There are things i can think of that you may try:
1. Try and do something techy yourself. Getting your own hands dirty will give you much better insights into what she’s getting into. Something that’s useful to you. I don’t know what you’re into, but if you have a hobby, it’s usually easy to find an idea for a tool that will help with that hobby. Just make sure you don’t try and take her place or something.
2. Probably better: Ask HER, if she could make something useful to you, or even better for your whole family / community. You may go for something a little more complicated, cause she’ll have more time to devote to this. IoT projects are very rewarding and touch a lot of aspect of tech. Home automation projects are great, like connected lightbulbs that respond to voice or if you have emails. Small games like wordle are cool too. Or things like community websites. When I was 18 (22 years ago!), I built a message board for me and my friends. It was really fun and then i could customize it for things we liked to do, like rating movies, and plan holidays. We used it for years, and only stopped when the ISP stopped supported the backend tech I was using.
In any case, the sooner she starts the better off she’ll be. The first thing is to pick up anything: a book or a tutorial online, and give it a shot.
Good luck, and have fun!!
That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know?
This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience).
If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey.
Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business.
Bits About Money: https://bam.kalzumeus.com/
Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/
She may also appreciate other women in tech, since it can be hard for women. Rachel is pretty popular: https://rachelbythebay.com/
My mom inspired all of my early learning about computing, officially starting at age 9 when she brought me to Barnes & Noble to get the RedHat Linux book because our internet was too slow to download the full OS. Her only contingency was that I actually read the book and pay for it with my own money. She taught me the value of a dollar and how to stick with something, even if it's hard. She chewed my teachers out when they'd say I was "wasting time" on computers, she bit back when I got into video gaming that invited disingenuous allusions from teachers about Columbine, and she listened when I'd babble on about what I did or learned.
My mom isn't good with computers at all, but my #1 champion when it came to chasing my dreams.
We have tons of short courses from great providers. My favorite is one which pairs teenagers like your daughter 1:1 with a postdoc at Cambridge University on a two week project e.g. creating an AI for categorizing blog posts. At the end of the two weeks your daughter gets a reference from that same postdoc on their enthusiasm, aptitude and preparedness for that technical subject. You find that if you and your daughter go through 2 or 3 such programs together the process of selecting among them and the references you get from academics give you a ton of context that genuinely prepares you both for the bewildering world of technical professional and academic careers.
Last year I remember in particular we helped one kid navigate the maze of "Computer Science vs Videogame Design vs Computer Art vs Chemical Engineering" this exact way. It was great to see his parents learn all about the nuances of the videogame business and careers in CS despite having a Chemical Engineering background.
Do consider reaching out and also checking out our social media where we talk about situations exactly like yours all the time.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder - my wife is the founder of that marketplace.
Some caveats about HN. The conversation here can be a little too focused on money, success and being an entrepreneur. My daughter is a similar age. This generation is smitten with comparison. I read mega success stories here in the same light as the chance of someone becoming a pro athlete i.e. very unlikely.
In saying this, tech can be a wonderful field to work. I was a tech hobbyist who got to spend the last 25 years working in technology. I'm now a lecturer teaching non-tech grads hoping to get jobs in tech companies. My advice to young people is to make a plan. The plan probably won't work out as you expect. Work hard and be kind.
My personal 2c is at that age super high level advice on "how to learn" is going to be more useful than "what programming language is best". A lot can change in 4 years and it's better to set your daughter up to succeed at building a solid base of knowledge that will be adaptable to whatever trend is popular 4 years, or even a decade out, rather than take even an extremely well informed person's guess as gospel.
I don't know all of the professional orgs for women, but as a Black person, I am a member of several orgs, like /dev/color, which create safe spaces for us as underrepresented people to ask candid questions and pool experience.
That said, I hope you find it interesting to engage with the tech world, which may help you continue to relate to her as she gets into the career. My parents start dozing when I tell them what's up in my professional life, haha. Even my wife, who is tech-adjacent, has limited patience for engineering talk.
