The Jobs You're Most Likely to Inherit from Your Mother and Father

As someone from the Balkans, I would have expected the job to be that of a notary. Notaries here typically intermarry to keep this lucrative business inside the family. It is common to walk past an office with the sign outside mentioning three notaries with the same last name, who might be three generations of the same family.

Mostly these are jobs that have the bias more to who you know vs what you know. It is much harder to become a doctor when your parents are because the many years of education you need. The article has the example of a teacher to become a politician and fill the job of her father where he fell away, using the network of her father for her success.

I'm a programmer. My mother is a programmer.

Out of the factors listed in the article that influenced my occupation, this one is one of the important ones:

“[The parent] had a studio next to our house, so it was something that we always grew up with,” she said. “[The parent's] philosophy was just make it part of everyday life and make materials readily available.”

I've had an access to a computer with a programming environment when I was growing up, which was not a common thing in the early 90's Ukraine. Of course, I only used it to play games when I was a kid, but even that was an advantage: liking to use computers and software makes you want to write your own at some point. That machine was under-specced to run many games, so one had to be a bit creative (from fiddling with CONFIG.SYS back in DOS days to running UT with 2MB of video memory, it was fun at times).

And when I did want to play with programming, moving on from scripting in Excel, I already had the tools to play with and a mental image of what programming looks like in general.

On a different note, I love cooking and try to avoid eating out unless it's for a reason (socializing, experiencing food I haven't had before, etc). And that is something I got from my father, who cooks a lot - even though I never cooked while I was living with my parents. But that's the part of the culture that I inherited from him anyway.

Would I be programming if my mother weren't a programmer? Quite likely, as many of my peers did (I went to grad school for mathematics and haven't abandoned the academic world completely). But perhaps I wouldn't have it as a hobby.

On the other hand, my parents didn't travel when I was a kid, so I didn't have a knack for traveling until I grew up. It wasn't that I disliked it, it just wasn't on my radar of interests.

The take-away for me is the following: it's important for kids to see other people - in particular, their parents - do things, and have an option to play and participate. Even if they don't, the effect stays for a long time. If you are a parent - do things. Travel. Learn a different language. Paint. Make music. And if your work is fun, bring it home and bring your kids to work. As the article indicates, all of that expands their palette of things to try, and makes entry into some activity easier.

The kids that didn't follow in their parents' footsteps probably got something - culture, work ethic, philosophy - if not skills or education - that affected their occupation.

I didn't inherit a business or any connections from my parents. But I still have that Hayes Optima 33.6 voice modem that I used to uppload an app I wrote to Freeware.ru back when programs weren't called apps yet.

So what if both parents have the same job; engineers in our case?