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Comment by Mezzie | Hacker News Reader

SO much of it is luck.

I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when I was born, my father's experience meant he could help me with coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc. to do anything).

I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates. We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that really took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports instead of tearing open tvs.

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For me, this is not luck, your parents worked hard from generation to generation instead of watching sports. This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society, it’s an inner stress that they had all their life, “How do I discover or make something to embed myself into a society where I can’t compete on connections or assets.”

Luck is they got into tinkering with TVs which led to tinkering with computers and hence tech. If they had worked hard in laying bricks maybe they wouldn't have had so much success probably.

Or making ships, in which case they would have been betrayed by their government and ended up watching their jobs, and entire professions, get shipped off to Korea.

The irony here is that we got both: Since grandpa's day job was as a factory worker at Oldsmobile, well....

We're Michiganders.

> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society

Meh, not necessarily. I like to tinker, but I wouldn't say I do it to provide value for anyone (and throwing something on GitHub won't provide value to almost anyone)

> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society ...

That seems like a massive assumption about people you don't know.

IMO, a more likely explanation is that people just tend to do the things that their brains find rewarding. I like programming because it feels like playing a puzzle game, so I'll do it for fun. For lots of other people the idea of sitting behind a computer all day solving abstract problems is pure torture.

Doing the dishes on the other hand is not mentally stimulating so I kind of avoid it until I have to do them. So my place usually isn't as clean or tidy as it could be. I also know people who enjoy the process of cleaning and tidying, and their place is always clean and tidy.

I don't think these people are more virtuous than I am for keeping their place cleaner, nor do I think that I'm more virtuous than others because I enjoy programming and can make things that they cannot. None of this is caused by abstract pondering about one's value to society. We just follow the reward structure of our brains.

You're thinking of this with a modern viewpoint, which holds that tech is inherently useful and a socially-worthy pursuit. This is a very recent cultural ideal: Even when I was growing up (in the 90s), it was way more the 'weird passion project' territory unless you were an academic.

My grandfather was born in 1919, and the parts of TVs he liked weren't the entertaining or cool parts. Furthermore, his obsession was actually detrimental to fulfilling his social role: My father says that his father wasn't good with money in part because he spent too much of it on things to tinker with, and he was socially not the most ept guy.

It was this way for other classes too:

My class background is complicated because my mother is from a decently well-off family but cut off contact and bailed at 15. One example from her childhood/family, however, is that one of her relatives was a tenured academic who helped found the academic study of pop culture. On the other hand, this was something he did after winning a Pulitzer and getting tenure for more serious work.

It's easy to forget, but 2-3 generations ago a tech interest was seen as a potentially useful eccentricity at best outside of a very few select sectors.

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