On the other hand, I've had friends and family who simply never started. They didn't have that spark, so they didn't take the first step. Or they did and it was hard and they didn't come back. They didn't have the motivation to get over that first hump to see what was on the other side. It didn't matter how many suggestions I made, or how much advice I gave them, it just wasn't enough to compensate for a lack of desire to go further.
For me, that motivating factor was Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham, a sort of eclectic book that covers topics as far and wide as why nerds are unpopular in school to some of the fundamental aspects of programming languages. I don't honestly know if this is an approach that would work for anyone else, but I mention it because it's the sort of thing that might spark an interest that would be self-sustaining (or at least it was for me).
FWIW, my strong advice for a parent, new to the industry, of a woman, is: do NOT get try to get caught up in the tech side of things, but instead attend to the human and culture side.
There are great things about tech and so many more women doing well these days but the awful truth is also that the tech industry can be uniquely terrible- there aren't enough adjectives- for women. For men, too, of course but the industry continues to be dominated by misogynists.
I follow (terrible term) hundreds of brave tech women on twitter...and hearing (virtually) their voices and stories has been the most important education of my life.
Learn that side. And be there for your daughter to guide and support and provide human perspective when she encounters the dregs that this industry harbors.
Best wishes.
What mattered:
- personal projects. Those can be anything from a game to a database engine, in any language too. They show personal investment in the field, not just money-driven career choice.
- enthusiasm for (new) tech. A "C expert" that will only do C (and often very specific stuff in C) is in a very narrower niche than someone who just wants to learn stuff and have fun. There is some justifiable verticality (front end, back end, database, network, surely AI nowadays), but limiting oneself by language, framework,... just means you'll be obsolete in 4 yrs.
- interpersonal skills. Programming is, as any job, at least 30% communication. If colleagues, bosses, clients like you you'll be a much more valuable team member. This does include NOT being a people-pleaser, and NOT hiding failures/issues.
Anyone who had of 3 of these stayed with us. Tech knowledge can always be acquired... actually, always has to be acquired, so doesn't matter that much once you've proven you can indeed imbibe it.
Really, it doesn't matter what the best choice today is that much - everything helps with everything else. Just starting something today matters. My best tech experience from highschool years was doing something noone around me knew about or even could recommend even though I grew up with techy father - but it happened by finding the right community online and just trying. On the other hand I got some well meaning guidance from my mom that just wasn't realistic. I don't mean that to discourage you from getting informed - just saying that you can do so much more to help in other ways: providing resources, finding ways to look for answers, looking for local groups, saying "you want to do X - great, try it, show me what's cool about it!".
Also watch out with reading too much HN or other sources. Each one of us is really biased in what we do and some groups are massively underrepresented here. For example the 9-5 consultants who are just as much a part of the industry.
Edit: Also keep in mind there's lots of tech/other crossover areas where you can learn tech+something at the same time. For example https://rosalind.info/ for bioinformatics, https://www.cryptopals.com/ for cryptography, automatic stock trading challenges that I can't recall the name of right now, etc.
Edit 2: "I feel like I am letting her down when she wants to discuss specifics, i.e. What do I think about the future of AI, which programming languages will remain relevant etc." - You're not! If she's serious about this direction, she'll leave you far behind in what she knows - and that's great! You can still help her help herself. You found places to improve your own knowledge, so you know how to keep learning :-) Also you don't need to know the answers for a good conversation - good questions will do: What does she think of the ai? Why? What's currently missing? Is anyone talking/blogging about solving it? What will it change? Who will benefit? What's the next challenge?
Encourage her to find mentors that can provide that technical guidance. Luckily tech is one of the places where "follow your interests" works.
This is the last thing you need to worry about.
Learning French won't be very helpful if you later need to learn Korean, but programming languages are not like that. It's easy to switch programming languages.
