
Ask HN: How to Deal with a Conservative Family? - mion
I&#x27;m an undergrad and my family is very conservative. For instance, my aunt who works at IBM thinks &#x27;programmer&#x27; is the software equivalent of a construction worker. My grandfather tells me not to write open source software because I don&#x27;t get paid for it and so on. Any attempt at explaining why my GPA is getting lower and lower as I focus on projects outside of class is futile: they see me doing something weird, going down a path so foreign and assume I must be wasting time or doing something wrong. I imagine many of you are going or have been through the same situation; what should I do?
======
ScottWhigham
You seem like you have it all figured out - that you know "things" that your
family doesn't, or that you think that your family's life experiences are old
and stale and not relevant in today's modern world. It's funny to see this for
me, as a 42yo man. I was that way too when I was 14-24. I'm not being critical
of you - it's more a 42yo man bemusing how funny life is.

I read something yesterday that resonates here - it was a something like
"Remember all those kids in school who always asked the teacher, 'Will this be
on the test?' They were on to something. It's your job to know what the
important metrics that you will be judged by, and it's your job to make sure
those metrics are where they should be." Well, you know the metric - GPA - and
you are letting it slide because you are doing side projects. Let's swap this
out with music and see it from a different perspective: "Any attempt at
explaining why my GPA is getting lower and lower as I focus on my music
outside of class is futile."

The key point I'm trying to make is that you are _distracted_. You can say,
"Yes, but I'm doing side projects that help me become a better programmer."
Fine - that does make it better. But when your future prospective employer
looks at your resume and compares it to 3-5 other candidates, will they cut
you the same slack you are giving yourself?

~~~
wellboy
"You seem like you have it all figured out - that you know "things" that your
family doesn't, or that you think that your family's life experiences are old
and stale and not relevant in today's modern world. It's funny to see this for
me, as a 42yo man. I was that way too when I was 14-24. I'm not being critical
of you"

Compare this to a quote of Socrates from thousands of years ago :)

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous
youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... They have
bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and
love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the
room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their
food and tyrannize their teachers."

It's always been like that and it's the only way our world keeps functioning,
questioning current mindsets and disrupting existing boundaries.

------
GBKS
Why do you grades necessarily get lower due to your side projects? Is it not
possible to keep both up?

This is a good exercise in learning to communicate and to manage your image.
Present things in way they can relate. For example, you can present open-
source like getting involved in your local community or a local business
organization. You do things for free (in real world organizations you have
member events, volunteering, etc) and you gain valuable business connections
and expertise.

The 'construction worker' analogy can be put aside if you can present them a
career plan. Research the jobs you want to get, get information on salary and
benefits, and explain to your family that this holds a good future for you.

~~~
mion
I guess they don't, a more disciplined way of doing things could solve the
problem. I see, thanks for the tip!

------
brnstz
Your problem is not that your family is conservative. I don't know how "bad"
your GPA is, but if it's trending downward, the problem is not your
aunt/grandfather's views on the world, however outdated they may be. You don't
necessarily need to change their view on programming / open source, but you
should appreciate they are concerned for you, possibly for good reason.

pg has a PhD in computer science from Harvard. Do you think his undergrad GPA
was low?

You have four years to get a decent GPA, you have your entire life to
contribute to open source. You can possibly do both while in college, but the
former might be more important.

~~~
wobbleblob
Once you graduate, noone cares about your GPA

~~~
jeremysmyth
Once you get past the point that people care about your GPA, no one cares
about your GPA.

You might need that GPA to get into a competitive academic program, to secure
a research grant, to add another string to your bow when you try to convince
an accelerator that you have the smarts to back up your charm and creativity,
or simply to get a job at a competitive company.

No one cares about your GPA once you get past that point. That point is not
necessarily graduation.

------
shane_burkhart
My family isn't quite to that level but no one really understands what I do or
where I want to go. I feel like this goes for a lot of startup people. Most
people don't see what we see or understand the opportunity.

One thing that I've decided is to stop worrying about what they think. Ya they
are your family but don't let them dictate your life or dissuade from what you
want to do. I live in Missouri, and plan on moving to SF when I graduate. No
one in my family is happy about that, but it isn't going to change anything.
You still love them, they still love you. They obviously are concerned about
your future. That's excellent because the startup path is not an easy one and
encouragement is welcome.

As far as grades go, they aren't the most important thing, but don't let them
tank. Keep them manageable. They have taken a lower priority for me but I am
still able to keep them to about half A's, half B's. That's fairly sufficient
for anyone as long as you have a lot of side work so show for the rest of your
knowledge. I can tell you I've learned more on my own than I have in any of my
classes.

