Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective | Hacker News Reader

Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective

fhur.me

36 pointsfernandohur62 comments

I always encouraged my son to follow his own interests, but exposed him to what I was into. Once he got to high school and started taking "computer science" he really opened up to it and became passionate about it on his own terms. This was amazing to watch unfold and really morphed our relationship into something even more special. Unfortunately the universe decided it was his time to and he passed away a few weeks ago, a week after his 18th birthday and high school graduation. I know he would've gone on to do marvellous things to help our world become a better place, miss ya bud.

I’m sorry for your loss, that’s truly heartbreaking

thank you

This is my nightmare :( I'm so sorry

Literally - I've had this nightmare. I was shook up for weeks. Can't even comprehend it actually happening.

To the OP: I am so very sorry for your loss.

thank you both, nightmare is the only way to describe it, he had so much to give to the world.

My next commit is for him.

this made me smile

That sounds beautiful and I'm so sorry for what happened. I can't imagine what you are going through, I'm constantly terrified of something like that happening

No. Unless it's her passion, but I'm not going to encourage her specifically in this direction. I want to invest equally (as much as I can) in other STEM, in art, in sports. Maybe she'll be a playwright? Or an athlete? Or a scientist? Or dedicate her life to help other people or animals?

Even if she is interested in programming, I'd warn her about burnout, about the ultra long feedback cycles, about the exhausting rate of technology progress. Make sure she knows the path ahead. It's weighted, I know, because I can only tell her about this path and not others. On the other hand, there's weight to the other side by seeing me doing that, being able to get advice and direction.

I want her to be happy. Fulfilled if possible. Good work-life balance, preferable on the side of "life" than "work". If I can leave her enough money to choose her profession rather than have to follow the money.

> scientist

> Ultra long feedback cycles

Lol

Yeah I’m confused about that as well. Programming has among the shortest feedback cycles of all! Heck, you can get your editor hooked up so that you get near-realtime feedback as you type.

Now imagine being a particle physicist or something and waiting years or even decades just to have a chance to run your experiment!

This one confused me. Software has some of the tightest feedback cycles in day to day work of any profession I can really think of.

Absolutely. I think this is why many people basically become addicted to it. You don’t need much discipline in many cases to get things done, you can just ride the dopamine (etc) hits.

For me it's less the dopamine hits and more the assurance. I don't need to invest 3 months testing something, I spend (maybe) 3 weeks. Instead of a full day of setup and testing something small, I can try and check within minutes.

I moved out of a scientist role into software engineering specifically because I hated the long feedback cycles. My research feedback cycle would be 5-10 years.

Even though the title includes a programmer's perspective, I don't think they were saying they want their child to follow in their professional footsteps. I think it was more about wanting their kid(s) to reach their potential, develop wisdom, good character, and always work on self-improvement.

I want my children to be happy and fulfilled. Whether or not they're "like me" in doing so is of no importance.

But I do want them to learn from my mistakes (as well as the mistakes of everyone else they are exposed to). One of the things I've tried to instill in them is "Make your own mistakes, not someone else's".

Having a child now makes wanting him to be "like me" seem like such a fools errand at this point. He's so obviously his own person that even if he decided to do things in a similar way to me his path to getting there would be so different that it wouldn't actually be the same at all.

I’m not entirely sure why someone would want their offspring to “be like them” aside from validating their life choices?

Short interesting story: My mom is an Architect, one day when I was about 8 or 9 she said: don't be an Architect, you won't get paid fairly (developing country). It got burned out in my mind, like a command. And slowly moved to "Don't do art stuff". I stopped drawing and started using computers more and more.

Only in my adulthood I started to explore Architecture, and ooohhh boy, I freaking love it. And I would have loved worked with my mom, taking clients, etc.

So, just be careful on what you say to your kids about a career, or how you say it.

I'm not complaining btw, just a fact of life from a very simple comment mom made one random day.

Same story. Don’t be a graphic designer, they said. Well, now I have a designer’s eye but can’t put words nor shapes to it. Also suddenly this passion for calligraphy and typography hit me in mid twenties? Is that what they call… a calling?

That's a calling for sure, is where you mind sees it self finding a conduit for self expression. Do try it! It's a beautiful art form! And don't have to drop everything to make it, it can be a hobby (for now), but try it.