The key is learning how to write code in any general-purpose useful programming language.
Python is generally considered a good language that is used in industry and also happens to be beginner-friendly, so start there.
I hope I am not being too presumptuous but I read this question as evidence of a mom that doesn't want to let her daughter go. She is going to have her own life and interests. She will make friends who are experts in whatever niche she chooses and will not be let down just because you can't suddenly be an expert in her field.
I think it's great you are reading HN and talking to her etc. But my suggestion is to NOT try so hard to be her peer, because that is likely to push her away.
My suggestion is that if you want a solid relationship with your daughter then maybe take some pressure off of it by making more friends.
I get the vibe your daughter is not set to inherit who-cares-if-I-work money.
Given that, in my opinion (I have a 20-yr old "kid" in college), the overriding challenge with undergraduate education in the US is a lack of connection between what you study (especially the specifics of your major) and what opportunities exist in the real world for gainful employment that earns a living but is also able to give one some life satisfaction at the same time.
Unfortunately, I believe this is not a matter of simple oversight. The truth is, it's not in academia's interest (as they see it) to, in their minds, be pushed towards a more vocational emphasis, as you see in m any other countries, where higher education is more entwined with vocational choices at an earlier age.
I love the idealistic ideal of a generally useful "Liberal Arts" education, but I wish it was not seen as somehow in conflict with some hard-nosed, real world advice about how the market for one's skills is judged, what the percentage chances are to snare a plum opportunity in field X and so on.
Right now, my son is entertaining a music major because it will be "more fun". Having spent a good portion of my life in that arena, it is difficult for me to explain that success in the music business is probably not dependent on what you majored in at college, whereas for less glamorous careers, what you studied could make all the difference.
Then there is graduate studies - another subject for another time.
Best of luck!
Although they can not provide detailed and expert level guidance, I still turn to them for career and life advice. I try to explain anything I am working on at a level that they can understand, but even then, I have to weigh their guidance against the fact they do not share the same context as me or someone in the field. It came a bit faster than both they and I expected, but I think all of us have realized we reached a point where they can't provide all the guidance I need and that it is on me to find mentors and decide the path that is best for me.
* The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work by Danny Hillis
* D is for Digital: What a Well-Informed Person Should Know About Computers and Communications by Brian W. Kernighan (I think his Understanding the Digital World is probably a retitled newer edition of this book?)
* Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
All three of these authors have had interesting and prominent careers in computing. None of these books are exactly on-point in terms of directly addressing careers, but all of them should help you understand more of the substance of what your daughter is working on and the context for other discussions you encounter.
Back when I was in secondary school (1995) I loved computers and programming, but my parents had no clue about them whatsoever. However they had a friend who was a lecturer at local university. They asked him to visit and talk with me about computers. He gave me a book on the C programming language, he gifted me some CDs with a 'novel' operating system (freeBSD) and he gave told me to learn about pointers data structures and algorithms. Of course he was also very available to answer my questions.
I thought It was the best thing ever at that time.
If she goes that route, there are many different types of work. Writing software is the obvious one, but there’s technical project management, engineering management, etc. Again, depends on where her interest lies.
One great thing about being a woman in tech is that it offers great job security and growth potential. For whatever reason there is a real dearth of women in the field, so if she’s good, she’ll be highly sought after.
I've been in the industry for some 30 years now - and I have become very careful, even reluctant making specific predictions like these, especially over long stretches of time. I would recommend to read a bit, sure, but stay away from opinion pieces ("AI is racist" or "Why Cariboo is the language of the future") and rather nourish a solution-oriented way of thinking ("Which problems can we solve with technology?")
Programming languages change all the time - and yet, they don't really. We're still mostly working in C-like languages, and that one's been around for half a century. Practical applications of math haven't changed in centuries. What changes are societal requirements that technology may be able to solve.
Get your daughter to have interests outside of technology. Talk politics with her. Interest her in the arts, and in business trends. The larger the palette she has, the easier she will find an interesting problem to solve.
