When did you get the concept for your job?

Lately I’ve been thinking about work, and careers, and jobs. I came back from being a counselor at SPARC, a high school summer camp, and each time I’ve come I’ve had plenty of conversations with participants about careers. It’s also my one-year anniversary at my current workplace, and, unlike last year, I’m not considering moving to a new one.

One thing we talked about in SPARC during the staff pre-camp, that we didn’t get to discuss much during camp proper, but is an interesting question nonetheless, was: What are the factors that influence people’s job choices? Not (only) in the sense of how individuals choose between choices, but in the sense of how individuals acquire these choices in the first place.

Some examples:

• Because I did good at math in school, my school encouraged me to do math competitions, and I did them because they were fun, and made people praise me, which I’ve always loved. Growing up doing math competitions in the Philippines, I was told, around the ages from ten to fourteen, that I’d grow up making a lot of money as an actuary, or I’d be a great Certified Public Accountant. In high school, at our IMO selection camp, we were taught mostly by math professors, and so I considered being a math professor.

• When did I first learn about software engineering? I’m pretty sure that, as a toddler, my dad talked to me about computers, and how people used them. I learned to program when I was, I dunno, twelve or something? And it was through contact with the internet that I learned that people programmed for a job, which I kinda ambiently knew because maybe one of my cousins wrote code on the side as a contractor or something.

  While I’ve probably heard the phrase “software engineer” during middle school, I haven’t thought about it as a job before high school, which was when I learned about NOI.PH, via some friends met through math competitions. It was only then I learned that software engineering was a discipline distinct from programming, and I first imagined myself as a software engineer, mostly because I enjoyed programming. But I didn’t think hard about what I wanted to do for a job, because most of my friends didn’t think about what they wanted to do for a job either.

• At SPARC, I asked someone when they learned about being a quant trader, and they said it was middle school. Jane Street sponsors a lot of US math competitions, so they’d heard about that company early on, and knew that they did some sort of finance thing. Then they met other people in math competitions, whose older siblings, who also did math competitions, ended up being quants or traders. Then they grew older, and now some of their friends went to college and interned for a trading firm.

• Jobs I have never considered before graduating college: product marketer, civil engineer, account executive, petsitter, postal worker, event planner, real estate appraiser, electrician, English teacher in Japan, court clerk, park ranger, blacksmith. By “consider”, I mean spend, say, more than two minutes learning about what it’s actually like.

  If you asked me, a few years ago, if I’ve ever considered being an electrician, I’d say no, that I wouldn’t like it, and stopped thinking about it. But, how sure am I that I wouldn’t like it? Well, I knew I didn’t like too much physical labor. Okay, but I was assuming that it involved physical labor—did I know that for sure? There’s gotta be electrician jobs that aren’t too physically taxing.

  Well, I know that I’ve loved doing math and computer science stuff in the past, and I’ve never felt that about… uh, other things? I mean, I don’t know for sure? I guess I’m also not “the type” to work in a trade, unlike the others I know who are “the type” to. Did I know for sure that those who aren’t “the type” won’t like it? Did I know for sure that I’m not “the type” to like it? No. Would I ever become an electrician? Probably not.

Anyway: do you have stories to share about this?