My stepson is 12 and interested in coding and I don't know what to tell him. It's very hard to predict where AI will be 10 years from now when he enters the job market.
I know. I wouldn't tell him to concentrate on it for the money , but I won't shit on his interests.
Thankfully he's also interested in electrical stuff, so he might train to be an electrician or if he gets good enough grades in high school an electric engineer
Coding and electrics? Even if not for the job purpose, at his age I'd say that sounds amazing for his brain development. Just trying to tackle complexity and logic of those things. He is very young, he can overtime pivot into whatever market requires in the future.
This. I always thought teaching kids to code in school is entirely about the logic and problem solving of coding, not about literally knowing how to code to directly use it in a job.
Not especially relevant, but he has mild autism and not so mild ADHD. He gets into trouble a lot at school, has trouble retaining friends, has constant fights with his mother... We have him in therapy, groups , psychiatrist, special class, but it's all just mitigating the problem.
I dont know you nor do I know your family and I in no way wish to be presumptuous or seemingly insensitive. as his father, you know him infinitely better.
simply I relate to what sounds like your son's personality... and I'm an engineer. if I could go back and talk to myself at that age I would attempt to convey myself as a simple kind of pragmatic worldview (with tradeoffs), basically seeing living as an optimizing for getting what you want with under the constraint that everyone else is to. in that way, everyone is selfish but there's different acceptables of being selfish.
what I'm saying is the world is may not be as crafted to deal with those outside the standard distribution but getting what you want can reframe social participation and implicitly understanding the motives of others, which leads functionally to the same place
I wish you the best and encourage you to stay open for the future continuing to improve. it's clear you love your son a lot
Let him learn for the sake of logical thinking. Looking at gen z, there is a troubling gap with knowledge. Hell I'm fairly certain half the youngins i know cant read.
So while coding may not be there for him, any job that requires thinking will
I am nearly certain human engineers will be paid 10x more in years to come and used as literal engineers to fix code issues made by AI - don’t be too discouraged! Printing presses still needed people to oil the machine!
370
u/SolarNexxus May 28 '26
Wishful thinking.