Why Do Some Poor Kids Thrive?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
And yet. His uncle had some contacts in West Germany - he gave my dad keys to an ancient Mercedes truck and employed him to bring various things from Germany to Poland - TVs, car batteries, stereo sets, anything really, Poland was absolutely starved of anything from the West so if you brought anything home you could sell it instantly. It didn't take long for my dad to buy his own truck, then another, then 10. When he passed away he left behind a company employing 110 people, still trading internationally, without having as much as middle school education. But his entire life he spoke of that uncle very highly, it was very clear to me that he was the role model for him, and inspired him in every decision. I think having someone like that in your life is incredibly important as well.
If anybody is interested in learning more or provide feedback about how I could improve the project feel free to email me.
Best of luck!
I think the reason don't do it more often is because life gets in the way. It's hard to work long hours and then sit down to do something else. But thankfully I've been blessed with lots of energy! :)
Good luck to you. Btw, just to know Im reading it right, what does the ESL mean here?
Thanks!
I've also poked my head in on a couple of the rPi/Minecraft hacking sessions that teach kids computer programming, and will try to promote this among my small and mostly crew.
Anyway, just wanted to say its great that you mentioned what you're up to, because we really need to be doing more of this, in my opinion.
How do you source the computers? I'd love to recycle machines if possible too.
But even the poorest families here usually own a TV with modern interfaces, so Pi for kids could work like magic. Thank you for the idea!
Money, or better, social capital gets importance when these kids become young adults and have chosen career paths with less demand.
Except that a good education is usually gated behind 1) high property values and property taxes in a suburban neighborhood, 2) high tuition, or 3) extremely competitive tests/lotteries to get into the small handful of good schools in failing urban districts.
Not everyone has a parent who can afford to be away from work long enough to be an effective substitute for a good school district.
For example, time spent working. I recall every vacation, every weekend and at least 1-2 mon-fri days or nights working, to help pay my dad's bills, pay for college, or just pay for things my parents couldn't help me out with even though I lived with them as an 18 yo, like medical insurance. There was never any downtime for me where I had a full weekend off, or a spring break to wind down after a few months of school. Barely any time was available to simply relax, have fun, remove stress or hell have time for my 'identity project'. Being ill for a day and missing a day of school work would mess everything up because I couldn't skip work, and I had no time spare in a given week as a buffer to 'catch up' up on stuff. It's a constant level of stress, which affects your studies, too. I was actually one of the lucky ones who lived in a nice neighbourhood where the median person had 5x our household income with free state subsidised education, it was great. But even then, I couldn't make full use of it like I could've if we had more disposable income. There are a lot of indirect factors, work was just one of them.
It's not the dame as the George Foremans or the Merle Haggards of the world who while making good had fortunate accidents help them along the way. Or maybe it is exactly the same, just expressed differently.
Those rubber keys were terrible. Somehow my dad found a old Soviet fax machine with keys in it which were activated by a magnetic ring, over a vacuum sealed contact, so I spend a day taking appart the keyboard, cut the front of my ZX Clone and soldered those rugged contacts. It looked ugly, but it was very reliable.
Also remember having a Pascal compiler, C, a graphical BASIC (Lazer Basic?), wrote my own assembly compiler (it was just a translator from Z80 mnemonic to bytes). It was fun.
When I used mine I used BASIC, and I "compiled" z80 machine code by looking up the opcodes, one by one, in the manual that came with the machine. I don't remember ever having access to an assembler, or compiler of any kind. But I eventually learned enough that I could hack games to get infinite lives. I have fond memories of the Speedlock system, along with Bleepload, and others of that time-frame.
When I graduated high school I joined the Navy to get college money. I believe that through the journey of going through adversity, it has taught me to appreciate everything I've worked for. It also drives and motivates me to build a foundation for my kids so they can have a childhood they look back on fondly.
We're all products of our environment. Whether it's rising above it to be better or working to build a lasting legacy, we all want to look back in 40 years and appreciate the things we've accomplished in our lives.
Sorry if that got all soapbox-y, but this is a huge thing for me. I wasn't born into money and never had a network of rich friends. And that's ok with me. Because looking back in my nearly 40 years I don't regret any of it. It's led me to what I'm doing today and I take nothing for granted.