The romanticize take is a calling for life. But we humans are changing machines, and what's true to some it can be so different to others.

I had "burst of interest" to make fermented food in 2018-2019, like a crazy fever to understand kombucha/sauerkraut, etc. I freaking love it.

Now in 2022-2023 it's the compost calling. A compost is so simple, but if you want it to have it in the shortest time, with the best quality, and without any stench, you actually have to put some thought into "what goes into it".

Anyway, silly examples but hope that helps in some way.

Moral of the story - every job sucks in some way. That's why I told my kids to do what interests them but remember, they call it "work" for a reason.

Haha, it's a more practical take!

It's funny how an offhand comment can turn into personal dogma. One day driving through a beachfront town I asked my mother what job you had to do to buy one of those beachfront mansions. She joked "nothing legal!" I'm sure it affected my views on wealth for a long time.

Something so minuscule! 100% agreed.

> And slowly moved to "Don't do art stuff"

Any insight on how this part happened? As a total layman, architecture strikes me as only 10% or so art in the painting sense of art. It could be more if you also consider e.g. software design to be an art, but at that point most things are art.

Yes, you're 100% correct, I do consider Software Development an art form (self expression).

I self expressed the most with drawings in my childhood, and I had this association in my mind with art/drawing/architecture.

In my late 30's I've taken to drawing again and consumed more architecture content to settle this matter in my head.

My mom is an architect in the US and said the same thing

Sorry to hear that! It's a rough but beautiful profession.

> We are all full of all sorts of bad behaviour. Instead of accepting our faults we should strive to fix them, so that we don’t pass them onto our children.

We should work on our faults, yes. But we should also strive to accept them, so that our children learn to accept their own faults as well.

If you treat any imperfection as an intolerable flaw, you will teach your children to treat any of their own flaws as intolerable.

The ability to pass on passions is dependent on your ability to detach your ego from work and suppress subconscious hierarchy behavior. As in if display how great you are and your kid is not, you destroy the base of the whole transfer. This is not a company environment were the senior lectures the junior. Better yet, hide your ability and just encourage passionate behavior. It's okay to stay up late doing a thing you love so much it's not work anymore.

I respect what you're saying, but you should probably suppress the subconscious hierarchy behavior at work too. A little humility goes a long way.

"A programmer's perspective" but nothing unique to a programmer parent. I assumed it was going to be about all of the bad habits that go with being a dedicated tech worker, because there are lots of them.

Yeah, but I giggled when I read

> The good parts and the bad parts. This is why it’s very important to stop and ask yourself if your behaviour is the right behaviour you want emulated in your children.

That is like something I would say and people around me wonder what I talk about. Maybe he meant this

Adults think that the best thing you can do for a child is to turn the child out like them. Think about that, that's got to be one of the dumbest ideas ever. - Alan Kay ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

The big advantage of turning out a child like yourself is you can support them very well. A lot of top performers in sports, business, politics, etc. had a parent who did the same thing and was able to massively help them from a young age.

While that may be true, casting it as a binary choice is also overly simplistic - ie. how that differs from the extent to which any reasonably resourced and motivated parent could encourage talents in a child and/or find external teachers would remain a valid question. That said, professional specialisation is a cornerstone of civilization, but in an evolving global social reality driven by rapid technology change there is perhaps cause to question the traditional hominid evolutionary trick of stamping-down worldviews and practices known to the immediate parent generation; instead encouraging a somewhat broader first principles or generalist reframing for each successive generation. Probably education is headed this way. More episodic and cross disciplinary, less one size fits all formally programmed, less parent-generation connected, more present interconnected. Nurture will of course remain critically important, but for an increasingly earlier period of childhood within biological limits.

I mean... I always felt the opposite, and became frustrated (with myself and sometimes them) when my kids have developed in some of the same negative patterns (usually scholastic / work related) that I feel in myself.

>I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.

- John Adams

I do soulless and artless crap like programming so my kids maybe don't have to. I'm doing it to acquire "fuck you money" so my kids can come out of the womb saying "fuck you" and then they can go pursue more virtuous, noble, artful things.

This reads like it was written by someone who doesn't have the slightest idea about the reality of working in other "more virtuous, noble, artful things".