And - I want to stress this is regardless of which gender your child has - prepare for your child to choose a different path halfway through. Support them if they choose to do so. In the end, what matters is if you spent your life in a worthwhile way, which does not necessarily mean 'in a good job'.
When I was at University the database courses (and the lecturers themselves) were very abstract and so excruciating boring that I leaned almost nothing. Courses in languages like C and machine code were much more fun.
But, decades later I find myself doing SQL every day, and despite having a compsci degree I’m effectively self-taught in all the languages I actually use.
The medical industry has been good to me in the past, there are plenty of women in powerful positions in the medical industry, in my experience. Also, medical is typically more resilient to recessions / general downturns. Finally, at the very least, you are making it more efficient for patients to get care. That's a lot more inspirational to me than selling ads and spying on people.
Really take the first job she can get and stick it out for a year or two. That first job is the hardest, afterwards, it's a lot easier to land a job.
As far as language, that's really just luck. The best way to hedge is to go to monster or dice and query each language in the area you think you will be living in. It seems like different areas have different predominant programming languages (oddly enough). It's usually C# or Java for backend, but there are some frontend frameworks too. When I was in college, I tried to learn as broadly as I could. That included how networks worked, how databases worked, how to write applications and how project management / development life cycle worked. All that has helped me.
Always respect your craft and keep mastering it.
I think nowadays Raspberry Pi’s are just great, so much power and freedom for 35 eur. I was always afraid to mess with our home computer (back in the day we had 1 for the family with a family email address), but Raspbery Pi’s, man I’d keep throwing them at my kids if they were interested.
Some of today's most interesting and exciting "technical" challenges have their roots in many disciplines. Cybersecurity can be tackled from a full range of perspectives, from the highly technical (e.g. cryptography) to traditionally non-technical disciplines like law, public policy, and design. The kind of deep thought our world needs on things like AI and ML needs people who are just as informed about the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, and economics as they are about computer science. Our ongoing debates about issues like content moderation or digital privacy need folks who understand how to think about people, including those who are at risk and vulnerable, and then translate that knowledge into the language of engineers.
And even though we've made progress on this front, our governments, courts, and legislatures are still running on a deficit of knowledge about tech, which is a whole different ballgame. (I'd encourage reading Bruce Schneier's site on public interest technology if you're interested: https://public-interest-tech.com/)
All this is to say: if your daughter wants to go the hardcore tech route and loves solving CS or software engineering challenges, more power to her! But I also hope that she doesn't feel limited or boxed in by the traditional definitions of the discipline.
An amazing coworker at a previous job worked with this group, but there should be similar ones around the world: https://mywit.org/about-women-in-technology/
Someone actively working in the industry can provide a valuable perspective and advice, and start building a professional network.
Alternately, there are various ACM and IEEE organizations, although I've heard both vary in quality and usefulness from chapter to chapter (or SIG to SIG). Maybe an IEEE or ACM subscription or membership, if financially feasible? Spectrum and Communications (the main monthly magazines of the organizations, respectively) tend to be a nice mix between survey and detail, so could provide talking points and research focus for a month.
If she asks you a question, ask her about the subject in order to find a parallel in your own life. Her having to explain it to you will probably shape her understanding of it better than if somebody just told her what to think.
There are way too many tech blogs out there with innumerable subjects and opinions. I couldn't even begin to tell you what they all are... You'd have to pick one specialty and start swimming through a deluge of information, blogs, podcasts, books. Also I'd say there are very few "right answers" in this overgrown industry, sort of like asking how you should build a house. What kind of house do you want?
As famously demonstrated by the Dropbox example, this community is not any more able to answer these questions than any random google search.
I teach college-age girls, and they universally report that it is very hard for them being women in this field. They report to me that they find solidarity among other women, and SWE is one place that helps build exactly that support. Also consider attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: https://ghc.anitab.org. We have a scholarship to send students there every year and they enjoy it.