My current job as a software engineer pays well. I live a comfortable life and can afford things I never had but my lack of college degree also causes me to have a very bad impostor syndrome.
Maybe I should save up enough to go back to college and graduate.
The final year courses include courses on machine learning, NLP, 'advanced optimization', which I'm looking forward to.
If anyone wants more info, feel free to message me.
[1] http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/g...
[Typo edited]
Some quick questions:
Are there any extra fees? How many classes in first/second/third year? Are they separated by semester or quarter? Does this include General Ed? Are there any previous qualifications one needs before applying?
EDIT: I answered most of my questions on that page! My only concern is passing the GCE "AS" Level which I can't find too much information on...
What's also nice is that like most UK degrees, the course grades are weighted higher towards the layer years with the more advanced courses. It's something like 10% first year, 30% second year, 60% third year. That means that if you're not used to academic work, you can scale up over time, and still get a good grade overall if you hit your stride by the second year.
Now you just have to do the work :)
[1]https://www.irs.gov/uac/Tax-Benefits-for-Education:-Informat...
I did go back to college and graduated. It didn't help with the impostor syndrome. It did fill in some gaps in my knowledge and opened a few career doors for me though. It was worth it, but that was due in large part to the fact that I chose to go do the first two years at community college and the last two at an inexpensive regional school.
A bit of encouragement, it is totally possible to go to school full-time while working full-time if you really want to. It just means you miss the parties and other social stuff (which I had pretty much aged out of by that point anyway).
Keep on hacking brother.
Nowadays, I am rich. Perhaps not millionaire rich, but I live very comfortably. I have no need to balance my checkbook. That said, I feel like I do not belong. I should be driving luxury cars and living care free, but I do not. Feel like everything can be taken away from me. What have I done to have all this money?
You don't need a degree. I do an excellent job for clients of my company; and I know what I'm worth to them. The many thousands of dollars per week are worth it because I'm the real deal.
You are probably not an impostor, you're probably just more valued than you know.
And if all of that rationalization fails; you should know that you don't have any obligation to prove that you're worth what you're compensated. That responsibility falls solely on those compensating you.
It really is "fake it 'til you make it." But in my experience that does go away, a lot, once you can really say to yourself that you've made it (even just a little).
One thing I can relate to though is working really hard for fear of underperforming or proving to be under qualified, only to learn later that others felt I was performing exceedingly well.
What cures insecurity is a shift of priorities and worldview - from the unrealistic list of achievements you've been told you need to accomplish (the root of your insecurity syndromes), to doing your own thing, to living your own life.
Of course that involves alienating everyone you rely upon for the most part. So not only do you need to be strong enough to stand on your own two feet emotionally, but financially as well. So it's baby-steps to get there, like everything else.
You also tend to be exposed to other well-educated people who are specialized in areas you are not.
It's not a matter of schooling - you can fill the gaps just as well on your own - school is an easier, albeit more expensive route.
So the policy implications seem clear. Enable more poor kids to find passion projects. Once they have one, get them in to a living situation that, though meager, gives them the space to pursue their passion. Honestly, sounds like an apprenticeship or graduate school model, but for much younger people.
My parents valued education in theory, but not as much in practice. My father learned the hard way and redeemed himself in his 20s -- managing to get into the Army Corp of Engineers after initially dropping out of high school. They pounded the importance of education into my sister and I when I was very young, but that seemed to taper off when I was about 9 or 10, when we were left to our own devices.
How did I thrive? Simple. At around the age of 12 I realized that they were mostly idiots. They made terrible financial decisions (which they're paying for now, as they have no retirement savings), my father -- mostly working in factories/landfills -- made no career moves (on account of my mother discouraging him at every opportunity), and my mother simply parroted the advice spewed by the TV, but did the exact opposite. My goal was to avoid ending up like them at all costs -- ending up in a crappy part of a city 50 years in decline with "a good job" being something like working in a furniture store, and being complacent with it.
I was fortunate in my early 20s (after I dropped out of a state college in which I felt I was getting a bad deal for my $) to work with an older QA engineer who took a similar path. He had it much worse than I when he grew up, but he could empathize with my upbringing, as it felt all too familiar to him. At the time he felt I was getting a raw deal from my employer, so he would invite me over on the weekends to have lunch with him and his wife (and his daughters, who were my age) to drive into all our heads on how to better make informed decisions about our current state at a given moment.
