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It's impossible to predict what the job market will look like in 10 or 20 years or what skills will be in demand. I studied biomedical engineering 12 years ago because it was "a promising field," but it had been "a promising" field for 20 years before I started and it remains "a promising field" today. It does deliver on its promise if you go into pharma though, which (as of today) requires a college degree, a master's degree, a PhD, and some luck. In 2016 I was fresh out of college, meeting people, looking for a job and I met a neuroscience PhD who had been having such bad luck that he was asking me, who was basically a kid, if I knew any places hiring. And now just a few months ago one of my college classmates who had gone on to get a PhD in materials science is career-changing into software because of the grim job market for his field. In the 90's you could walk into an office in jeans and a t-shirt, say you knew programming, and get a job (or so I'm told). In the 2000's, after the dotcom bubble crash the job market for software developers seemed bad but I think it recovered quickly. In the 2010's demand for software devs was insanely high; VC's were over-funding tech startups, unicorn companies boomed, and older companies were giving more respect to their own tech stack so as to not fall behind. By the late 2010's though, the labor market started catching up to demand for software devs so junior positions were getting harder to obtain. In 2023 I think software jobs for junior devs are very hard to get. I do think this trend will continue. On the flip side, the recent government initiative & funding for bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the US has brought a lot of new jobs to my hometown, some that sound really cool. A lot of new software jobs for automation, mechanical engineer jobs for manufacturing, and probably in the near future once things are set up and running they'll be hiring chemical & electrical engineers if they aren't already. So yeah I have no idea what advice to give to a 16 year old. But I think it's better to have multiple skills than to try to be an expert at one thing. It's less of a gamble to you if one of your skills doesn't work out, and possibly you can combine the 2 skills into something that really is unique. |