> However, the allure of being a "YouTuber," which had been steadily gaining traction in recent years, saw a decline, slipping from ninth place in last year’s survey to the 14th spot.
It’s no different from kids in the 80s and 90s wanting to be rock stars or basketball players. Kids often have impractical career ideas based on what they see in pop culture until they are old enough to know themselves and the world more.
And they’re not wrong. One thing that’s cool is there is more variety there, like celebrity playing video games, celebrity doing science, celebrity making cool stories using video game tools, etc.
I have the opposite problem... As a solo bootstrapped founder, I feel like it would be extremely useful to create a few videos to promote the product, however getting in front of a camera feels like a nightmare.
“YouTuber” is another way of saying “small business owner” and regardless of your perspective on the platforms in general, they have cause an explosion of independent businesses
Not really, since most people who want to be a YouTuber probably don't want to be the owner/operator of a laundromat. The desire to be a YouTuber is probably wrapped up in the desire to 1) be famous-ish, or at least well known within a community, and 2) To make money doing the things you already like to do - ie a person who likes to play video games might want to be a video game youtuber.
Yes, and if they incorporate, which many do once they become even just medium-sized, they are a small business owner.
Before that, they're self-employed.
The whole point is that people have biases against video content creation as a business when it's done by individuals, but not by Hollywood or news media.
Why not? These businesses have made multi millionaires out of regular people. Linus of LTT was offered $100 million for his company. How many ~10 year old companies get valued like that? Started by some regular relatable person with a regular background?
Young adults have seen how corporations treat regular people. They’re not very eager to sign up for the pain train that millennials went through. YouTube is a real career path with significantly bigger upside than almost any opportunity young adults have today
If [0] is to be believed then a YT career requires beating at least 96.4% of the other channels. To be a millionaire you'll need to do even better. It's probably easier to try for a career in data science, law, or medicine.
Did anyone else not have a dream job when they grew up? I would give an answer when pressured, usually something with a fun name like anesthesiologist, but that was just to placate the adults.
Indeed, I remember saying "astronaut" at about age 10 to shut my grandmother up. I didn't want to be an astronaut. In fact I resented the question, because it seemed to have a subtext of "get your ass in gear and think about work". Hence I chose something implausible.
I kind of wanted to try to make games, though. And now here I am, many years later, kind of trying to make games! Mission accomplished.
I don't know where it came from (as both my parents seemed to like their work) but I was sure from a very young age that working was one of the dumbest ideas I'd ever heard of. I was always shocked when classmates would have some plan or idea for what they wanted to do as adults.
My parents would be like, "If you want ______, you'll have to get a job to pay for it." So I just made the decision to not want things lol.
And so I just figured out how to live pretty simply and be happy with less so I could care less about work. Of course things get more complicated over time but it's served me pretty well.
I have a job that passes the time well enough and keeps me stimulated mentally, but as I tell people I work with, "If I win the lottery tomorrow, it's been nice knowing you!"
If I'd have said the truth, it would be that I didn't dream of labor (I wasn't the happiest or most agreeable of children). I probably just said firefighter because that's a pretty basic "what to be when you grow up" type job, but also my father was one.
"Did anyone else not have a dream job when they grew up?"
I probably had a few over the years. Being a dev was one, I guess. How wrong I was. Maybe it wasnt really a dream job but just a job that I thought if be good at and could make some money. I can't even imagine what a dream job would look like today - they all seem like shit.
Your entire post resonates with me - I was interested in programming since about 12 years old, and just fell into it with CS as the most obvious major in college, and the most obvious job to get out of college. But if you ever asked me from 12-18 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would never have said "programmer".
I have enough money to retire and be the simple living farmer/beach bum that I would like to be, but now I have a wife and children and it seems unfair to foist my desire on them.
Yeah, I wanted to be a "nuclear physicist" because I thought explosions were cool, and obviously nuclear explosions were the biggest kind. So obviously a nuclear physicist will be researching how to be able to make even bigger explosions!
Obviously as I grew up, knowing that a) ostensibly the point of being able to make those explosions is to ensure they don't actually happen and b) knowing what we'd use that deterrence power for really took the wind out of my sails. Plus somehow it pays less than software, which I actually had more of a passion for than explosions (though I still respect a good explosion to this day). So yeah. Kids will give pretty arbitrary answers to this question even if they think they do have one.
I wanted to work on satellite operations or planetary science as a kid. Writing code for, and remotely operating and debugging space hardware from millions of miles away felt like the "ultimate" software job.
I dreamed of being an engineer from the start, honestly, although I didn't have a preference as to what specialization. I just always dreamed of using science to humanistic ends and optimizing things within constraints.
When I was 8, I told my mom I wanted to be a garbage man because I figured they got off really early to play since they were up so early to throw away trash, and they were providing a societal benefit that didn't require schooling (My teacher, Mrs. Morgan, was a complete asshole). My 11 year old nephew wants to go to the Navy to cook because he loves cooking and once saw a show about the mess halls there.