Solid, extremely pragmatic advice from the two of them. As well as painful examples of mistakes both of them made along the way, to show they were far from perfect themselves. Much of it focusing on the long term even if it involves temporarily stunting yourself in the short term, or cutting ties with people you may have had relationships with but were ultimately toxic. Some of the advice was certainly hard to follow in practice, but I'm still to find a case where it wasn't the best move I could've made, and regretted not following some of it earlier.
So I was a cashier and a filed bank teller. I delivered newspapers. I washed cars and delivered tires and packages. I washed windows and cleaned doctors offices. Then eventually went to college and got into software development.
It baffles me when some people are surprised that its possible to work your way out of poverty. That's what most sane people do when they have the opportunity to do so.
Of course, if you have a culture that deters hard work and self development, that makes it a lot hard.
Its also harder when people say that environment determines the outcome instead of individual determination. The truth is its both, but telling people their effort is not what makes the difference is creating a environment that does not encourage the effort required to succeed. The idea that environment is everything can help ensure a bad environment prevents you from succeeding. And even the environment cannot be changed without individual effort.
The massive difference in resources seems like a place to start. Compare the percentage of kids who get into college from poor urban public schools, where many kids aren't even functionally literate and classes lack books, and wealthy suburban public schools.
But whatever the cause, the bar is far too high in poor neighborhoods for most people to get over.
Those cultures that are no longer poor were more conducive to escaping poverty.
The evidence is compelling in places that dropped government control of everything and millions of people have moved out of poverty in just a generation or two.
China is a good example. Everybody started out poor but they still had an ethic or working hard, saving for the future and education.
Other people are born with the same opportunities but not the same values and don't take advantage of those opportunities.
Its not the poor neighborhood. Its the poor ideas in people's heads. Change that and the neighborhood changes too.
An interesting notion, but is there any data that backs it up?
I excelled at math, loved computers, and went to DeVry to do computer programming. I was the first in my family to go to college. Started my first tech company at 22.
With a lot of hard work, I believe anyone can break out of poverty.
I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming.
Going back to why I replied, the sad fact about an information age economy is that working with information or your community (e.g. coding or using that information to trade) is leveraged and worth more than pure manual labor. At the highest level, you have CEOs with insane networks of personal relationships (I knew a family friend once who, with one phone call, got the best eye surgeon in the state to do an emergency operation on one of his friend's friends) and surgeons who can save lives. At the medium level, you have coders.
From a rational economics standpoint, everyone is expendable. But the replacement costs are quite high for those higher up the power-law curve of the information economy.
And some people with the talent to code don't have the physiology to last long doing manual labor.
What if you are in a part of the world (read much of the world) where the only paths to success require seriously unethical behavior?
The right partner makes a huge difference, but what if you only meet a suitable partner late in life or you end up sucked into their or their family's problems?
If you have good health, you do not live in fear of criminals and militias, if you and your partner love each other unambiguously and have the time to really support and enjoy each other, and because of all those things you are able to achieve some measure of financial security, then you have what a tiny minority of human beings get to enjoy as a fleeting mirage, and only a vanishingly small minority get to enjoy for a significant fraction of their lives.
Most human beings can only "make" a small part of their luck.
As to working hard, that isn't what counts. It's making the right choices, i.e. working smart.
Sure, lots start out with many disadvantages and will have a tougher road. But if you're able-bodied, you do have choices.
That's clearly not the case. Off the top of my head, success depends heavily on the neighborhood and family you are born into. Are your parents divorced, in prison, are they alchoholics, do they teach you values and education, do they abuse you, do they rear you at all, can they afford food, electricity, or college? Does the school in your zip code have books the classrooms? Are you going to get shot in the streets, do your friends sell drugs? Is it a wealthy suburban school where 90% go to college, a poor urban one where 90% are literate?
The fact is, if you are able-bodied, you do have choices.
I won't repeat what I've posted elsewhere in this thread. I'll just add that in my life I've noticed a consistent pattern. People who take responsibility for their choices do much better than people who always blame others, fate, whatever.