Overall, don't worry about your family's perception of you because it will
improve and they will eventually see where this path leads. People see
startups as a big failure, but simply put you fail to succeed. Just keep
pursuing your passion.

------
rfergie
My family are not particularly conservative, but they would still be concerned
about a falling GPA.

Perhaps you are misdiagnosing the problem?

~~~
mion
Maybe too. But I guess I didn't explain it well enough for the sake of
brevity. What I mean is, when you do the startup thing, you may end up
neglecting certain things, in my case collge. How do you let them know that
you're not wasting time when in fact you're investing in a path they do not
understand?

~~~
jacalata
How do you know you're not wasting time? How did you convince yourself? once
you have laid out the arguments you use on yourself - can you figure out why
they don't work on your parents? For instance - are you assuming a higher
likelihood of success for your startup than they are? Or an easier route back
in to college if you get kicked out for failing? Do you know something they
don't (or perhaps vice versa)? Do they think college is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity and startup ideas will always be there, but you think the
opposite? Or is it perhaps a conflict of principles, like you don't care if
you do end up working in fast food so long as you gave the startup your best
effort, and they think this would be a terrible failure of everything they
ever wanted for you?

~~~
mion
I got my current mindset after reading many books, articles, pg essays,
talking to people and so on. When you become obsessed with something you suck
in all the information about the subject out there. I wish I could just show
them a 'memory dump' of my brain.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
In other words: brainwashing.

That's what happened when you read similar books, followed like-minded people
(and have an unhealthy obsession), do discussion with like-minded people or
even steer the topic toward your own pont of view.

Be careful. You are living on your own bubble.

------
wobbleblob
Your family is right: 'programmer' is the software equivalent of a
construction worker, and you almost certainly do not get paid for writing open
source software.

Whether these truths are bad things is another matter though. Where would the
world be without construction workers? Can you imagine what a building would
cost if the architects also had to do the actual construction? And would it be
a better building for it? And who would have heard of Linus Torvalds if he
hadn't written some open source software? Your name on a popular project is a
great advertisement for yourself. It gives you a broader choice of employers
and it helps your salary negotiation.

------
olalonde
> My grandfather tells me not to write open source software because I don't
> get paid for it and so on.

Many employers give more weight on open source work than on GPA. I guess you
could try to explain him that (you could use architects as an analogy: would
he hire an architect with a great GPA but no portfolio or an architect with a
great portfolio but a bad GPA?).

------
mcv
Show them they're wrong by being successful at what you do.

Of course that's going to take a while, and it could get really annoying if
they keep nagging all that time. It would help a lot if you could get the idea
across that real skill trumps GPA. Find some examples of highly successful
programmers that didn't graduate.

