Advice to a Junior in High School?

[Tom Plunket]

Howard Nease wrote:

> I have heard a whole lot about the fact that the market for 
> software engineers nowadays is *HORRIBLE*...

You could go to work in the video game industry.  Like most
entertainment industries it fares pretty well especially when
there's a downturn in society.

I've been a video game programmer for seven years.  It's a lot of
work and not a lot of money, but it feels cool to me to work on
the programs that people use *after* work.  ;)  We make the
software that people choose to use individually.

> I would be devastated were I to find the need to leave computer 
> science.

There will always be a call for programmers.  The key to securing
yourself in whatever position you want to be in is simply to be
better than everyone else around you at that role.  Study hard,
go after internships while in college (or even before, I recently
had a 16-year old intern in programming who was hot-shit), and
absorb everything you can.

Learn Python, learn C++, learn Lisp.  Understand what you like
and don't like about each of these languages.

Good luck,
-tom!

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