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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I just don't get it. It was pretty clear to me what to do when I left high school. Study, study, study. Work hard, work hard, work hard. Nobody told me this, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I grew up poor in projects in a horrible violent city with nobody to guide me. If I can do this, why can't other Americans who have a much better upbringing and supportive family structure? Which makes me think, life is too good, too easy, for the average american. Why go through the effort of studying years of math and computer science when they can enjoy life and get by on jobs that don't require years and years of dedication and schooling?

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This is anecdata. By that reasoning why would we even have poor people if being poor drove everyone to success like it did to you? Do you actually think that anyone who workedars hard as you would achieve the same level of success? If they could, wouldn't that just then become the minimum and you would have to work harder than that to achieve more? There is clearly something else going on here.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.

This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:

1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.

2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.

> 1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard?

I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through.

> How did you get into computer science?

John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.

I'm more interested in the process leading up to college, your work ethic definitely makes a difference there but your opportunities when you are younger affect whether you ever even go to college and how prepared you are once you get there.

How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)?

I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed.

By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.

So you had support while you were able to do those things. Most of the people you were disparaging don't.

Look what happens when we stop making things "too good, too easy":

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...

There's a huge middle ground between "Being #2 is failure" and "no need to ever try to do anything"

Maybe there is when your Gini Index is in the 20's, or hell, even the mid-30's. When it's 46.1, closer to Brazil than to most other developed countries?

Then I'm not so sure.

I have read the second article you link to and I find it irrelevant to the point you are making.

That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of.

I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.

A lot of people just aren't responsible enough to do this themselves. Most people from your city probably weren't. There's probably a nearly infinite amount of factors at play there, but that's a lot of opportunities for improvement that we just aren't focused on as a nation. We're all checked out and getting sold out by our own institutions.

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