You literally have nothing to lose right now, and you can try and fail at a bunch of things before other priorities (mortgage, wife, kids, whatever) make you risk averse. If you go to a startup right now, and it totally bombs, so what?! You just dust yourself off and do it again. It would be a shame to take a "safe" job early in your career, there will be lots of time for that.
Here's an example of how they conflict: if you go to a big company, there will be lots of opportunities to meet people, but no risk. If you go do a startup, there are only a few people, but lots of risk/opportunity.
For the next 10 years, expose yourself to as many experiences as you can, at some point something will click and you can run down that rabbit hole.
At this point in time trades seem like a pretty good bet. They pay well (in my country at least), you will always have work, and the skills you develop are very practical. Nice to be able to look at an issue with your own living space and comprehend what it will take to get it fixed.
But that isn't a very hacker news response. I guess you would also develop these sorts of skills in eg. industrial engineering.
There are plenty of other options if what you're spooked about is automation and language models erradicating all of our jobs. If you enjoy baking you might consider getting into it.
On the other hand, it might be best to ignore all the hype about LLMs and automation and go into whatever you feel most passionate about. Learning and working in whatever field will always lead to growth. It may eventually be GPT'd away, but then I know a lot of people who have completely changed career later in life and achieved success and satisfaction.
If you pick a trade pick one of the less physical ones. Like plumbing or electrician. Every homeowner wants a reliable plumber in their contacts, and they’re expensive as fuck in the United States. It’s not just dealing with poop either like some people think. There’s a pretty big variety of things plumbers do.
I live in Mexico now and from what I’ve heard from every person I know who owns a house or manages a rental it’s just as hard to find a reliable one here, so it’s not like immigration or AI will have a huge effect.
Don’t get into tree cutting. It’s extremely dangerous. General contracting can be very lucrative but is much broader.
With these trades you can eventually “hang your own shingle” and become a business owner.
As I was writing this I was thinking “fuck maybe I should become a plumber”
I would also say - if you do go into trades, consider still doing 2 years of community college and going to a trade school. It really depends on your situation - would your parents support you during that time? If the pressure is on, then just do trade school and start working straight off.
But just be aware it's going to put you in a different social class (blue collar) than others your age who go to college. There's a lot of 18 and 19 year olds who go this route and brag about how they're making 50k a year, but fail to see the bigger picture. You only get to be those ages once, don't piss them away working 60 hours a week unless you have to.
And guard yourself - a lot of people who do this type of labor are into heavy drugs (especially meth) or have criminal pasts. Alcoholism is also rampant. Just be aware of those things as pitfalls and try to stay away from it. Stick with the "winners" - form relationships with the people you find who don't have these issues. If you have another social "group" to draw from in the form of college friends, it'll be easier.
Plumbing and electricians can be a great career but “one of the less physical one” denies the fact that it still wears out your body all the same. Speaking from a family of manual labor + friends in trades.
Trades are recession-proof though. Rich or poor, recession or not, people still need to shit and don't like doing so in the dark, so at least plumbing and electrical will still have work. People need housing, so anything construction and building work will also be fine. Same for heating and HVAC.
The fields mostly impacted by recessions are those that never had a business in the first place - lots of tech has been built on "growth & engagement" freeloading off VC money with no actual businesses paying for that "engagement", and now the free money ran out.
I got by first job in software just when the first big software bubble started popping and companies started falling left and right.
I still stuck with it and I'm still here. You start seeing the signs of downfall when you're made redundant for the 3rd or 4th time. =)
If I could do it all over again, I'd get an actual degree in a trade. Electrician, plumbing, carpentry. Both as a backup job (that I would never really do) and as something I can do with my hands and make actual physical things.
Oh, and get a job in retail, even for a month or so over summer. It'll give you a new respect for anyone who can do it for over a year without murdering anyone.
--
As for education in general I'll leave you with a Donald Rumsfeld quote[0]:
"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
Getting any kind of education lowers the number of unknown unknowns in your life and gives you some known-knowns and a ton of known unknowns.
Known unknowns are the things you know exist, but don't know how to do or solve. But because you know they exist and are a solved problem, you can study them further if you need to.
If you have a ton of unknown unknowns you might spend a long time reinventing something that has already been solved. Your solution might be better because you didn't know it couldn't/shouldn't be done a certain way, but in 99.99% of cases it's not. You've just wasted time.
May hate my answer. Learn to be optimistic long-term, go to therapy, exercise, make friends, have relationships, and try different things to find a career you enjoy. AI is overblown and knowledge is only becoming more valuable in a world spammed with low-quality information.
