> Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?
That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.
Using a broad range of parents’ recommendations for what their kids could aim for does not having anything to do with parents being proud or disappointed.
It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.
A manager at an In-N-Out burger restaurant makes more than most developers outside of Silicon Valley ($160000) - and tbh I don’t complain about that because I’ve seen the speed those guys put out burgers in Mountain View on a busy day!
There’s a fun anecdote about Bell Labs where an electrical engineer, Nyquist, was found to be one of the connecting points for patent output in the company. Having lunch with him seems to have outputted greater numbers of patents. I know there’s going to be so many other factors but I know I’ve learnt a lot from hanging with colleagues over lunch or at the pub, what’s the replacement to that?
I know a guy like this. He was once employed to wander around talking with other engineers of different specialties. He has a habit of looking at things from first principles. And talking to him would invariably get you unstuck on some problem, often by sidestepping it completely. At the very least they’d end up with interesting directions to spend effort on.
