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Comment by boogieknite | Hacker News Reader

i think youre right that unpacking could get in the way of enthusiasm. speaking for myself i simply enjoy the challenges of software development and enjoy most new challenges the deeper i go

on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code

maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process

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There is the anti discussion, about where to know is to be ruined in some way, which is valid, the inference I get is that there is merit in engineering your approach to a career in engineering, and for some fickle few that clearly works, everybody else has to self decieve or seek help in that, or the world would grind to a halt. The game is stacked for those who can chanell there primal urges into abstractions and other disiplined outlets, the rest end up represed , acting out or some combination that is less "efficient"

if i understand your eloquence i think youre right that im lucky to apply my kind of "crazy" (tfa) for money

i recently spoke with an extended family member who works a secure 9-5 job for which they are paid well, requires little effort, is physically active but not taxing. they feel pressured by society or internal expectations to reach for something more challenging

they are young and asked if i have advice. i told them them are in an ideal situation and not to care so much about work. they can consider that box checked and seek satisfaction outside collecting paychecks

this is like a lifelong smoker telling their relative never to smoke. programming is my biggest hobby

I also picked my profession because it’s what I always liked and wanted to do.

I dreamt of going to college just to learn the things I wanted to know, not to make money. Even imagined learning them and then finding a job don g something else.

Was just very fortunate that it ended up in a lucrative field.

One relative tried to persuade me to go into medicine or law to make more. Put it as “you’re going to work the same hours so might as well be better paid.”

So glad I didn’t take their advice…

my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.

is this also an early experience at a job whether paid or unpaid? if so there could be some noise in the signal from that.

yes first time in a work-like environment. she’s mostly excited about it though we realize in retrospect it might be a bit of a risk to a fledgling interest. fortunately it seems to be a supportive environment (got lucky).

in my opinion this is a high stakes combination with little grey area for outcomes, as in I predict based on the tiny shred of info I have that she'll come out of it knowing whether or not it is something that she wants to pursue. good luck

thanks! yes we sort of saw it as “if it’s not for her better that she know early on”. we don’t want to talk her out of it (quite the contrary), yet we know many others who pursued lab bench science for a decade+ before realizing it was not for them for one of many practical reasons and we thought it best to give her a preview… there are many fields she was happy to rule out after simple conversations but there is a small handful that she finds compelling as stories or narratives but don’t survive the first level of unpacking (math, software, cybersecurity). fortunately the central science has stood up to actual challenges so far…

> working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed

That sounds more like biomedical research than chemistry? At the risk of stating the overly obvious to you do keep in mind how great the differences are between subfields. Synthetic organic versus materials science labs will look like entirely different professions from the perspective of a layman glancing in the window (which they are I suppose).

fair point - yes this is a biochemistry lab but her part is specifically to do with analysis of lab data collected from someone’s specific experiment. so she’s learning practical things having to do with actually doing new science in a real environment though she’ll need to generalize a bit in her mind (hopefully correctly but then developing intuition and imagination matters too) to the pure chemistry aspect of it. she’s generally excited to meet actual professionals in their day-to-day work who have specific performance expectations of her and who really care that her part is done correctly and can be thoroughly audited and verified for accuracy. this time she’s not getting her hands on actual lab instruments and things like that (she does that at school and hopefully in next summer’s internship if she can can get one and is still interested by then); but she’s seeing how data comes from each of those physical world manipulations and what is done with it afterwards.

Weird, 18c is the sweet spot, like ideal perfect temperature for me.

that’s what my wood shop teacher used to say to the whole class who were wearing heavy sweaters.

I always thought it would be so much fun to work in a lab with monkeys until Chris Kattan unpacked that one for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV2kaJ5_8PU

Like many things in life (including those we end up succeeding at), if we knew what it would entail (and already had the experience), we wouldn’t go at it with the same vigor - and might fail outright. Or maybe it would be easier.

I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.

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