And American today has more opportunities for more people than anywhere at anytime in history. There's a reason why America has so many illegal immigrants and so many more that want to come here.
How do you square that with the data, the outcomes that wealthy kids are so much more successful? How about that they get into college at such higher rates at age 18? Why would poor kids be any lazier than wealthy ones?
> And American today has more opportunities for more people than anywhere at anytime in history.
Not to nitpick, but at least some resesarch says that social mobility is higher now in Europe. I also suspect it was higher in the U.S. in the 90's, when there were more social services and education (not to mention health care and housing) cost much less.
> There's a reason why America has so many illegal immigrants and so many more that want to come here.
Net illegal immigration with Mexico is now negative, at least last I saw (that is, more are returning than entering the U.S.).
Also, illegal immigrants often come from places that are much poorer than the United States.
I've tried to make it very clear in this thread that it is not at all about "just working hard". It's about working smart, i.e. making choices.
To know the truth about a country, check if there are walls around a country to keep people in, or walls to keep people out.
That doesn't change my point.
> To know the truth about a country, check if there are walls around a country to keep people in, or walls to keep people out.
A very broad brush on an irrelevant issue (relative economic opportunity between nations) to the problem at hand.
I'm glad you made it; that's impresssive and great news. The data and research overwhelmingly disagree with your statement; so few make it. Read the stories of those kids in the article; it's not reasonable to say that they merely lacked hard work. As I posted elsewhere, the bar obviously is set much too high for most of humanity (and I assume we are talking about people in wealthy nations).
"With a lot of hard work, and the legal freedom to move away, anyone can break out of poverty."
Staying in the same place (sounds like your grandparents were kick ass people) is pretty much the death sentence and many people, after certain youthful indiscretions may not be permitted to leave the area.
Plus, you're white so I'm guessing you've never been detained for "matching the description".
And, in many ways, the purest luck of the draw. If his grandfather didn't have a C64, what happens? Or for me, if my dad doesn't happen to go from selling office furniture to playing with computers when I was very young and I don't happen to then have computers lying around that I'm allowed to play with basically unimpeded from the age of three or four...am I in this field? Am I as good at it as I am? Isolating causes is so very, very difficult when it comes to the individual (easier when you are working with statistically meaningful populations, of course); trying to boil it down to "hard work" leaves out a lot of "hard workers" who end up disabled before they're 60 because their jobs grind them to powder.
There are enormous numbers of people who work very hard and get nowhere. The elements of the "Character Hypothesis" (persistence, determination, self-control / the ability to delay gratification, abstention from substance use, curiosity, conscientiousness, self-confidence, emotional intelligence, good communication skills, a willingness to listen, and grit) are all necessary to escape poverty, but not anywhere sufficient. Pure chance is a huge factor, but acknowledging that fact destroys the entire project in some minds.
There's a reason the Nordics have so much higher social mobility than the US does. They actually work at it:
"In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. At the top rung of the ladder, however, mobility again decreases.[10]
One study comparing social mobility between developed countries[11][12][13] found that the four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children"
I was very lucky. I didn't (and don't) work harder than my peers who didn't make it out of poverty, yet I did. Amount of effort isn't correlated with measures of financial security.
Working hard doesn't, by default, lead to financial security.
Working hard can lead to financial security but there's a lot of luck involved as well. Not to mention planning - unless you count that as work.
Trust me I am not saying working hard doesn't lead of results or don't work hard. I am saying that poverty isn't synonymous with "lazy" or even "not working hard enough."
Regarding the people you grew up with, you say they work as hard as you do. Are you sure about that? And while they may be working hard, how smart are they working? For instance, some went to college, did they get a degree in something that is in high demand where the pay is good? And getting a college degree is only one piece of a good education. How much did they really learn, and consequently, how competitive are they in the job market? Even if they're all in high demand STEM fields, they still have to compete with the thousands of other job seekers after all.
Thinking through the alternatives and making smarter choices is hard work. And that is cumulative. It's kind of like compound interest too. You may not see a big difference from day to day or month to month but given some roll of the dice in circumstances, over the course of years and decades, working hard will almost always make a huge difference.
I'm not saying that you did not work hard, I'm sure you did. I am saying that plenty of people work just as hard but stay in poverty.
