Hacker News Reader

> complained about my situation at home and my Dad Casually mentioned have you tried "google.com"

God damn I wish I had any mentorship at all when I was a kid, just anybody who knew about computers.

I was pretty fortunate. My Dad was a veterinarian who taught himself to program (in Pascal) he knew a lot about a certain era of computing - early 90's MS-DOS 386 era PC's. His tech skills kind of atrophied and stagnated he never really adopted to the Win 9x gui first era of computing but he still had his ear to the ground enough to tip me off about google.

My father thought computers were tools for secretaries - on which he looked down - and could not fathom why on earth it was interesting to me. Then he babbled about the one Fortran class he had to take at university, how backward those punch cards were and how he basically learned nothing. When a computer finally entered the house, I was so exited. The first thing I did was installing a copy of a programming language I got from a teacher and I was very proud to show my father. My father literally threw a tantrum. I basically had anti-mentorship. For the longest time my dream was to be unlike my father.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com