Tell HN: My dad told me I'd be a high school dropout and I make 200k a year
Before I start this.
I'm in therapy. I hit on a girl at a bar a few months ago and she finally convinced me to get therapy by saying everyone just needs it .
Everyone, especially all of you with your fabulous incomes, get some therapy.
I am so grateful to all of you, to every programmer who helped me on stack overflow. To everyone on on the Unity forums, who would help me with extremely basic programming questions. When I first started programming, I had no direction. I didn't even understand what an array was. Now, despite my dad being a psychotic violent monster, kicking me out, subjecting me to multiple evictions with my mom,I had actually gotten into a nice college after High School. I did go to community college first, and there. I met so many amazing great people.
One girl from high school who was actually extremely smart, she got into a really good school. But unfortunately she had to drop out of her for your school and go to a community, because her mom was demoted at work.
I will say from my time in college, and meeting people there's one policy I hate with the most fervancy
And it's affirmative action by far, all of my Asian friends have lives which were way worse than mine. A Chinese friend was living in a homeless shelter at 19 because his dad was so f*** abusive. His dad would just beat him every single day
I absolutely love programming. As long as you have a used laptop, you could find one on eBay for $100. All right. Maybe the battery doesn't work good, you now have a portable desktop.
Install Ubuntu on that and start hacking. That's what I did, I was like oh cool. I can like get the terminal and stuff about buying a Mac because Macs are expensive.
Shout outs to Google, for making it possible for broke kids to develop for Android phones. That 40$ Walmart phone, you can learn to run applications on that. The phone I had, the phone I used to show off the early apps that got me my first salary job. Might have been worth $100, maybe $150 at most.
And, I carry on this tradition. Programmers are a very welcoming bunch. I was a silly college dropout, and just because I installed Ubuntu on my laptop , experienced software engineers on various forums would help me with so many issues.
I think for a lot of you neck beards, it's almost like a calling. You need to help a 19-year-old who tried out Ubuntu for the first time and all of a sudden she can't play League of Legends anymore. You need to help her figure out how to install Wine.
It's surreal, and I do the same thing. My time is worth a lot of money, but if I'm on a video game dev forum and some college kid is struggling with a concept, I'll stop and take 10 or 20 minutes to research the problem and provide a solution.
It's so amazing how free all of this education is.
Now that I'm a Senior Software Engineer, I've started to give back. I've written tutorials, and I think learning to program is one of the last career options when you don't have an educational background.
It's crazy, as long as you're motivated and you have an internet connection. You can do anything. You can program and program and program and program, create the best apps you can. Get into Dev groups, show off your stuff. Eventually. Someone's going to give you a shot
And if they don't, give yourself a shot. Put your apps up on Google Play. Just keep coding. No matter what, just keep coding. Early in my career. I had so many recruiters laugh and say I should just go back to college.
Why, just say I'm not qualified.
I will say this country is absolutely disgusting to people who come from unstable backgrounds .
I still have numerous medical issues. I've only recently started treating because my dad outright refused to treat them. My dad is often confused and hurt as to why I don't talk to him now.
Back when I didn't have health care, I would often have days where I felt horrible. But hey when you're broke you just drink another Red Bull and keep going. Later on, once I started making money, I found the keto diet and lost about 80 lb. And I'm working on managing my health conditions, although my dad 's actions have caused permanent damage.
And then I found it much easy to meet someone, of course. That's never been a priority to me, as when I was 19 my first girlfriend dumped me when I lost my job
Gratitude, is the key to happiness. My first apartment, for at least 2 hours, I hugged the floor. No more evictions caused by someone else, if I was going to get evicted, it was going to be my fault. As a side note, I had to eventually estrange myself for most of my family, since they tried to get me to violate my lease which would have led to eviction 3. They're just bad people.
I wasn't getting evicted again, when I was 20 or so, I never missed a single day of work. Ever.
Work is redemption, because of my childhood. I always felt that I was unclean, that I was stupid, that's something wrong with me. I loved working 80 hour weeks. I love when the servers go down on Christmas Eve, and I'm troubleshooting server logs from my phone after I just landed.And to be honest, I'm going to be a messed up paranoid person for the rest of my life.
Even with therapy, this is who I am. Even writing this post, there's some slight fear this will somehow offend somebody. Let's just say I'm someone who would benefit from Affirmative Action. But fuck Affirmative Action.
I think of a friend of mine, who I've lost contact with. A very nice girl from a traditional Korean family. Her mom was so abusive, she spent much of her early twenties crashing on couches. She told me things I will never repeat, there's no way you're going to ever tell me that I deserve special help and she doesn't.
Fuck Affirmative Action!
In my early twenties, I was very political. I'm not anymore because regardless of political party there's one factor which will turn a person success above all.
And that's a supportive family. I never had that, my dad was so obsessed with fake prestige,. He had custody for an entire 2 years, and it was just horror. It was. I'm going to hurt you if you don't somehow get straight A's, in one case. He actually had me missed two weeks of school for a surgery.
Then when I told him, I wasn't going to catch up after missing so much school. He just kicked me out, he then later would show at my job at threaten me.
But several members of my family think this is fine. Usually people like my father have an entire support system of enablers.
Again, I was a junior in college by the age of 21. I have no idea why my dad was such a horrible human being. I was actually doing pretty well in school! The only reason I didn't finish college earlier, is because my mom didn't want to turn in a form. Now my degree in some irrelevant thing, sits on my desk as a nice conversation piece.
As a side note, therapy that you decide to attend. Can be great. Therapy someone else forces you to get is better described as forced behavior modification. I'm not going to say exactly what happened, but when this forced behavior modification did not yield the results my dad wanted. He just got even worse.
Much much worse. I went from at least having friendly chats with my father to severing our relationship entirely.
It was really really bad. Because of this experience I didn't go to therapy for well over a decade. Despite several partners practically begging me to.
One of my partners was practically perfect, you were everything I could have hoped for. Well educated, great career, carrying and compassionate. But I had just been through too much, she wanted me to get therapy, and if I ever bump into you somehow that's all I'll say .
I'll tell you I'm getting therapy, but I don't think it's going to work completely. I'm always going to have levels of paranoia that no normal person has.
And life is really good to be honest.
I obviously have no relationship with my father. But, I make enough money to finally take care of myself.
I eat great food everyday, I diet well, I travel tons. I have nothing to complain about.
Life is good.