Can you imagine... Not even knowing you can have interests.
Not that you can choose interests.
Not even believing that you can have something to be interested in.
Let that sink in
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
When you're poor and you don't want to be poor anymore, you choose to do things that give you financial security. Drug dealers turn into accountants. Kids who want to get in and out of college in 4 years choose to go into computer science. People who's 'natural' (which is a completely irrelevant factor) interests are reading books get into graph theory.
Interests being innate is a huge fallacy that people who have not had to handle situations like this believe.
For every one of you, how many of them?
Maybe a major difference is that if you try that path and you are poor, you're out of options. If you try it and you are wealthy, then you change majors in college.
Common denominator is they love their art, do it constantly, had a dream of being paid for it, and sonething reinforces that.
Not to mention I don't think that you can really "force" yourself to have the "correct" interests.
This idea that programmers have that we must be special or that you have to be smart to be a programmer is ridiculous. I know plenty of dumb people, absurdly illogical dumb people who make it in this industry.
I wonder how many poor kids ever have the opportunity to choose a major in college?
The same way millions can finish a game in Easy mode, but there are still some people that can finish it in Hard and Ultra Hard mode.
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
I'm the child of a single mom of 4 who made $7000 / year, and I'm the first of my extended family to graduate college and the first millionaire (my younger brother got to middle class). Luck is the way that I succeeded.
1st, being born with a high IQ helped. But, that clearly wasn't enough since I had the lowest IQ of my family. And, 40% of my gifted class didn't even graduate high school.
2nd, being born with a personable and friendly demeanor helped a lot, probably more than my intelligence. However, by having intelligence, I was better able to make good choices of friends.
3rd, being born with height potential was huge. It's been clear to me that people in powerful positions are much taller than average.
4th, being born with symmetric features and attractiveness was important. Again, this attribute helps in making and keeping relationships. And, when people think of someone, they often think of me first.
5th, being cautious and risk adverse was hugely important. I was involved with the gangs and criminal activity like many of my peers, but I was extremely careful about what things that I would do. Also, many of my peers ended up having kids in their teens, which was very devastating. Many became addicted to drugs and died. Many died of accidents and suicide. Of my friends, over 15 died before I was 25 (I lost count).
6th, having a mentor was good for me in making good life choices. A retired, highly educated engineer took me under her wing and mentored me in my late teens. Before I met her, I had not even considered going to college. I looked forward to being a manager at a retail store. Even though I was in the honors and gifted program and ranked #11 out of my class, I never once received any college guidance from my school. So, her help was amazingly helpful.
7th, (sorry, this is getting long), living at a time when college was affordable and accessible was critical. I went to college in the 90s when tuition was under $2500 a semester, and I was accepted with many marks on my academic record. Even though I wasted time in college, I was able to graduate with only $40k in debt.
8th, picking the right major was extremely important. I floundered around for a couple years at college and almost dropped out. Then, I had a roommate who turned me on to computers (I never had one, since they were very expensive). I took a couple programming classes and found it to be a creative outlet. And, at the time, graduates were making $30-45k, which seemed great to me.
But, looking back on it all, it was mostly luck. I wish I could say that I had some part in it, but really, I didn't.
The only very important (maybe most important) decisions that I made didn't happen until I was over 30. I moved to a wealthy area and I married up. Without doing those things, it would have been much much harder to gain access to connections and capital.
Well, you did have a good part: all the lucked wouldn't help you if you fucked it up with your attitude, behavior, etc.
It's just that the inverse is not true: having the attitude, behavior, work ethic etc is worth nothing (or very little) without the chances and luck (imagine a genius, gentle hardworking. And those are not given to the majority of poor/downtrodden people.
Also, while (1) and (2) you mention might have a lot to do with existing disposition, they're also things we work out and change/improve.
If we consider (1) and (2) totally out of control as "genetics" or environment based (e.g. chance), then well, we can't say anybody really has any qualities of their own as a person.
My question is this, ignoring your edit, if you say it was all luck based on the 8 points here, am I to conclude that anybody with these advantages would all have the same outcome no matter what they themselves did (taking into consideration the likely variability of behavior in context of your profile). If they worked their asses off, they would be no more successful than you are now and if they had just did the minimum, they'd be just as successful as you are.