I have plenty friends who do art or art-adjacent things (such as design) as a full-time job, and some of them are actually doing quite ok financially (even among non-design people). Let me tell you, working a full-time employment in those fields tends to be a soul-suck to the level you cannot even probably imagine. You know, quite often (but not always), how exciting and fun programming for your own side-projects feels in comparison to programming for pay? With "more artful things", it is just like that, but with an even higher gap of suckiness. Of course, unless you are in the top 1% (or maybe even 0.1%) of the art world in terms of career success.

I am not saying that your child shouldn't choose "more virtuous, noble things" just because of what I said. Quite the opposite, I believe following what you truly want to do is the move (which is how I went into programming around a decade ago, back when both I and my parents had zero idea that it actually paid well and had good employment prospects). Can I claim that I enjoy my work all the time? No, but outside of a few short bad stretches due to a specific work environment I got myself into (and which wasn't representative of programming as a field in general), it has been generally ranging between "fine" and "interesting". If you expect any profession to be all entirely creative fun and joy, with no occasional "meh" component of work whatsoever, you are deluding yourself.

The grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. But it tends to become blinding neon green level of brightness when one doesn't have much (even second-hand) exposure to the realities of that other side.

> I have plenty friends who do art or art-adjacent things (such as design) as a full-time job

The comment you're replying mentioned "fuck you money" for their offspring. That means said offspring will not need to work to make a living.

A good chunk of the people I know that I had in mind when talking about it definitely had essentially unlimited (for all intents and purposes) trust funds from their parents.

That didn't change the fact that the art jobs they were doing were soul-sucking, even when they were working solely for themselves (literally just working on art pieces to try to present and/or sell as a part of their own business or for art galleries). Which was evident to me, based on how they would have multiple "burnouts" per year where they stop doing anything at all.

Imo being successful in art is like being successful in other fields with a long tail-end of success (where the top 1% or 0.1% is doing great, and very few actually care about the works of the rest), such as film/athletics/music/etc (with the only difference being that art seems to be more difficult to break through without pre-existing financial means).

And you don't worry about the impact of raising a child from day one with a "fuck you" attitude? Besides, unless it is double-extra-fuck-you money, money can run out. Some would argue this is more true when that money is in the hands of people who never had to earn it.

Programming isn't always soulless and artless. That's how I'd describe work, but not side projects.

In terms of programming, if my child wants to imitate me and learn to code, then fine, but doing so is riddled with problems. Firstly, code is so unforgiving, unlike art, where mistakes in art can be tolerated and even add to the aesthetic of the art, but one single misplaced comma in code ruins the whole program.

Then there's the countless times you have to bang your head against the wall whilst coding because of some unrelenting problem/bug that just won't go away and you've spent 5 hours straight combing Google for a solution, but you need the grit to solve it all by your lonesome. No savior of a snippet will solve it for you.

Then there's the mental gymnastics required to envision the end result of your code and the delayed gratification you endure when everything is in prototype mode for long periods of time. You have to have the vision of the end product and execute accordingly.

Coding is not for everyone, but imitate at your leisure.

The worst part in retrospect is the sedentary, seated, nature of the work. I don't necessarily want to encourage either of my children in this direction for this reason alone. It turned out to be quite unhealthy.

Tbf, aren’t the overwhelming majority of white-collar jobs sedentary and seated? I agree that it’s not healthy, but I don’t think it’s unique

Not to mention this whole LLM thing people are talking about...

Aye, in the future your ability to be creative and loquacious may do more for you when there is an AI interpreting your inputs.

Someone is going to have to tweak that AI but it may be more like a handful of highly-skilled and razor-sharp AI surgeons instead of legions of hackers.

Or cuz the AI will wake up and exterminate us like a bug...

trying to get paid to do art is much harder path that being a programmer when you're not really into it and doing art on the side

I would not want my children to be like me. Not because of my imperfections or whatever the article is trying to say. Even if I were a perfect model human the same would hold. Simply, the world has already had its opportunity to experience me. It doesn't need to try again.

Yes and no. I would like my children to grow up to be a better version of me, one where my mistakes are a foundation for their education, where the good I do they do better etc.

I made up my mind a long time ago that my children can be anything they want, as long as it is good, as long as what they want does not hard others.