Ask her. Let her teach you. Be in awe of her growing skill and knowledge, her intellect and passion, how fast she goes. She might love to teach you the things she learns, and this is the best way actually to learn new things. You don't have to know or do anything, just be curious and let her tell you what the future of AI is or whatever, sit back and enjoy your free education.
I wouldn't worry too much about such specific questions right now. I'd focus on encouraging her to keep exploring her interests, maybe looking for schools that have good programs for the broader subject area. But she has plenty of time to learn the nuances of the job market and how she wants to fit into that. They could very well change in the next four years anyway.
Best of luck to you both!
It can still be good for you to learn more so that you have a shared interest or at least conversation topic. I'm just saying that trying to learn it from scratch to the level of being a mentor will probably result in not-so-great advice.
If she need to get more up-to-speed, a community college may be the way to go before heading to university.
Also investigate co-op and intern programs available through the university. These provide valuable breaks from academics where you can use what you have learned.
I'd suggest the second edition that was published in 2021 as it apparently adds a few sections about more recent "buzzwords/booming-industries".
Disclaimer: I have not read it my self, but I have heard that it is well written and the author Brian Kernighan is a small-celebrity in our world. I have watched a few youtube explained by him on technical topics which was very good.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32889467-understanding-t...
https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Digital-World-Computers...
Edit: heh wow actually after reading the table of content, I think I actually convinced myself to buy it for a close relative myself.
Later she may decide to learn a language that is closer to the machine and squeeze more performance, or become enlighten and learn a more esoteric language.
to be honest, if you're not already an engineer, or a mathematician, or in general have some sort of expertise that allows you to "mentor" her, then don't even try
unless what you want is simply to be able to hold a conversation and not get completely lost, in which case, learn some of the history of computing, or read some of the "how X works", where X is something specific, like computer sound, or computers, or the internet, etc. you don't need to become an expert to be able to understand the fundamentals, and hold a conversation
for the mentoring, it'd probably be more effective to seek someone else who can take the that role (I'm assuming it'd be something like in engineering)
and it'd probably be better to mentor her in "life stuff", by that I mean things everyone needs, for example, learning how to cook (everyone needs to eat), learning to manage time, learning to balance relationships, hobbies, work, "self care" — like maintaining an exercise routine, arranging dentist/doctor appointments, saving money, and figuring out what to do in life, some people focus so much on grades and getting a degree that they end up feeling lost after graduating
more on the mentoring, I'm not sure I need or would want to speak to my parents about what I study or work on, much less want either of them mentoring me, knowing that the only "got into it" in what might be interpreted as "they wanting to feel superior" (not saying that's what you want), instead of they simply taking an interest if or when I speak with them about what I do
it might have been nice, but I think understanding that different people have different things they like/want, different problems, and simply taking an interest is a better approach, than trying to be in every aspect of someone's life, that's just my thoughts though, you should ask her what she wants you to do
in general advising to create things and tinker is good, by "things" it could be hardware/software or a by-product, or using hardware/software to create other things, for example, if you're into music, you could make a circuit to transmit music, or to amplify some sound in the music
another good way is internships, I'm not sure if there are limits on how many internships one can get/do, I've only done one, but it can be very useful as an indicator of how working in the industry is
also, AI is a meme, and C is never going to die
In programming language terms... Trendy language that will probably last for a bit of time are Python, as an universal glue not really alone but surely anyone encounter it a bit in the present and for the next 10+ years, Go and Rust likely remain a bit present and being trendy might be nice to have a bit on their CV (a bit means I know what they are, I can use them, I know a bit their ecosystem). Lisp is really niche these days but will remain as it is or grow for the next 20+ years very likely. However do not consider them as "something to learn individually", programming is like reading books, a language is a kind of books, like fiction vs history, you can't study "one kind" much more than you study to read books in general. Again my advise is not do address her somewhere, just tel her to look around balancing her desire to what she can found around. There is nothing useful in studying something you do not like just because it's trendy, get a crappy job quickly and than pass with the same patter from a delusion to another.