I can't remember if it was a comedian or just some other person I'd seen a quote from; but they basically joked about how teacher's always said to pay attention and do well in school, or you would grow up to be a garbageman, but the teacher failed to tell you that garbagemen earned more than the teacher did.
I knew a Navy cook. He told me a story about how he'd get sick when the food was good because he'd gorge himself on e.g. an entire tray of chocolate pudding that was about to go bad.
Same here, ever since I was 12. Still not disillusioned by the field having graduated college two years despite all the doomsaying. I feel like a wizard!
Hexediting games to bypass or neutralize copy protection helped me become a programmer (on top of copying code from magazines and books onto a Timex Sinclair and ZX81).
I remember the first game: BattleTech Crescent Hawk Inception. IIRC the copy protection involved typing words from pages in the manual, and I "defeated" it by changing every word to the same string.
I actually owned the game, I just didn't want to get out the paper every time I wanted to play.
For me it was realizing what autorun.inf is for, from that realizing some programs load texts and images off the same CD they came with and I can change those and change the program that way, then I discovered a few programs built around displaying unbundled HTML files and that I could change those in Notepad leading to the discovery of HTML and later JavaScript and by that point I was too far gone. So not exactly games, but these CDs and programs I was messing with were shareware CDs and their launchers so still kind of a +1 for games.
It makes sense. When kids see cake, they get to eat cake. Except when they go to the cake shop. There, they see many cakes that they cannot eat. But the employees of the shop hold the apparent power over who does and does not receive cake.
Just to point out, but the manufacturing line kanbans are about the reverse of the software development kanbans, and the kinds of pressure they apply are also completely different.
They share the same fundamental inspiration. It's just that the work is very different.
This is in the Japan Times and Kuraray, the company doing the surveying is a Japanese company. The article doesn't mention whether the 4000 children surveyed were all entering schools in Japan -- but I wonder how much these results would vary by country.
Plenty of people have grown up yet aren't really functional adults, or at least not independent. Wishing is still great, especially when you can try a lot of them without committing your entire life or career path.
We took some goofy career test in high school, and my top choices were 1) Lighthouse Keeper 2) Mortician and 3) Librarian. Wound up becoming a librarian for the past 24 years. So I guess the test was accurate.
Programming is a passion for a lot of young nerds, and it is quite exceptional in that it also makes for well paying jobs even without being part of an elite. I consider myself very lucky. Many other "dream jobs" can be fiendishly selective, don't pay, have hard to overcome barriers if you didn't win some lottery, or may be way worse than you think.
I am not saying that programming is the absolute dream job, I hate Jira as much as everyone else, but honestly, if I didn't have to work to get paid a good part of my days wouldn't be that different than a regular work day. Not 100% of course, work is not all just fun, and I don't always want to be in front of a computer, but it is definitely more than 50%. For many people, it is 0%. And I get paid for it, enough for pretty much everything that is not luxury. And even though my skills are not that exceptional, there is enough jobs available for me to be picky, it is even true for people lesser skilled than me. It is almost unfair (but I take it!).
If you are on HN, there is a good chance you are passionate about tech, that it is more than just a job. And chances are that it started from a young age.
I picked up on web development and started doing it freelance by 17 or something, but ironically was getting more work then than I am now at 32, and someone looking at my spotty resume would think I'm a lunatic for not finding something else. Problem with obsessions is they tend to be hard to pivot from.
I have a middle school career aspirations sheet from the mid 90s, where I said I wanted to be a software developer at a particular place (now out of business). I came really close, ended up doing software dev in the same industry by 22, but moved on long since.
Carpenter as a small child. Found programming around 10 or 12 but I realized I found it boring at about 15. Decided I wanted to run big servers and networks about then.
Still administering systems at 32. I think I wanted to build things from birth.
Pretty much. I wanted to be a software developer, although I think I specifically wanted to work on games (I've mostly done web dev, buh.) I also wanted to retire at 30, which didn't happen.
I wanted to be an astronaut, animator, inventor, back to stop motion and time lapse animation and then physicist. I can't be an astronaut, but those other things are still achievable.
I'm pretty sure the oldest astronaut (real astronaut, not billionaire who bought a 10min trip) is currently still going to space and is 65. Conveniently I couldn't find a source so I could also be making this up, but I'm 95% sure.
Me, more or less. I knew in 4th grade wanted to be a scientist. And I went on to get a few chemistry degrees. Currently work in the pharmaceutical industry.
Probably not the same kind of cake shop, but I know a software engineer who used to run a successful upscale US cake-decorating shop.
He's very no-nonsense, in a non-jerky way, and had a good intuition for noticing problems in company operations. After he left, I was discussing hiring plans with management, and I remarked that we probably aren't going to be able to hire someone as good.
Maybe managing a bunch of artists who get to design&build exotic cakes for a living, to be a successful business, is a transferable skill.
That's very nice, I hope it stays so as they age.