I'm going to tell my 12 year old that when he leaves education he wants something like this on his personal web site:

"CARA (Capstans Are Really Awesome) is my latest quadrupedal robot, following ZEUS, ARES, and TOPS. Built over the course of a year, CARA is easily my most dynamic and well-designed quadruped yet."

That would be a terrible path for someone with this extreme level of demonstrated talent, motivation, and follow-through.

Much better for someone to fund a startup run by him.

Why would you put someone with clear talent at building stuff in charge of running a startup? He'll get bogged down in lawyers, day to day operations and growth strategies.

Hire him and put him in R&D in some robotics company.

Y’know, sometimes smart, dedicated, curious, self-directed people are that way with a lot of things.

I was a professor for a long time. My observation was that often a top researcher was also a top teacher and even a top administrator. There are exceptions of course. But if someone is smart and effective at using their attention, those skills transfer to many things.

It’s a pain in the ass when allocating university roles. I want that person to do EVERYTHING ‘cos they always deliver.

Yes but also the robotics industry notoriously has an extremely low shipping rate. So choose your bog I guess?

And some of them are military focused.

... what tf?

On top of studying engineering at uni, his "side-gig" is being creative, empathetic, and fantastic at communication - and your prime recommendation is to "hire" him to be a specialist hidden away in the back office? Which interwebz forum are you on?

EDIT: My last question is clearly an echo-chamber statement. But that doesn't subtract from the fact that, yeah, should he found a business, yes, he'll deal with certain "BS". That is the weight we'll all carry. But he's quite likely capable of moving civilization forwards, so... :shrug:

Eugh. No. Let him create stuff and let someone else take care of the taxes and payroll and the sales and all that other stuff.

He might be perfectly happy doing projects and YouTube.

Likely makes more money, too!

For many, no; taking on lots of sponsorships, you can make a good amount of money (especially the ones where you agree to do X posts across Y social media accounts for Z period of time, essentially being fully sponsored across a large swath of life).

But for a lot of tech/engineering channels, it'd be immensely difficult to make the same salary as you could working at a FAANG or the like. (I'm making about half what I made when I had a W-2, but it's enough).

Do fun projects of your choosing vs the grind of corporate life.

The former has a rather large non-pecuniary component of total compensation.

Exactly; especially in terms of stress—which is a major problem with my chronic illness, and both the main reason I'm happy to be away from a W-2, but also the thing that makes me most nervous as I'm dependent on marketplace healthcare (which is quite expensive for much worse benefits), and it's harder to get things like life/disability insurance as an independent.

Being a top YouTube producer is not without stress : Reacting to the change in number of followers, responding to comment that can be unpolite, managing sponsors...

Thank you for taking a pay cut to do what you do, I'm so glad your channels exist. Also please remember to take vacations! (trade shows don't count)

If you’re not in software the salary you’d be making as an employee would be much lower than what you refer to as “FAANG” though

You just need to start selling supplements, anti-aging creams and time shares.

His current Patreon has 57 paid members. Unless he has another revenue stream, I think he'd need more paid members.

He is a senior mechanical engineering student at purdue. I think the channel is something he is just getting rolling in his spare time.

youtube ads and sponsorship are his additional revenue streams

Very impressive. Commenting to be able to find this later because I need to keep tabs on this guy. The CD launcher is incredibly cool.

Nobody hire him!