I'd surmise this would not be the case so it seems likely that how hard one works, given the hand they're dealt, means a little more than you think.
Don't discount the value of the choices you made, like 1 (choosing to graduate), 2 (making good choices of friends), 4 (there's a lot one can do to improve attractiveness, like standing up straight, haircut, choosing clothes, demeanor, etc.), 5 (choosing friends), 6 (choosing to pay attention to a mentor instead of dismissing her), 7 (choosing to go to college), 8 (choosing a major).
You made a LOT of choices along your path to success. The individual details are luck, but recognizing those opportunities and taking advantage are very much a choice on your part. Life is complex, and everyone encounters lucky details that they may or may not recognize for what they are. You did.
However, it doesn't solve the problem that it's not realistic to rely on children and teens to make good decisions. That's what parents are for.
I agree that children and teens often make poor decisions. It's why the criminal justice system, for example, should be much more forgiving of them. (I know a top developer who told me he stole cars as a teen, and was arrested many times over it. He finally realized his life was doomed unless he changed his ways.)
I also remember being a teen, and watching my peers do stupid things. I knew they were being stupid, they were aware that they were f*cking up their life, but they did it anyway. I don't know that you can save people like that, but they aren't victims of fate. It was still their choice.
"The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters."
I still think there's this question of "why do some kids have more grit than others?" to be answered, but perhaps this is a start?
Worth a listen:
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-proble...
There is an interesting book called "The Sports Gene" that has a section that talks about how someone bred sled dogs based on their "grit" characteristic and was able to be a successful dog sledder because of it.
Also that book is also a great read about how inherited traits and environment interact with each other. And thanks for the podcast suggestion.
It happens in technology too. I'm not sure how many people remember Dragon Dictate, but they were well ahead of the game in voice recognition in the 90s and 00s.
Then they made a bad mistake and got into a marketing partnership with individuals they would have been better off avoiding. This not only killed their business, it also meant they no longer own their own IP, which is currently wasting away in business limbo.
That's the point of the OP. Grit will only get you so far.
It's not about individual hero stories, it's about the probability of success for equivalent effort for entire populations, and how vulnerable they are to the effects of a single bad mistake.
That's where you can see the negative effects of some backgrounds, and the positive effects of others, most clearly.
The assumption behind this belief set is that they were the select few who could do this. There is an alternative hypothesis that out of the large number of people with poor background who did this, they were the few somewhat randomly selected to succeed.
Certainly if you look at their biographies there seems to be a consistent element of right person in right place at right time - which suggests that there might be a lot more 'right people' than get lucky.
I.e. nobody is going to get lucky by watching TV.
That's really sad for me. That guy is still a kid, from where I sit. And he will likely be doing work that bores him to tears for the next 50 years.
We should be talking about fixing that. Figuring out a way to send some smart, creative, in poverty, 30 year olds to four year college for free.
I think the first step down the road you describe in your last sentence would be that we (as individuals) shouldn't assess our personal goals and assume they are universal or shared with other individuals. This was a tough lesson for me to learn when I was younger, that imperfect systems are sometimes more acceptable or most appropriate when compared to some sort of perfected ideal.
My family was initially very low-middle income, and some poor business and personal decisions caused us to fall, for a time, into poverty -- even spending several months homeless and living out of a motel.
The area we eventually ended up in was very rural, fairly poor with quite a bit of rural poverty around -- my immediate neighbors didn't even have running water or an indoor bathroom.
Having spent my earlier years in a more urban environment, I found the local children hard to relate to, and the distances between me and kids I got along with well enough were vast enough that they may as well have not existed. My parents worked very long hours and as a result I spent huge amounts of time virtually alone.
Somewhere along the way I got into BBSs and the world opened up to me. My "life-raft" was a happenstance introduction to the demoscene and the discovery of other kids in my metro area who were interested in technology, art and global perspectives. It also happened to dovetail pretty nicely with my other school interests (music and art).
I saved money to buy my first soundcard and learned how to upgrade computers. The desire to be part of the demoscene caused me to dive deeply into keeping up-to-date computers in my house and I learned to cobble together pretty decent ones for the time with very little money.
