from Hacker News

If I can do it, you can do it

by raganwald on 1/27/14, 6:41 PM with 15 comments

• by bluedino on 1/27/14, 6:56 PM

  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.

• by johnmclarty on 1/30/14, 9:40 PM

  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.

• by taybin on 1/27/14, 6:52 PM

  This is satire, right?

• by raganwald on 1/27/14, 6:49 PM

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

• by danso on 1/27/14, 6:58 PM

  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

• by majidfn on 1/27/14, 6:55 PM

  Sarcasm?

• by oftenwrong on 1/27/14, 7:04 PM

  \s