

If I can do it, you can do it - raganwald
http://braythwayt.com/2014/01/27/you-can-do-it.html

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bluedino
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.

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

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johnmclarty
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.

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taybin
This is satire, right?

~~~
raganwald
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

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

~~~
karmajunkie
weeeeelllllllll...

[http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-
an...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-
data-after-all.html)

whether it is or isn't, great post.

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danso
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

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

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Mine, farmer and homemaker

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majidfn
Sarcasm?

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oftenwrong
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