Iam 26 M. I did my civil engineering in 2018 and then worked as a civil engineer for a year then covid happened and i taught myself coding and got a job in a small startup and worked there as a software engineer for 1 year and now my father wants me to take over his business (manufacturing and packaging of mineral water) Which he is running for the past 8 years. My parents only chose enroll me in civil engineering which i regret now because that field is very bad and so not suitable for me and now with the business also they are forcing me to do so because they dont want to sell it.
The thing is what i really like is making youtube videos which iam doing side by side because when i was working 9-5 as a software engineer i had all the time outside of my job for my youtube channel. But now that iam again helping my dad in his business eventually i have to take over everything. In this business we have to work 12 hours a day and 7 days a week (mostly be present at the factory and just monitor people). People who will be suggesting to hire someone, here you cant trust most of the people because the transaction is mostly done with cash.
Regarding my youtube its not a big channel but its doing good recently…i atleast want some free time to make youtube videos and edit them (which takes a lot of time) and i cant tell my parents about youtube because they have a mindset of the old generation so they can’t understand it.
The money from the business is decent but i just cant seem to sit here the whole day do some 2-3 hours of work 24/7 without any weekends. I just dont see myself doing this for the next 20 years. Iam really passionate about my youtube and i know i will pop off one day.
My plan was to work 9-5 and do youtube in the remaining time. Youtube is my long term goal.
What are your thoughts about this? Should i take over the business and give very less time to youtube or do my 9-5 and do youtube side by side?
Civil engineering is not bad. Engineering careers in general are still good choices and open doors to long term employment. There is still a lot of demand in the US. Also unlike some engineering careers which can be easily outsourced Civil engineering has an technical element that requires a knowledgeable field presence. So there may be less foreign competition in a local job market.
The bottom line is that she won’t graduate in a vacuum. She will face competition from other grads, so she should strive for academic excellence now, while in school. Also take on part time jobs in adjacent fields of work, in order to build her resume with some relevant experience.
Lastly when starting out be prepared to live anywhere. Tell her to find the hardest and most challenging engineering job that she is qualified to do, right out of school. What she will learn in those next two years will impact her long term career trajectory more than her degree.
I will definitely tell her about this. She’s sharp. Good student and already interned for our hometown. They loved her there and she had two work dads who I really respect. I think she is going to do it again this summer.
Another thing that is going in her favor is that construction adjacent fields were really the last bastion of male dominance. As a male who has been in the construction business for close to two decades, I’ve really started to see a lot more women Project Managers and Field Engineers over the past 10 years. It’s really accelerated lately. I see there is a much different style of management between men and women and some women who I have worked with are very effective construction project leaders. They often bring a different level of planning and organization to the teams. Professionally it’s refreshing. Don’t be afraid to let your daughter loose in the field. She’ll never really develop a sold 3 dimensional engineering understanding if she is stuck behind a desk all day. Seeing how projects come out of the ground and understanding how structures are integrated into the terrain is a crucial and often lacking ability.
OP I think you are comparing the wrong things here. First what are you long term life goals? Making YouTube videos in and of itself is not a viable life goal, no more than bottling mineral water is a life goal. So without understanding what your personal life goals are, we have no way of knowing which choice may be more likely to help you achieve that goal.
Second and equally important what are the revenue opportunities that you could realistically achieve at either career and how much time (money) will you have to invest to obtain a reasonable return on your business venture.
Let’s start with your parents business. It sounds like your father is the primary source of management labor for his business. He may be also be fulfilling other lower skilled labor tasks too. When you describe a business where the owner is working 7 days a week 12 hrs per day, it sounds like he may be severely understaffed. So the first question is how much money does their business make? If the business earns $300K in profit right now and your father is earning all of that money. If you just split the business responsibilities and profits equally, you could each work 40hrs per week and make $150K in profit.
Obviously I am severely oversimplifying the example, but you need to assess how much earning potential you would have at this business. It may be a total financial loser, and no amount of effort will overcome the fact that he is running a crappy business in a saturated market with a low barrier to entry. If that’s the case, it’s not even a binary choice. However, if his business is profitable, shows signs of strong growth, and the only reason he is working so hard now, is to really scale the business to the next stage. There may indeed be room in the company to pay yourselves well without working 80hrs a week. Unless you have done this financial analysis, you cannot even answer your own question.
Now the same can be said for your YouTube business. If you were trying to make the same income per year as my previous example $150K you have to first calculate your top line revenue. A very rough guide would be $1 per daily view at a 50% engagement rate per year. So that means you would have to create sustained content to keep 150,000 daily viewers engaged at least 50% to earn possibly $150K in revenue.
The second part of that equation is how many hours of content creation would it take to capture 150,000 viewers per day every day, for every year you need to work? Is your content that interesting and unique to capture that audience? Can you sustain the level of creativity to continue to capture that large of an audience? Do you have any idea how much personal time would be required to create and edit that content? You have to ask yourself these questions and answer them.
Choose the most lucrative option and learn to like it. Then maybe you will have the time and money to pursue the things in life that you love.
I wish you success in whichever endeavor you choose.