Tell your kids to be plumbers
A few years ago I’d have been happy if my children wanted to follow me into a career of programming, but the longer I spend with LLMs, the less future I see in it for any of us. How should we advise our children for their futures?
If you can afford tokens, programming became an outcome-oriented task. Tell your LLM what you want and wait. Ideas to MVP in an hour, little programming required. Senior developers’ last bastion is debugging and performance, but it’s only a matter of time. Engineering teams will mutate into LLM shepherds until even seniors have no place. And my industry isn’t alone.
Anything where computers became central is feeling heat: data entry, customer service, translation, technical writing, marketing, copywriting, paralegal, secretarial, accountancy and tax code, and every creative job that doesn’t rely on physical media. Junior tasks are already being done by LLMs, senior roles will follow.
So what do you want your kids to be when they grow up?
Will that still be a thing in ten years?
Note: Let’s remember: it’s their life to live. As parent’s we sometimes like to think we’re steering but we’re not even passengers. We can advise, we can enable, but we can’t make our kids do anything and would be foolish to try.
Raise barbarians, rogues and rangers, not wizards
My parents, grandparents and school pushed hard towards further education and “professional” jobs. It was the only path for a bright kid. The “trades” were for kids who failed at school. If you didn’t need an A-level –let alone a degree– what was the point?
This feels like bad advice today. Intelligence-based jobs will still exist but not in today’s volume, and with ever increasing numbers of people (and AIs) vying for them, throwing our kids into that fray doesn’t seem like giving them opportunity, it sounds like a fight.
But everybody will always need plumbing. All the tokens in the world won’t solder pipework, dig pipe trenches, stick tiles on the wall, smell gas leaks, and and they won’t carry a bath up the stairs. Robots are decades away from replacing cheap meatbags so plumbing is safe from automation, while still being diverse, entrepreneurial and often creative enough to engage an active mind.
The important thing is raising kids with the awareness of what jobs are actually available. They can’t all be doctors and influencers. There are lots of STR and DEX builds available. Don’t be afraid to dual class.
Education still adds value and opportunity
What do I want my kids to be? Happy.
Forcing them out of school into an apprenticeship is unlikely to achieve that, and as much as I worry about the future of employment, will more education ever be bad? Further education isn’t a checkbox qualification. It coaches people how to think, research, learn and grow.
Higher education needs to catch up with the world. £100k for a 5y medical degree, 40 year career might make sense, but what about the degrees without an attached career? Rather than get tribal about what should be allowed at university, I think we need to be more flexible with learning. Is there anything wrong with learning about the Italian Renaissance while training as a plumber? Similarly, we should help adults go back to education, learn more. More night schools, more vocational courses.
I do worry about the future, but that’s always been a parent’s job.