Therapy is a great garbage collector. One doesn't need perceived psychological issue to benefit. And it doesnt have to be trying to resolve some hidden childhood pain or whatever. Sometimes it's so much better to pay someone to dump your trivial mental garbage on knowing that:
1. They arent going to find it gossip worthy and spread it to one or more people in your social groups.
2. You get to unburden yourself without burdening friends on the regular.
3. Sometimes there is real benefit to having a neutral 3rd party to help provide a different perspective on something that may be blocking some minor thing - and gets you on your way quicker
> In a world where nothing seems sure anymore what would you do?
Assuming you're talking about the job market, nothing was sure at any given point in time. Of course, after the fact everything seems "obvious" but I assure you at the time it wasn't.
The only thing I would be my cards os is studying medicine: If you become a surgeon you'll most likely make lots of money, the downside is that it takes lots of work and time to do so.
Whatever you do, from chef and small business retail owner to startups - make sure you're good at what you do and you won't have to worry about the market.
> Would you bother getting an education?
If you are _really good_ at programming (e.g. you already know how to program relatively complex CRUD applications) my advice is to study something else e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Sciences, etc. Diversified profiles are the most sought after.
Going to college is not just about learning CS (or whatever) fundamentals. It is about friendships, having fun, entering adulthood. Try to take advantage of the Erasmus system, travel as much as you can, as cheaply as you can, meet ppl, do crazy shit while staying on track with your classes. It is important to "exit" student's life within the expected time frame, helps a lot.
> When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn?
Knowledge is _never_ meaningless. Most of the _experts_ on any given field have lots of knowledge that at first glance might seem irrelevant but they're able to mix and match in order to advance the knowledge on a specific field.
My guess is that you're referring to modern tech stacks. Often times seasoned users complain about how "this" or "that" stack has nothing new to offer apart from X which was already a thing 15 years ago with a different name. That's part because of age - we all become a bit of a whiners when getting old - but primarily because the already knew the old tech stack inside out so they can analyse, break down and understand the decisions (good and bad) of the new stack on the fly. When your time comes you'll have to learn to current tech stack and make your own decisions.
I work with surgeons and the running joke is that practical procedure based medicine just sucks - the hours, the physical work, the hospital, the conflicts and politics. It’s all truly brutal.
However I do agree 100% with what you said. Witnessing them fixing a newborn infant was an insane experience for me and I was super jealous.
What they recommend is still medicine, but the non-practical fields - prescribing medications, designing and administering complex treatments from the comfort of an office.
My personal take is that everything and anything medical will never ever go away as long as there are humans. I love the fact I get to work in both a software dev world and the medical world. Software still can do so much for that.
> make sure you're good at what you do and you won't have to worry about the market
No... make sure you strive to do the best you can in whatever you do. It's not about being "good enough". If you care about your work (whatever it may be), be a good human, and put in effort to learn and do the best you can at your given job - you will succeed.
Don't be afraid to take chances when you're young.
Being good at what you do is a side effect of caring about what you do and putting in the effort to learn about your job, your industry and the people around you.
Readit News
My kids are 19, 17, 12. I tell them- you're not going to college to get an education that is about knowledge out in the world. You are going to get an education about you. To learn about your person- your body, your brain, your own mental model of your self and other selves and the world.
Your person is still in physical growth mode until at least 25, and then you have lots of other changes and challenges coming after that. You will continue learning, including about your self, throughout the entirety of your life. To be set up to do that is why you're going.
(Yes, college is not the real world, in any way. But in important ways it is real enough.)
==
The most important things to be able to do are- build relationships, focus and concentrate, organize your self and your thinking, communicate, have fun, and take care of the physical self. You don't have any idea, really, how well you do those things as a teenager. It's the job of the adults around you to help. College is an opportunity to expose your person to more unique, distinct, varied, skilled adults and peers than at any time previous, and for some, more than they will ever get again (unfortunately). That exposure is the most intense learning the self can do.
For each of my kids, they have things they are good at now, and things they are not good at. Not just skills- capabilities. Biases. Potentials, not actuals. As their parent I have a good sense of possible distinct and unique trajectories for each of them given those potentials, and I do what I can to coach them onto those various trajectories and in specific work domain disciplines that are potential fits (to my eyes) for them. But that's a conversation that is specific to our relationship. And their lives are their own.
For you, I would encourage you to see yourself not even at the beginning of your adventure, and to think hard and figure out good ways, with the guidance of adults you currently respect and trust, to avail yourself and position yourself to be exposed to and learn from new adults worthy of respect and trust. And pay it forward, too.
