Sounds like you have had a very productive life! Your son is very lucky.

Encourage the education. But there are loads of good careers that don’t need university degrees.
And all the while, he can try and achieve his dream.

From personal experience, university wasn’t useful for me - other than giving me time to figure out what I don’t want to do, and meeting friends that are still friends to this day.
But I could’ve easily done an apprenticeship, or gone straight into some industry/company. Some days, I wish I had. Other days, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what I am atm.

Dream case, he makes it.
Best case, he figures out what he wants to do by 21.
Worst case, he’s still figuring it out when he’s 25.

I wasn’t making decent money until I was late 20s. Even now, I can’t guarantee I have enough work next year. It’s extremely likely, but I’m self employed so…
Knowing my folks will still support me means I can continue pursuing interesting, useful and innovative things, even in my 30s - even tho the support is no longer required.

Maybe talk to some of your contacts in the football industry.
See if they have similar “football or nothing”, or if they had backup plans.
Talk to some managers, coaches, sports scientists, medics etc.
Ask them how they would get into pro football. Ask them what happens to pro-football aspiring players that don’t make the cut.
Use your experience and connections to help and support your son. And be there if it doesn’t work out.
You might know better, but he still has to learn. The best lessons are mistakes.

Did you go straight into being a pro footballer? Or did you have back up plans? Like “if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be an electrician” or something?

I’ve never had super lofty goals, but my parents always supported me in what I wanted to do. They never tried to steer me, but they did ask pertinent questions about what I was planning at various points. Probably to hint at bad idea.
I feel like I could have asked them for money/support at any point for any of my projects/ideas/whatevers, and - after making sure I was serious - would have helped out however they could.
I have a very unique career at this point, and I am only in this position because of the eclectic experience I have. And it is completely unrelated to my dreams as a kid or what I studied at university.

Ultimately, he is growing up. He’s going to have to make mistakes.
I’d say you have to be prepared to support him as much as you can in his dream of being a pro footballer.
Maybe he won’t be a pro footballer, but he might get a satisfying career out of being football-adjacent. Medic, science, coaching.
Or maybe he will try it for 5 years and eventually realise it’s not gonna happen, and be an electrician.
Or maybe he will struggle for 2 years, realise he needs to double down, and make the cut a year later.

I had a friend when I was growing up that dreamed of being an RAF pilot. Everything he did was around that.
Due to some unfortunate life circumstances, that dream was ripped away in the space of a week. Completely out of anyone’s control, but he could no longer qualify as an RAF pilot.
He was heartbroken. He’s now an engineer/mechanic in the RAF and loves tinkering with cars.

He shouldn’t find another dream.
But he should be aware that dreams don’t always come about. And if this dream doesn’t, would he be happy in an adjacent career? Or something else entirely?
Help him research the backup plan.

What kind of sane person is gonna debug and track down a memory leak, though? Just buy more ram

I was aware of kubernetes 6 months ago, but had never used it.
I got a 3 node cluster running in a day, and was learning kubernetes.
The only issues I’ve had were due to hardware failure causing etcd instability, and misconfigured operators generating terabytes of logs leading to pod eviction.

I don’t know what would signify it being production ready. It had all the levers and knobs I needed. I haven’t yet needed to run a sysadmin debug container to poke around the host OS.
It’s also great for learning. If you make a mistake, it’s very easy to wipe and reinstall and get back to where you were.

https://youtu.be/31HaTbWONmQ

Talos is great

Some do?

https://www.itv.com/news/2024-11-20/why-is-the-use-of-anti-personnel-mines-in-ukraine-so-controversial

Some mines are designed to have a time limit on them and become inactive after a set period of time.

However, other mines can remain active and dangerous for many years after the conflict has ended.

According my linked article:

US officials says the mines they send Ukraine will be “non-persistent”, meaning they have an internal mechanism to shorten the lifespan of the trigger.

The mines are designed to become inert after a set period of time ranging from as little as four hours to two weeks, officials said.

They say the mines use an electrical fuse that requires a battery, and the mine becomes inert when the battery runs out.

The US intends for Kyiv to use the anti-personnel mines in the eastern part of the country, US officials said, where Russian troops have made slow and steady progress against Ukrainian defensive lines.

Ukraine has also made assurances they will try to limit the risk to civilians.

Yeh, but purple shirted eye stabber tells you how it is. He’s honest. And quite frankly, nobody has stabbed any eyes around here for ages. Maybe it’s time to try some eye stabbing.
I’d vote for him.

I consider myself technically apt.

I was expecting a parcel from abroad so was expecting to have to pay customs.
Received an SMS that looked fairly legit, from a named SMS number that didn’t set off an alarm bell, asking for additional information. The only red flag that got me were some unusually personal questions, like date of birth. I was close to giving away a bunch of personal details.

Another one was a “your parking permit is about to expire”. We recently had permitted parking introduced, and I figured I’d messed something up. But thankfully I looked into that via the councils parking permit page, and knew I was months away from an expiry.

My parents received a “help, I’ve flushed my phone down the toilet and need a new one for work tomorrow. Sorry for the strange number, I’ve borrowed a friend’s phone. Can you send me $$$ to [account details] so I can get a new phone?” from a scammer pretending to be my sister.
Apparently they made it up to a “this is a new account number, are you sure this isn’t a scam?” prompt in their banking app when they finally decided to try and contact her. She immediately picked up and said “stop, it’s a scam”.

It doesn’t take much to make you vulnerable to social engineering.
An expectation of events and something that would normally red flag suddenly doesn’t seem suspicious.
An emotional manipulation, time pressure, all that stuff, and it’s easy to ignore red flags.

I always say “if you ever feel pressure, take a moment and analyse the situation”. Time pressure, emotional pressure. And analyse looking for anything that seems odd, then pick at that thread.

Lemmy.world