Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

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Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges.

I became a programmer because I had many, many hours with nothing to do at my grandparents' house. I did have a programmable calculator and the reference programming manual that came with it, so I'd recreate (in extremely basic form) the games I read about in magazines/that my friends told me about and that I dreamt of playing but didn't have access to, such as Diablo/Sim City/etc. Later I learned assembly to make faster games (I'd print out z80 asm reference tutorials at the library, write code by hand on paper, and then type it out, compile it, and load it on my calculator from a library computer a week or so later).

Honestly, lots of respect for the kids these days that are so self driven that they'll spend hours on their projects and not watching mindless short form videos. I don't think I'd have had that self discipline if I had had a phone with unlimited internet/YouTube/TikTok/etc access.

Same here. All I had was a C= 64, its manual and several magazines which sometimes had printed 6502 assembly bytes. Took me three years to figure out how to poke them to the correct ram address.

> Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges.

I'm jealous of the resources, not of the kids. No way in hell I'd want to go through being a teenager again, especially with social media existing. But that has nothing to do with the learning resources available now that were not when I was their age.

Another thing for teenagers growing up in such an environment is that the capability delta keeps expanding.

Not only are the job opportunities just starting to dry up, the competition for these openings gets ever fiercer, giving only the most dedicated people a real chance.

I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.

> I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.

Additionally, because of the scarcity of information and degree of difficulty in learning those skills 15+ years ago, you could actually get paid well enough to have very good access to the housing market wherever you'd want. Now, in some places where work actually exists, if you get a job that you can sustain long term, it might cost 100% of your paycheque to land a mortgage on much more than a tiny apartment. You realistically need to shack up with another software engineer or whatever, not just anyone you fancy which itself seems quite difficult to pin down even well into one's 30s

Go to school -> take the debt, grind for potentially years to get a job if you're lucky -> find someone who also has a high paying job -> take on an amount more debt that your grandparents can't even visualize, and are yet responsible for -> kids?

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