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I've got to echo: "Don't be a mentor, be an enabler instead." from another comment. You don't know what you don't know, so trying to figure out the direction for the future may be just confusing for both. I've been doing tech for ~2 decades and my son won't get guidance from me in any specific direction - but I'll show him as many different things as I can, because I have no idea what will be both fun and relevant in 20 years.

Really, it doesn't matter what the best choice today is that much - everything helps with everything else. Just starting something today matters. My best tech experience from highschool years was doing something noone around me knew about or even could recommend even though I grew up with techy father - but it happened by finding the right community online and just trying. On the other hand I got some well meaning guidance from my mom that just wasn't realistic. I don't mean that to discourage you from getting informed - just saying that you can do so much more to help in other ways: providing resources, finding ways to look for answers, looking for local groups, saying "you want to do X - great, try it, show me what's cool about it!".

Also watch out with reading too much HN or other sources. Each one of us is really biased in what we do and some groups are massively underrepresented here. For example the 9-5 consultants who are just as much a part of the industry.

Edit: Also keep in mind there's lots of tech/other crossover areas where you can learn tech+something at the same time. For example https://rosalind.info/ for bioinformatics, https://www.cryptopals.com/ for cryptography, automatic stock trading challenges that I can't recall the name of right now, etc.

Edit 2: "I feel like I am letting her down when she wants to discuss specifics, i.e. What do I think about the future of AI, which programming languages will remain relevant etc." - You're not! If she's serious about this direction, she'll leave you far behind in what she knows - and that's great! You can still help her help herself. You found places to improve your own knowledge, so you know how to keep learning :-) Also you don't need to know the answers for a good conversation - good questions will do: What does she think of the ai? Why? What's currently missing? Is anyone talking/blogging about solving it? What will it change? Who will benefit? What's the next challenge?




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