This kind of intense hardware/software experience got me my first job and an entry into the IT world where I grew in skills and ideas, and eventually put myself through university up to an M.S. (the first in my family) with the help of some grants.
Because of those connections I met my wife and have held great and wonderful jobs since then and have had a chance to travel the world and see things 10 year old me, sitting at the desk looking at pictures in history textbooks in the rented motel room my family lived in, would have never imagined I'd ever see in my life.
It wasn't all smooth running, there were many struggles and many times I almost never made it. But one helpful hand, or a caring boss or teacher, helped me get through it. I never took the SATs for example, barely graduated high-school, was nearly bankrupt in the middle of college due to a medical emergency. I never want to repeat the stress and anger of that time again, but I know it wasn't all just me, I had plenty of help and that, combined with desire from my life-raft seemed to be what did it.
My mother had to provide for a family on her own. Most of the relatives from my father's side didn't bother to help, they had their own problems to deal with, add all of this on top of a economy which was non-existent in 2008. We had no place to stay for 4 months because we couldn't afford rent. I couldn't watch shows my peers watched because we couldn't afford cable/satellite TV, let alone a place to stay. There was food, electricity and water shortage for years(still is). Inflation was so high the government had to discontinue the currency.
Teachers in my public school began to flee to other countries so that they could still provide for their family.I had to teach myself Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.I took up subjects I was never assigned to do in order to get decent grades so that I could go to college. I had to do two A levels, instead of three because teachers thought my grades weren't good enough, other students made fun of me because of this.The environment I was in was a perfect recipe for disaster, for a young mind.
But here I am, with a degree in Computer Science and working for a software company with like minded people because my father bought and introduced to me a cream rectangular box, big monochrome monitor and taught me how to type with a keyboard at the age of 5. This machine would become my identity project. Computers have been my survival tool, my passion, even when my peers thought I was delusional for pursing a career in Technology(they even made fun of me for thinking I had a chance).
Environment plays a big part in your life but you have the choice to let it dictate your life or you take the wheel and determine your future. I could have given up but I chose not to, even though everything around me constantly said I should.
I'm not in a place where I can say I made it but, but its sure as hell better than what I have experienced in my late childhood and adolescent years. For those young folks that are reading this and are in somewhat a disadvantaged situation, stay positive,stick to your identity project and never give up!
If you've never had to struggle, how do you know how to handle it when you are struggling?
Kids born into wealth, at least moderate wealth, are much more likely to be successful than kids born into poverty, so it seems they figure out that struggle thing eventually.
Wealth can help compensate: Maybe if you lack a lot of talent you can still get through college, and that will keep out of minimum wage jobs over the long term.
For me and the other people I've known or mentored from similar backgrounds, I things that get people away from abusive and dysfunctional homes can make a big difference. I think I personally would have dropped out of college early on if I hadn't been able to work tech support in the summer and therefore not go home. Wonks always go on and on about what a difference parents can make, but it goes both ways.
http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LU4qIlz47C5Uph2P5i250K/Cha...
I studied in a Chennai corporation school...When I was in 12th class, Zoho representatives came to our school and told us to take an exam. I was...among those six that got selected,” recalls Babu, who has been with the company for years. As product manager, Babu now leads a team of about 60 engineers.
But it's a bit different over here. Unlike the US, lots of people over here are poor due to chance and bad luck. Firing people is easier and less risky.
I'd also happily hire people without a degree - any self taught stats guys wanting to level up, email me.
The difference that my Indian colleagues have mentioned to me between India and the US is that people get second (and third, and fourth, etc.) chances. Your fortunes may wane but it isn't necessarily permanent.
Consider "Bob" from this article. In the US Bob got lazy in high school and is now a barista. Over here Babu could easily get stuck in rural poverty even if he doesn't get lazy.
Unlucky Babu, not lazy Bob, is the person you want to recruit.
And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general.
I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.
A degree from a program that has a proper curriculum is extremely valuable for programming.
Ok, maybe not for slapping together some extremely simple CRUD applications if that's only what your job entails.
That is not surprising at all. People are their best when they are engaded in something bigger than themselves.
