Tech & Leadership
Advice for Kids I Don't Have Yet
My wife and I have been talking more seriously about the kids we might have someday. I’ve written before about how long it took me to get comfortable with the idea at all. But last week, in the middle of one of those conversations, I caught myself rattling off a whole plan without thinking about it. Good grades, a good school, a stable job, then climbing from there.
Then I stopped, because that same week at work I’d watched an AI agent build in an afternoon what used to take my team a sprint. I’ve spent the last few months writing about what that means for the job market and working through my own anxiety about it. And here I was, about to hand a kid who doesn’t exist yet a plan built for a world that might not exist by the time they need it.
The Rearview Mirror
I wasn’t looking at their future. I was looking at my past and calling it a plan.
There’s a name for what I almost did. Parental survivorship bias, looking at a kid’s future through the rearview mirror of my own path that happened to work out. My road was decent grades, a good school, a stable software job, then climbing from there for the better part of a decade. It worked, so my instinct was to copy the whole thing and hand it down.
But my own path already broke that plan once. I quit that ladder in the middle of climbing it because it was making me miserable, and figuring out the rest of my life meant doing something that wasn’t in the plan at all. If my own path couldn’t survive contact with my own life, I don’t know why I’d trust it to survive a job market that’s rewriting itself every quarter.
The Part of the Job That’s Disappearing
The cleaner and more predictable a task is, the easier it turns out to be to automate. I see this on my own team already. The well-specified, well-documented, here’s-exactly-what-to-do tickets are the ones an AI agent chews through fastest. The ambiguous, messy, we-don’t-actually-know-what’s-wrong-yet ones are still where a person earns their keep.
That’s uncomfortable, because a huge amount of school is built around the first kind of task. Follow the rubric, hit the requirements, get the grade. I did that, and it worked, because when I graduated, reliably executing a known process was still a scarce and valuable skill. I’ve written before about the junior-to-senior pipeline problem this creates even for adults already in the workforce. I don’t think that skill will be scarce anymore by the time my kid graduates. If their best skill is following instructions precisely, they’ll be competing against something that does that instantly and for a fraction of the cost.
I could be wrong about the timeline. I’ve been wrong about AI timelines before. But I don’t think I’m wrong about the direction.
It’s Not Just Tech
I don’t think this is only a tech industry problem, or only an American one. I’ve been reading about how the same pressure shows up in different shapes around the world, and it’s made me less confident that any single country’s playbook is safe to copy right now.
In China and other parts of East Asia, a generation ground themselves down chasing a single academic ranking system, then graduated into a job market that couldn’t absorb that many credentialed people at once. A lot of them are opting out now, doing the bare minimum instead of climbing a ladder that turned out to be shorter than advertised.
In Western Europe and India, I keep running into the same complaint. A computer science degree used to be a reliable on-ramp, and now the entry-level jobs that degree was supposed to lead to are exactly the ones getting automated first.
And in parts of Africa and Latin America, where the local corporate ladder barely exists or keeps getting wiped out by currency swings, I’ve read about young people skipping it entirely. They go straight to freelancing for clients on the other side of the world and get paid in dollars or stablecoins instead of a currency that might be worth half as much next year.
What I’d Actually Want to Teach
So here’s what I’ve actually been asking myself:
- When my kid fails at something, is my worry about their resilience, or about how it reflects on me?
- Would I rather raise someone who’s excellent at following a rubric, or someone who can look at a mess nobody explained and find their own way through it?
- Am I teaching them to feel safe in the shadow of an employer, or safe because of what they can personally make happen?
I don’t have full answers. But here’s roughly where I’ve landed, for whenever we get there.
Don’t let the grade define them
I’ve watched people on my own team go through this. The ones whose sense of self is wrapped up entirely in their job title, their level, their last performance review, they’re the ones who spiral hardest when the ground shifts under them. I don’t want a kid who’s never failed. I want a kid who’s failed enough times to know the failure isn’t the whole story about who they are.
Build something before anyone’s paying them to
I got into this industry because I liked making things work, not because I liked getting graded on it. Every job I’ve actually enjoyed came from that same instinct, not from executing someone else’s spec perfectly. I want a kid who builds a dumb little tool because something annoyed them, not because it’s worth extra credit.
Don’t bet everything on one employer
When I took that break from my career, the only reason I could do it without panicking was that I’d built some slack into my life first. Savings, sure, but also just knowing I could support myself outside of one specific job title. I want a kid who never confuses their employer with their safety net.
I still don’t know what I’ll actually say when the moment comes. Maybe by then this whole post will look as quaint as the FIRE blogs I used to read look to me now.
But I’d rather admit I don’t have the map anymore than hand my kid one to a country that stopped existing. The best I can do right now is stay honest about what I don’t know, and make sure they know how to figure things out even when nobody’s handed them the rubric.
I don’t know if that’s enough. Ask me again once we actually have a kid.