~~~
mion
It does take time! I can try that too, though I'm afraid they'll say they got
lucky or something

~~~
greenyoda
A lot of the best known success cases did get lucky. For example, Bill Gates
dropped out of Harvard, but Microsoft was a tiny, obscure company (they wrote
BASIC compilers and such) until they got the contract to supply the operating
system for IBM's PC. This happened, in part, due to the missteps of their
competitors (like Digital Research). IBM's ineptitude also helped make
Microsoft successful: IBM let Microsoft keep the rights to the software
because they couldn't imagine how valuable it could be; they were still in the
mainframe mindset where the software was ancillary to the huge, expensive
hardware. Also, Microsoft didn't write MSDOS themselves; they bought an OS
called QDOS from some other company for $50K (who also didn't know what it was
really worth). So, yes, Gates got very, very lucky.

The vast majority of new businesses fail, even the ones that get VC funding
(VCs have about a 10% success rate; a handful of big successes pay for all the
failures). So your most probable startup outcome is failure, in which case
you'll need to make a living by working for somebody else. A lack of a college
degree or a poor GPA would make that path much harder.

------
intellectronica
Presumably if you're an undergrad you're an adult? Part of growing up is
learning to make your own way. You family were the people giving you direction
as you were growing up and now you're on your own - you decide what's good for
you and take the responsibility to explain your decisions. It's great if you
can still get advice from your family, but if you don't think it's good advice
that's fine. Everyone goes through this phase. It's particularly hard in the
beginning, when you're just starting to make your way in the world, but it
gets better with time. Listen to your family, make an effort to explain
yourself and also be very clear with yourself and with them about where the
line between their giving advice and your deciding for yourself passes.

------
jacknews
I think your relatives may be right, assuming you are only "contributing" to
open source, rather than leading a substantial project, or wrapped up in
potentially important research/innovation.

It's just a hobby, especially if you are neglecting your "day job", that is,
your grades.

Painful though this may sound to the HN community, it has always been the case
that people who command or deal with "things" are considered lower class than
people who command or deal with other people, and I believe this is still the
case, even in tech circles. For example, I don't believe any of the current
wave of "tech stars" have achieved what they have through technical skill
alone. It's mostly been about business acumen, marketing, timing, assembling a
good team, and so on.

The "redeeming feature" with software is that programming is actually quite a
complex skill, still open to innovation, and the demand for it is apparently
currently higher than the supply. However I believe Obama, and other figures
in powerful positions, are attempting to rectify that situation with their
"everyone must learn to code" initiatives, and combined with potential
innovation in automation and so on, the ground could quite easily shift.

So while your open-source contributions may also be contributing to your
resume, you have to consider the bigger picture of economics, and human
nature, and decide if your current hobby is really viable as a lifetime
career, and whether it can trump the "official" route to success or not.

What to do? Charge for your time. If you're any good, someone will pay. You
will learn what programming, in the real world, is all about, and your
relatives will see someone practicing "grown up" skills rather than merely
indulging a hobby.

And finally ... "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I
could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-
one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." Mark Twain.
perhaps shift the quote by a few years.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm not sure why you feel your family is conservative. Remember: these
political terms have very fluid definitions. If you stuck a gun to my head, I
might define "conservative" as "folks who don't want to change anything
because it works good enough already" while liberal would be "folks who want
to change things that aren't broken" That's just a SWAG, though. I'm sure all
my conservative and liberal friends would disagree!

So I know a lot of conservatives who do open source, who do all sorts of new
things -- after they've been around for a few years. I guess die-hard
conservatives might wait 50 years or so before trying new stuff? Usually these
guys aren't in IT, though. You have to remember that in IT something like 80%
of what we use refreshes every couple of years.

I had a very similar problem with my parents who were very liberal! To them
there were established ways of trying new things. It wasn't an issue of trying
new stuff. It was that they had a different mental model of reality than what
I was experiencing. It took a long time before they finally figured out what I
was telling them.

There are a lot of conservative people who teach interpretive dance,
improvisational acting, or creative writing. Likewise, there are a lot of
liberal people who are lifers at various BigCorps, are lawyers for the man,
and so on. Don't confuse the comic book definition of things with how things
actually work.

So the problem here is, at least from your brief description, is not that your
family doesn't want you doing new-fangled stuff. It might be that they don't
understand how the technology field works. It also might be that somebody is
paying for college and you're spending your time chasing stuff that doesn't
look like college to them. Could be a lot of things, actually. I think more
information is needed.

It's one thing to want to freeform chase your dreams. It's another thing to
commit to a structured regimen of training. Sounds like your family is
expecting one thing from you and you want to do another. As long as they
aren't writing the checks and you're not making a mistake by going in debt for
something you're not using, sounds to me like you get to decide. Time for an
honest talk.

Also, and this is tricky for tech folks, you just may never be able to convey
what the tech world looks like to them. IBM lifers have a much different view
of tech than SV types. (Each tends to disdain the other, but that's a story
for another day)

Buck up, kid! If you want to spend your evenings building free software to
change the world, go for it. But that means you have a communication job ahead
with the family -- one that might take many years to accomplish.

------
munimkazia
This is just a hunch, but I don't think your family would be too worried about
these things if you kept your GPA up. They are trying to find the reason for
the falling GPA, and blaming what they can find.

------
kbeller
What does "conservative" have to do with your question?

------
timbro
> My grandfather tells me not to write open source software because I don't
> get paid for it

Yeah, these are the values of the rat race culture we've been nurturing so
far. And look where that has taken us. Sanity?

------
davidsmith8900
\- Just keep your head up and continue to follow your heart.

------
wellboy
It's always like that and it would be weird if it weren't. You're 100% going
in the right direction. If you want to be an entrepreneur and change the
world, you will receive a lot of adversity, also for no apparent reason.

But if you do, you know you're on the right path, so go out there and kick
ass! :)

~~~
lkozma
I appreciate the positivity of your message, but I would be more cautious in
giving advice to strangers on forums.

How can one know that the poster is going 100% in the right direction without
knowing more specifics than what is written in a 3 line post?

"If you receive adversity, it means you are on the right path" can also be
dangerous advice without more information.

~~~
ScottWhigham
No kidding. We don't know OP at all so for anyone to say OP is "100% going in
the right direction" is just not an informed statement.

