I think a problem a lot of people are grappling with here is that due to LLMs and AI generally, it’s basically impossible to predict what the future will look like or what jobs will still be around.
I’d probably say something like: do something you enjoy and seems like it might be useful, but accept that the pace of change may mean that whatever you study ends up being irrelevant.
Whatever solution there ends up being to this, it’s not going to be one that an individual 17 year old can implement. We’re past the point where individual good and bad choices matter that much to economic outcomes.
I would advise any somewhat ambitious 17 year old to avoid tech and get into healthcare if they can stomach human interactions and bodily fluids. Sure, it is not all sunshine and rainbows, but there will still be plenty of work helping people who are ill or elderly. Even in the worst-case economic scenario, medicine will be a more socially rewarding and stable life path.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
The real reason to recommend this is that they have an excellent chance of avoiding the "nerd-to-incel" pipeline that tech all-but-guarantees for its best nerds. Post GenAI boom, the social cost of working in tech combined with the coming collapse in high paying jobs, means that unironically coders should be learning a bit about coal mines.
In this regard, Healthcare is a polar opposite. It's pretty hard as a male nurse to not "accidentally" become a home wrecker.
I’d probably say something like: do something you enjoy and seems like it might be useful, but accept that the pace of change may mean that whatever you study ends up being irrelevant.
Whatever solution there ends up being to this, it’s not going to be one that an individual 17 year old can implement. We’re past the point where individual good and bad choices matter that much to economic outcomes.