
How i became a developer from coal miner? - akarambir
http://ennovates.com/engineering/yes-you-can-do-it/
======
lkozma
The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not
a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at
6am, but ended at 1pm. This is not too bad actually. In communist Romania,
miners were actually one of the envied professions: high salaries and bonuses,
feeling of camaraderie, celebrated as heroes of communism, early retirement
(with a relatively large lump sum in the end). Mining was of course very
dangerous and demanding work, but as an electrician in a mine, one would get
most of the benefits without most of the dangers.

Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were
hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but
plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce
whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could
use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset
formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that
at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've
seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in
operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago
in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could
pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they
could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of
boredom, some did both.

Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea.

ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many
people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism.
Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with
a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder
propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is
that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy
theorists.

~~~
gaius
_many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing
through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising_

I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there
really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola,
etc...

~~~
lkozma
Not sure, but whenever it is in the news that something in fast food or in
cola is found to be harmful or addictive or whatever, the reaction of most
people is never outrage but more like "no kidding, what did you expect" :)

~~~
JonnieCache
Isn't that the case everywhere?

~~~
lkozma
Sure, but there are shades :)

ADD: also, some people would go like: "OK, this is probably nothing new. Why
was it in someone's interest to report this news now and whose interest was
it."

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olalonde
Account suspended, here's the cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fennovates.com%2Fengineering%2Fyes-
you-can-do-it%2F)

~~~
ez77
We have 35 upvotes for this story, 30kB for the content... say 100 visitors (a
3:1 visitor-upvoter ratio is more than generous). Is it normal for the
resulting 3MB traffic spike to suspend a shared-hosting account? It just seems
too bad to be true!

~~~
BasDirks
I don't think you're even close on the 3:1 visitor ratio. I'd like to see some
numbers on this.

~~~
akarambir
I'm the owner of this website and talking about the numbers. It was about 2000
visits until my account was suspended. And after redirection to
<http://ennovates.wordpress.com/> visits were 1900 there till writing of this
comment. so 44 upvotes and around 4000 visits.

~~~
ez77
Thanks for the actual figures, and sorry for my poor estimate. So the load was
60MB instead of 3MB. Just out of curiosity, was your account rightly
suspended? What quota applied?

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latch
It's a good story. From a naive distance (the only perspective I have to
offer), coal mining is equal parts romantic and disgusting. We can worry all
we want about sitting at a desk all day long, but our life expectancy has to
be considerably better than a coal miners.

I do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time.
Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that
movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to
fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost
of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could
probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget.

Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas
aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has
rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly
complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you
can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile
phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).

~~~
apsurd
If everyone believed what you are saying then nothing would get built. It's
easy to think creating/inventing things was so much easier _back then_. Think
of how famous I could be if I lived hundreds of years ago. I could easily
invent the light bulb, radio, motors, computers. Hell kids today are building
these things right! The concepts are so simple, everything was up for grabs
back then!

Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached
any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was.
_Hard_.

The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that
Zuck could have said the same about myspace...

Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but
they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on
github. Yet php is the most popular language _on the internet_. Point being,
github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny.

Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there!

edited to add: For some motivation, here's what a solo modern inventor can do:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen>

~~~
latch
Do you really believe that for all fields? Or just for software development?

I have to absolutely totally disagree with you if you are talking about all
fields. Licensing, regulatory and insurance costs alone prove a significant
barrier to entry. I also think that as a field matures, so too does the body
of knowledge and the amount of time required to become an expert in said field
increases. Look at how much more a doctor, lawyer, or account needs to know
today than they did 100 years ago.

I also think this is unavoidable in software..though I might agree with you
that we aren't there yet? However, whenever I hear someone say "Well, X didn't
have those features either when they shipped", I always cringe)

------
piaskal
There is an interesting followup to that story on quora.
[http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-
coal-m...](http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-coal-mining-
in-Romania-to-web-consulting-in-the-US-what-were-some-instances-where-you-
felt-like-giving-up-but-persevered)

~~~
jbellis
... and the first part is lifted from [http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-
my-job-to-learn-to-pro...](http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-my-job-to-
learn-to-program-What-should-I-do?q=im+about+to+qui)

------
akarambir
Awww.. I didn't even realize that i made it to the top page of HN. And off-
course this happiness came with a sad news that my shared hosting account have
been suspended. But I've redirected this link to my Wordpress.com blog. You
can read on there...

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dongsheng
Off topic but in Australia coal miner is not a too bad job, miners earn much
more than software dev, and of course, it's a much tougher job.

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junklight
I worked for a chap in Yorkshire who had been a miner and had lost his job in
the Thatchers war against the miners. He'd taken his redundancy money and
taught himself to program.

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daimyoyo
The link is borked. Anyone have a cache?

~~~
akarambir
now its redirected and working...

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john2x
An inspiring post. Thanks.