Honestly my suggestion is caring MUCH, much more, the human part of the university and working world, meaning how to deal with humans in "contracting" terms, dynamics of college and working world, ... the sense of the passage from a "young protecting world" to an open one. That's normally ignored and they count MUCH more than the chosen tech field, because learning is the target, knowing something in advance might help initially but not much more than that, how to move in the new world, how to make choices, that's change the game. These days anything is "focused" to a point veeeery few are able to see a kind of big picture and often that picture is incomplete/distorted, learning how to look and think in general from the start is lifesaving. Specialization is a way to be a successful worker, have a generic knowledge of anything is being a successful human being able to move in her own society in a changing world instead of being at the mercy of events, responding each time to whatever happens a time after another without knowing where you are going, so where to go in the medium and long run.
Oh, BTW an unpopular (on HN/in the anglophone world) thing: if you can it might be far better and cheaper study in Europe (France (Nice/SA, Montpellier, Toulouse)/North Italy (Turin, Bologna not much Milan) than in the USA, UK or CA, coming back for a master is a thing, enter France/Italy unis with a USA/UK background is surely hard (lack of too much culture due to how English school systems are designed) but doable, and with the knowledge/forma mentis formed here a master in the USA is a snap of fingers, have a value all around the world and the total cost is probably far lower in the long term. I have globe-trotted a bit and honestly I do not feel in almost any country values in well reputed unis, MIT included, the rep help at first but in tech terms fall short due to a waaaaay too specialized knowledge. So a master to focus after having formed a solid culture is a thing, the rest is more advertisement than substance...
What I said to him was: if you want to be able to talk to your son about quantum mechanics, you're going to have to learn to solve Schrodinger's equation in a one-dimensional potential well.
He kept on pressing about how he wanted to open up conversations about all the industrial applications of nanotubes, about quantum tunneling, quantum communications and cryptography, all kinds of things, but I kept giving the same answer - if you want your son to take what you have to say on QM seriously, learn to do the math. What he didn't do was to put in the 3+ years of studying wave mechanics and differential equations that I had implicitly recommended and continued to recommend. Eventually he got the message, accepted that his son shouldn't be listening to his opinions on the implications of QM on the wider world, and things calmed down between them.
The point I'm trying to make is that it is easy to think that you can run ahead of your daughter to be useful as a guide to her, as you probably always have done. Or that if you stay informed on the things that interest her, she'll want to have long conversations about them with you. But as she grows up, there will come a point where she's a specialist in her area and you just won't be able to keep up, and the only conversations that will work are ones where you're asking her to explain to you something you fundamentally do not understand. And there's no shame in that - I absolutely cannot keep up with the learning rate of people half my age and it's exceedingly rare to find someone who can. Your daughter is about the age where this change in dynamic should start to happen.
If you're going to talk with your daughter about technology, from now on, you must acknowledge that she is the master and you the apprentice. She'll be teaching you, which might be useful to her, but you're not going to be able to guide her on matters relating to tech any more than I could guide her on a career in medicine. Which is not nothing, but bear in mind your usefulness here is going to bracketed between the equivalent of "I hear NHS staff are pretty overworked these days" and "I know a great guy who's been a consultant for decades, do you want to meet him?" The latter, by the way is a seriously useful thing you could do, but requires acknowledging that she'll need actual guidance from an actual expert way sooner than it seems, and probably much sooner than you'll be able to speak pidgin-tech.
This isn't meant to put you off. Do read Paul Graham's excellent essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) - they're very accessible (apart from the programming textbooks!) and can give you real context as to the human elements of the decisions she'll be making. But, having seen this story play out before, I want to help you avoid the pitfalls. Remember, she'll meet many technical peers and mentors over her career, but she'll only ever have one mother.