If I can do it, you can do it | Hacker News Reader

If I can do it, you can do it

braythwayt.com

25 pointsraganwald15 comments

For every story like this, there's 50 stories of a lower-class kid who started plugging away at a computer in school or at a friends house and ended up being a programmer or sysadmin.

Plenty of people now would love to thank their aunt or grandmother for buying that obsolete-but-still-very-usable Amiga or Atari at a yard sale, or that math teacher who had a Mac in the back of the classroom, or the librarian who let them in an hour before school started to play Arkanoid and read the BASIC books.

I fit into that "50 stories" category in that I was from a broken-home single-mom, mother of 3 family with no computer-using roles models. My mom scraped up enough to buy me a Commodore 64 when I was 10 and that lead me to getting into completely self-taught (out of magazines and books) programming, first on the C64 and then on local mainframes and workstations that I would hack into (sorry!) to be able to reasonably do things like program in C -- over a 300 baud modem with no error correction, using a crappy old 13" CRT television as a display.

These days, of course, you can (and should, since it is considered a much more serious offense) skip the hacking part thanks to the internet and the fact that you can run Linux on a cheap $200 system.

In spite of that experience (or I guess in some degree because of it), I do appreciate the point he is trying to make and I see people making the same mistake he is satirizing on smaller scales all the time.

As poor as we were in the early 80s (this improved over time because my mom went back to school, became an RN and is still working in the medical field despite being a bit over 65), we were US-poor, which is quite different from being third-world poor, but wouldn't be if the ultra-libertarians succeed in killing off every social safety net we have.

Love your story. I'm smart and work hard and am successful. It would be easy to wag my fingers at others, saying "If I can do it . . ." Then I remember my brains are the gift of heredity. My work habits were crafted in a privileged childhood environment. And family connections have opened all sorts of doors. Good on those who succeed without these advantages, but I wouldn't want to try it.

This is satire, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

I hope so

Reminder: The plural of anecdote is not "data."

weeeeelllllllll...

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...

whether it is or isn't, great post.

I know this story is satirical anecdotal but I wonder what weight your parents' programming jobs has in your decision to be a programmer, at least compared to other professions? My parents were both COBOLers and that never at all interested me, yet we had a computer at home early on and my dad bought BASIC books for me to use.

Anecdotally, it seems most of my academic friends also have parents in academia. Chasing tenure track seems insane to me but if you grew up in a professor's household, it may seem less strange

I honestly don't know. When I first wrote a program, I felt like Mickey Mouse putting the sorcerer's hat on. My interest wasn't particularly rational.

My parents had no programming jobs. My father must have learned a bit of programming along the way, in support of his work, but I never saw evidence of that. My mother did not program, and I don't believe that my stepmother ever learned. When I think about friends who program or have programmed for a living, I come up with (fathers' work here): coal miner; taxi dispatcher; engineer; technician; construction estimator.

I should say that I and most of my friends were born at a time when there were mighty few programming jobs.

[edit: corrected a typo]

Well, my parents are a lawyer and court reporter so clearly not everything

Mine, farmer and homemaker

Sarcasm?

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