You can do the same thing while on the job. Presumably, you could even learn faster, as you will be in a real-life environment, with real responsiblities, real people, real constraints etc. Whereas college is basically a bizarre form of retirement - a 4 year long "retirement" young people take before starting working. Yes, they learn some things there as well, but most of that knowledge is not needed and is just an excuse to spend time in college (for students) and to charge hefty fees (for universities).
Historically, US colleges were finishing schools for the wealthy - and now, most of us are wealthy enough to spend 4 years like this [1]. Unfortunately, since so many people finish college, a college degree is now a requirement for many fairly basic jobs - which means that not going to college closes many doors for people.
[1] Tragically, many people can only afford it through crippling student debt, which they take because they can't see the big picture at 19 yo. We don't allow 19 year old people to drink beer because they're too young to handle it, but we allow them to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt... European (where I am from) solution is to just fully cover college from taxes. This way, we probably have even higher college attendance than in the US (i.e. even more wasted time and money in total), but at least the amenities are very basic and there's no parasitic admin overhead - so, I'm guessing we spend much less on higher ed per capita.
Oddly enough, most countries think that a person who is legally responsible for their own decisions is also mature enough to handle alcohol [0]...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age
Learn to share your learnings with others, publicly. Do it 1-1. Blog, speak, share on social media. This will create public engagement and if you are enthusiastic and positive, will lead to many opportunities. Don’t hoard knowledge. The more generous you are with knowledge, the more people will want your expertise.
Work on the hardest problems. For example, do you specialize in crafting prompts for LLMs or do you understand the math behind LLMs themselves? I’d argue try and do the latter, and share and learn enthusiastically. You’ll find higher paying and more interesting work.
Find others that love learning. The coworker who doesn’t value their growth, who turns their nose up at the “nerd” who dares to spend time on their growth is toxic. OTOH the colleague excited to grow will drive you to be better and be an invaluable connection your whole career. You can find great collaborators at many places: university, job, whatever.
Be humble. You’ll never master even your chosen field. Stay close to people smarter than you. Don’t assume you can’t learn from somebody. A great quote is “we are called upon to teach when asked to learn when we are fortunate”
When I was getting into programming, everyone was warning me that the jobs would all be outsourced soon. That didn't happen, or not in any kind of apocalyptic way.
I'm not certain what you're concerned about, so I'll address a couple of things.
The job market is in a rough place. This happens. It's a pendulum that never stops swinging. Make yourself useful somewhere and hope for the best. If you're paid well and smart with money, you can weather the storms.
AI is making crazy, disturbing advancements right now. However, it is not even close to being able to fully replace a human in a programming or similarly technical job (I'm not an AI researcher, but that's my observation). It's a good time to get familiar with these tools, because it seems very likely that we'll all be using them in some capacity, rather than working for them. This is not hugely different from the computer revolution we already went through.
So yes, get an education. For your own enjoyment/self-fulfillment if nothing else.
1) PEOPLE: The relationships you make early in your career can end up being the most valuable thing you take away from your first couple of jobs. Go places where a) you like the people, b) they challenge you and you learn from them, and c) they share your values. People that were throwing up in the back of my car in college became lifelong friends -- now they are industry leaders, and we'll never lose that bond...
2) RISK: Take as much risk as you can stomach. You literally have nothing to lose right now, and you can try and fail at a bunch of things before other priorities (mortgage, wife, kids, whatever) make you risk averse. If you go to a startup right now, and it totally bombs, so what?! You just dust yourself off and do it again. It would be a shame to take a "safe" job early in your career, there will be lots of time for that.
Here's an example of how they conflict: if you go to a big company, there will be lots of opportunities to meet people, but no risk. If you go do a startup, there are only a few people, but lots of risk/opportunity.
For the next 10 years, expose yourself to as many experiences as you can, at some point something will click and you can run down that rabbit hole.
But that isn't a very hacker news response. I guess you would also develop these sorts of skills in eg. industrial engineering.
There are plenty of other options if what you're spooked about is automation and language models erradicating all of our jobs. If you enjoy baking you might consider getting into it.
On the other hand, it might be best to ignore all the hype about LLMs and automation and go into whatever you feel most passionate about. Learning and working in whatever field will always lead to growth. It may eventually be GPT'd away, but then I know a lot of people who have completely changed career later in life and achieved success and satisfaction.
I live in Mexico now and from what I’ve heard from every person I know who owns a house or manages a rental it’s just as hard to find a reliable one here, so it’s not like immigration or AI will have a huge effect.
Don’t get into tree cutting. It’s extremely dangerous. General contracting can be very lucrative but is much broader.
With these trades you can eventually “hang your own shingle” and become a business owner.