I want to introduce my kids to programming, but I also want to see them experience art, sport, and music and everything else the world has to offer. I don't care if they are programmers, I care that they get a bit of an experience at it.

I would rather they grow up to be better than me.

I have a hard time imagining a role that places one closer to the center of the human universe. Enabled & creative & empowered.

The major downside is the Aladdin problem. Vast cosmic power. Itty bitty living space (& mortal lifespan to spend). These capabilities we have could be better spent, do end up entangled in so many frustrating stifling enterprises. But they're still amazing abilities. I'd wish such great adventures for anyone.

I would love that my kids applied code to automate stuff and solve complex problems. Would I want them to become software engineers? I wouldn't, because they would most likely end up working on some SaaS product or something equally stupid, and burn out every few years. But if they went into something like aerospace engineering, energy, or whatever, and happened to write a bunch of code, it would be really cool.

My 0,02€: Having become a dad late in life, I have plenty of perspective. When discussing our 3yo with my wife, I note that I've identified a couple of deficiencies in my own upbringing & school-age experiences that I don't want my kid to have to repeat. Just trying to leverage the benefit of experience.

Essentially where I'm at as well.

Didn't have kids young, and man they're tiring, but in exchange for energy I can see what I want my kid doing and NOT doing. And really, it's mostly the NOT-doing stuff I'm worried about.

The kid will be into what they are -- it would be nice if they're into the same stuff as me, but it's fine if they aren't. But there are a bunch of situations I wish I didn't have to go through that I'd like to spare them from. Biggest one being a military brat and moving a lot, and never really being able to dive into a hobby or group.

Bullying is another eh

Nah.

Don't be a programmer sweet child o' mine. Unless you wanna go bald.

Time for a happy story, and a sad one.

When I was a kid in the late 1950s, we had a typical TV of the day, with a dozen or so tubes that would often burn out, so the TV would "go on the fritz".

Dad would pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box, take them to the corner grocery and plug them into the tube tester one by one, and buy a replacement for the bad tube. And I would tag along with him.

The next time the TV went on the fritz, I asked him, "Dad, can I pull out the tubes and test them and find the bad one and put the TV back together?" He said "Yes, you can!" So I did.

He was also an avid fisherman and took me and my sister on his fishing trips. I didn't take much interest in that, but he never pushed me into it.

Mom was an accomplished seamstress but didn't have a knack for mechanical things. So when her sewing machine needed oiling or minor adjustments, I found the manual and took care of it for her.

She also had a Smith-Corona Portable Electric Typewriter that came with a touch typing course: a little paper easel with exercises and a set of phonograph records with voice instructions. Given my interest in machinery, I thought this was cool and worked through the entire course, learning to touch type at the age of eight.

Fast forward 40 years.

I will call my late wife Carol, and our two daughters Alice and Becky.

I was working one evening when Alice walked in and asked, "Dad, whatcha doing?" I said "I'm working on some JavaScript code." She asked, "Can I do that?"

My eyes lit up and I said "Yes! You can!"

I grabbed another laptop and set her up next to me and showed her how to write a simple loop and an if statement.

The next evening, Becky asked, "Dad, what was Alice doing last night?" "She was learning to write JavaScript code." "Can I do that?" You can guess my answer.

Over the course of a few days, they started competing with each other! "Dad, am I ahead of Alice?" and "Am I ahead of Becky?"

Around 11 a few nights later, my late wife Carol walked in and said, "Why is Alice up so late?!" I explained that she and Becky had taken a sudden interest in programming and I was tutoring them.

She would have none of it. "They have school at 8 in the morning and we have a curriculum to follow. They can't stay up late doing this!"

We were homeschooling at the time, which I thought was a great idea because it would allow our daughters to find things that interested them and pursue them. But Carol only wanted them to follow a strict schedule with a standardized curriculum that she had bought, even if it bored them to tears and kept them from finding their real interests.

I can't really blame her. She did what she knew how to do. I can only blame myself for not pushing back and insisting that it would be great if our daughters could have an opportunity to dig into something that interested them.

An opportunity like I had when I was young.

Both the girls dropped out of our little programming course after that and never took an interest in it again.

I don't know what could have happened if they had been allowed to pursue this interest.

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