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This seems like a much more interesting question to me. Telling other people's children what to do is easy and basically doesn't have any downside to being wro

by jgraham 24d ago

This seems like a much more interesting question to me. Telling other people's children what to do is easy and basically doesn't have any downside to being wrong. With your own children things are a bit different. So: what are people here with school age children telling their own kids about the future? If their kids ask, what kind of careers would they encourage them to pursue, assuming they have the skills and interest? When I was last in the Bay Area, maybe about a decade ago the bookshops were full of titles like "Python for Preschoolers" (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Clearly at the time a lot of people working in tech thought that cultivating an interest in programming was going to be the path to being a successful (by some metric) adult. Is that still the case?

greenowl 24d ago
We've wronged an entire generation by pushing "learn to code".
- zem 23d ago
  "learn to code because it will get you a good career" perhaps, but "learn to code at at least a high school level, because it will give you a very good mental model for how computers do things" is still very useful.
  - jmaw 22d ago
    Or maybe generalized to "get good at problem solving." I've found building software systems has a lot of parallels to working on physical things such as carpentry/DIY and working on small engines. The concepts of breaking down a problem into a bunch of smaller problems, and identifying what can be independently tested/built remain the same.
    - zem 22d ago
      the problem solving aspect is great too, but I mean specifically "this is what it means for a computer to know something, and this is what it means for it to do something" expressed in terms of data stored in memory, and algorithms that read to and write from that memory, and "this is how computers think" in terms of control flow and if tests, is a form of literacy that everyone should at least be exposed to.
- DarmokTanagra 22d ago
  "learn to make saddles"

by jgraham 24d ago

greenowl 24d ago

We've wronged an entire generation by pushing "learn to code".

zem 23d ago
"learn to code because it will get you a good career" perhaps, but "learn to code at at least a high school level, because it will give you a very good mental model for how computers do things" is still very useful.
- jmaw 22d ago
  Or maybe generalized to "get good at problem solving." I've found building software systems has a lot of parallels to working on physical things such as carpentry/DIY and working on small engines. The concepts of breaking down a problem into a bunch of smaller problems, and identifying what can be independently tested/built remain the same.
  - zem 22d ago
    the problem solving aspect is great too, but I mean specifically "this is what it means for a computer to know something, and this is what it means for it to do something" expressed in terms of data stored in memory, and algorithms that read to and write from that memory, and "this is how computers think" in terms of control flow and if tests, is a form of literacy that everyone should at least be exposed to.
DarmokTanagra 22d ago
"learn to make saddles"