As I was writing this I was thinking “fuck maybe I should become a plumber”
But just be aware it's going to put you in a different social class (blue collar) than others your age who go to college. There's a lot of 18 and 19 year olds who go this route and brag about how they're making 50k a year, but fail to see the bigger picture. You only get to be those ages once, don't piss them away working 60 hours a week unless you have to.
And guard yourself - a lot of people who do this type of labor are into heavy drugs (especially meth) or have criminal pasts. Alcoholism is also rampant. Just be aware of those things as pitfalls and try to stay away from it. Stick with the "winners" - form relationships with the people you find who don't have these issues. If you have another social "group" to draw from in the form of college friends, it'll be easier.
The fields mostly impacted by recessions are those that never had a business in the first place - lots of tech has been built on "growth & engagement" freeloading off VC money with no actual businesses paying for that "engagement", and now the free money ran out.
I still stuck with it and I'm still here. You start seeing the signs of downfall when you're made redundant for the 3rd or 4th time. =)
If I could do it all over again, I'd get an actual degree in a trade. Electrician, plumbing, carpentry. Both as a backup job (that I would never really do) and as something I can do with my hands and make actual physical things.
Oh, and get a job in retail, even for a month or so over summer. It'll give you a new respect for anyone who can do it for over a year without murdering anyone.
--
As for education in general I'll leave you with a Donald Rumsfeld quote[0]:
"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
Getting any kind of education lowers the number of unknown unknowns in your life and gives you some known-knowns and a ton of known unknowns.
Known unknowns are the things you know exist, but don't know how to do or solve. But because you know they exist and are a solved problem, you can study them further if you need to.
If you have a ton of unknown unknowns you might spend a long time reinventing something that has already been solved. Your solution might be better because you didn't know it couldn't/shouldn't be done a certain way, but in 99.99% of cases it's not. You've just wasted time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Unless you have psychological issues you want to resolve, "make friends" makes this part redundant.
The idea that everyone needs to pay a professional to talk to unnecessarily medicalises the human condition.
1. They arent going to find it gossip worthy and spread it to one or more people in your social groups.
2. You get to unburden yourself without burdening friends on the regular.
3. Sometimes there is real benefit to having a neutral 3rd party to help provide a different perspective on something that may be blocking some minor thing - and gets you on your way quicker
Deleted Comment
Assuming you're talking about the job market, nothing was sure at any given point in time. Of course, after the fact everything seems "obvious" but I assure you at the time it wasn't.
The only thing I would be my cards os is studying medicine: If you become a surgeon you'll most likely make lots of money, the downside is that it takes lots of work and time to do so.
Whatever you do, from chef and small business retail owner to startups - make sure you're good at what you do and you won't have to worry about the market.
> Would you bother getting an education?
If you are _really good_ at programming (e.g. you already know how to program relatively complex CRUD applications) my advice is to study something else e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Sciences, etc. Diversified profiles are the most sought after.
Going to college is not just about learning CS (or whatever) fundamentals. It is about friendships, having fun, entering adulthood. Try to take advantage of the Erasmus system, travel as much as you can, as cheaply as you can, meet ppl, do crazy shit while staying on track with your classes. It is important to "exit" student's life within the expected time frame, helps a lot.
> When knowledge becomes meaningless is there a reason to learn?
Knowledge is _never_ meaningless. Most of the _experts_ on any given field have lots of knowledge that at first glance might seem irrelevant but they're able to mix and match in order to advance the knowledge on a specific field.
My guess is that you're referring to modern tech stacks. Often times seasoned users complain about how "this" or "that" stack has nothing new to offer apart from X which was already a thing 15 years ago with a different name. That's part because of age - we all become a bit of a whiners when getting old - but primarily because the already knew the old tech stack inside out so they can analyse, break down and understand the decisions (good and bad) of the new stack on the fly. When your time comes you'll have to learn to current tech stack and make your own decisions.
Wish you success in your life.
However I do agree 100% with what you said. Witnessing them fixing a newborn infant was an insane experience for me and I was super jealous.
What they recommend is still medicine, but the non-practical fields - prescribing medications, designing and administering complex treatments from the comfort of an office.
My personal take is that everything and anything medical will never ever go away as long as there are humans. I love the fact I get to work in both a software dev world and the medical world. Software still can do so much for that.
No... make sure you strive to do the best you can in whatever you do. It's not about being "good enough". If you care about your work (whatever it may be), be a good human, and put in effort to learn and do the best you can at your given job - you will succeed.
Don't be afraid to take chances when you're young.
Being good at what you do is a side effect of caring about what you do and putting in the effort to learn about your job, your industry and the people around you.