Ask HN: Does anyone have some good Career/Life Advice for an 18 year old

The value of a trade is that it gives you an alternative if sitting at a cubicle for 2000+ hours a year drives you crazy. Plus, it's always good to be helpful. You may want to look into becoming decent at auto repair or carpentry. Those are things that typically have a much higher barrier of entry, and a lower salary than HVAC, but they're both always a helpful skill.

The value of a second language is it opens up travel opportunities, and if you choose an economically important language (Chinese, German, British "English" [I have no idea what they're saying...]) or a politically important languge (Middle Eastern languages), the pay can be quite high for translation.

Many here might think HVAC is a terrible idea, and they may be right, but I'd still recommend finding a trade and making it a hobby, like I mentioned with auto repair or carpentry. Learning a musical instrument is also a great way to improve your life in general. But for the most part, sounds like you have a good head on your shoulders, and you'll do well at whatever you choose, so long as you stick to it.

Good to have a job related to what you're doing, always good to be able to bring in money.

Good decision on CC to Uni. When you're in University you could look in to interning somewhere during the summer, and/or just getting a somewhat better part time job.

A good long term goal is to become independently wealthy, or a reasonable approximation, by sometime in your thirties. Even if you don't become independent, or it takes longer than your thirties, you'll be far better off from the attempt than otherwise.

So learn what that would take, and start executing on that as the backdrop to whatever you're doing in the foreground from year to year. It's not just maxing your salary, it's smart and minimal spending, saving, investing and opportunities. Pay attention to your finances.

Also you said that programming has come easily to you during school, and while I don't know the US school system you seem to be doing great; my advice is don't get complacent when you transition. It's way too easy to nail exams in school and then figure you can keep up without trying in university; for me it was a lot easier said than done. I don't know the community college->university system so maybe it'll be different, but it's something to keep in mind.

1) Start banking stuff you do.

Track your achievements, with numbers where possible, with meaningful numbers ideally.

Your pitch to employers, if you don't end up working for yourself, is largely going to be what jobs you've had and how well you've done them. No-one really cares about you as a person when all they've seen is your CV, they want to know what you can do for them.

Lots of people don't track their achievements, they don't say how much they've optimised something, how many clients they dealt with, whether they got promoted... That's your leverage before you get to sitting down with employers, and it's your leverage when you're sitting down with employers.

Start doing this right now if you don't already do it - have a big file on your computer where you list all the jobs you've done, all the people you've done them with that you have contact details for, and all the achievements you've done in them. Have a short paragraph - couple of lines - laying out what the job was.

This is especially useful later on in life when you want to construct a CV and are trying to cast your mind back, if you do a wide variety of roles. One of the things I do in my spare time is work down a charity office and watching people trying to recall what jobs they've had, when, what they did, what they achieved... painful. Don't put yourself in that position.

Also track where you live, write it down, the exact dates. Even if you're moving back and forth between university and home. It bears on some security checks and it's nice to have the numbers available if you ever end up doing that sort of thing.

2) Do lots of different things.

In all honesty you can't say where you're going to be in five or six years, having an idea of it's nice but you shouldn't invest everything in one course of action, emotionally or in terms of resources. Do a wide variety of things; different hobbies, maybe even a few different jobs. It will give you insight into the sorts of problems that other people have and how they think about solving them. This can be invaluable when you have to work in a team even if you do end up doing programming. It also prevents failure in any one area of your life being totally crushing.

As part of this - Work at least one job you hate. Nothing provided me more motivation going through uni than knowing I was going back to the estate working in door to door sales if I messed my chance up.

3) Be careful who you take advice from.

You are going to get given a lot of advice from people over your lifetime that is not in your best interests. Some of that's ignorance, some of it's malice. Before you take life/job advice from someone, look at their life/job and see whether it resembles one you'd like to have. Then see whether their advice matches what the people who have a life/job they don't want to have did.

An obvious example of this: Asking a professor about your likelihood of getting a job is, generally, foolish. They don't work in that industry, they don't know what its requirements are. Look at the job adverts that are put out for that industry and ask the people actually in the industry. I've seen people who've done very good research work find themselves utterly unable to get a job outside of academia when they'd assumed they'd be fine. But the requirements of the job had more to do with teamwork and experience in languages/frameworks.

Shoulda looked around a bit in their advice.

4) Learn about business, take a course if you struggle with this.

There's a language to business, there's also a certain way of thinking. You don't necessarily have to become an MBA or anything like that, but if you're going to be talking to business people it helps to have a common vocabulary and conceptual framework.

What's SMART management and why do people use it? Why mi...

One of the best things you can do for yourself, at this juncture, is to just ignore what everyone says about your "potential" based on your grades, test scores, the schools you went to (or the schools that rejected you), your work history etc up until this point.

You have, at this stage in the game, so much plasticity available to you, and (despite all those shitty part time jobs, etc) so much time. Moreover: what people tend to forget about talent and how it really develops is that not only does it faithfully reward hard work (and focus), but it rewards it exponentially.

So anything you invest your time into now... be it advanced math classes, that hairy functional programming book that might seem hopelessly daunting and abstruse to you now... as well as non-technical endeavors like learning about how music is made, or about foreign languages, literature, psychoanalysis, etc -- might not seem to pan out, in terms of tangible benefits, for another 5-10 years. But taken together, these investments will find a way of leveraging each other synergistically, enhancing not only your potential to get a better job, but more fundamentally, your ability to improve yourself -- and over time, quite dramatically.

That, and: "it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done."

Specifically: the next time a fork in the road comes along, requiring you to make a decision about some major commitment of time and/or focus -- be it grad school, or a close relationship say -- and you're feeling pulled both ways about it: try defaulting to the "heavier" option (requiring greater time/energy investment) than the "lighter" one.

Point being, of course you can fail, and see energies misdirected, no matter what you do. But generally speaking you'll tend to at least learn more, and grow more, the more you are willing to make heavier, riskier investments of your resources. And you'll find yourself feeling far less ennui and regret when you think back about how things crashed and burned despite everything you tried and did... than in moments when you opted to simply duck for cover, and let the moment pass.