I grew up in my folk's shop. Not really all that poor, I guess, in comparison to some of our customers. I mean, all 6 of my family at least had a toilet and a TV. All us kids still feel that good eating is Chef Boyardee and Twinkies (really). To this day, my brothers take all the bell pepper bits out of their Denver omelets at IHOP, one by one. Just can't stand the taste of fresh veggies. Power went out from time to time, but we did have it. We all did sports year round, mostly because it was a valid excuse to not work at the shop for my folks, that was nice I guess and means we weren't all that bad off. That shop was not fun either. It was an autoshop, so grease and asshole customers was life. My pants literally stood up on their own after work in the summers, there was that much grime in the fibers. The shop was a tin shack, so the winters were frozen and the summers were 120+ everyday by 11am. Still meant you had to fix the transmissions though. We all knew lathes and welders by 10 years old. Firefighting and carpentry became routine as us children were put to work. Don't misunderstand, I love my folks and I loved my life, but that child labor was not safe, though we all didn't know it at the time. Dad never had algebra, mom got to geometry, but that's it. The pastors would not shake Dad's hand as the grease that bakes into your fingernails makes you 'dirty' in their eyes. I love Jesus with all my heart and am a Christian, but the church can go fuck itself long and hard with the wrong end of a steel rake.
Ok, have I proved my 'poor' cred then? Yeah, it wasn't as bad as other commenters here, but still, I know man's lot is labor.
And I think that's what pulled all us kids out of it. Grit and a stiff upper lip. We all had our bones scarred by that life of labor. So, when it came to school and all this BS 'achievement metrics' that the colleges use to let you in, it was comparatively easy for us to accomplish. As such, when folk complained in college that algebra was too tough, we all found that bewildering. I went to a UC with my brothers and my sister went to a CSU and we all did Physics or Chemistry as they were the hardest majors. Nothing else really felt right as a use of all that money my folks saved up for us. Labor was our lot, as was Adam's, and we felt that was the only way.
Now we all have good jobs or are in pretty good grad schools. And yes, I recognize that we had bootstraps to pull ourselves up with, and others do not, so my own family 'tithes' 10% to some charities we believe in. All us kids do something similar.
Grit is the only thing that will pull you out. Hard work and Jesus' grace. Luck is also big, I guess, but you have to make your own luck.
Get them out of their environment, let them be free, forgive them for messing up, and they will thrive.
Nothing like your parents asking you to borrow some money from your side job so they can pay the bills, as a 14 year old, to start your distraction free day. /s
There's a million examples like this. Sure, rich kids have busy lives and can be stressed out by all kinds of high standards, don't get me wrong. But being poor means you have to think about every single little thing that you do, or that happens to you. A flat tire, or worse, having your bike stolen, is a disaster, it can mean weeks of disposable income lost. As a kid I was constantly stressed out and hopeless about the most insignificant things because they can hit like a brick. I remember I talked to a kid once who asked me whether we'd be using graphing calculators in a particular class. He was wondering whether he should drop the final years of hs maths where we'd be doing calculus for an easier hs math curriculum, because paying $150 for a graphing calculator was not an option for him. Distractions like that happen left and right, things 'normal' kids wouldn't even consider thinking about. There's a Christmas dinner coming up in 3 months and kids are supposed to wear something nice and formal? You're already stressing because you'll be the only kid with a bunch of 2nd hand regular clothing.
In fact quite a few studies have shown that poor people have less mental bandwidth to deal with their every day lives, because they're bogged down (distracted) by all of the issues that come with a life of poverty, and that this lower bandwidth is a big hurdle in achieving the same level of performance as a normal person.
This in response to an earlier exchange about how race and gender related posts get many votes in the beginning and are then flagged to death, but ones about class always make it to the top. Is there a way to see how many times an article has been flagged? I would like to gather data for my assertions.
I know I've seen a tool out there that tracks the ranking of HN articles over time. Perhaps the slope of the descent would serve as a good proxy for flagging.
I did not flag it, and I think others may have flagged it. The comment to point ratio also contributes to front-page decay to avoid flamewars. This isn't the target audience for comfortable or uncomfortable discussions about race/gender/privilege. In my opinion, the author of that article exhibited behavior that, if you take away race and gender from the equation, would be questionable, at best, if you were an individual working at a company (the relationship with a coworker and others). Those facts clouded what the author was saying about race and gender.