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Respectfully, this is kinda BS. Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great. I grew up the

Respectfully, this is kinda BS. Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great. I grew up the kid of immigrant parents from an African country and I am an immigrant myself at 5 years old. I have a great job at a major well known tech company in a technical programming position. I'm not the kid that got straight A's. I was the smart fuckup. I almost flunked out of high school. I dropped out of college. I could barely program worth a damn out of college. It was hard work learning not only how to program but, all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Now, I'll argue there weren't a bed of nails. There were a bed of pillows. I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. I thought back then that I was walking over a pit of spikes but, it turns out I wasn't. Today is much different than even a decade ago, so much more than a generation ago. You can teach yourself how to program. You can work a minium wage job while you teach yourself. You can't do it in LA, SF, NYC but, you can live in the parts of the US that no one talks about and learn. It takes time and dedication but, one can do it. I fully financially supported my brother for two years and he didn't learn or do really anything with that time other than barely pass a bad coding bootcamp and then struggle to find a job with that inadequate education. The greater difference is the person and their perseverance than economic circumstances. As a poor person who made it by screwing up again and again and again and again. Unless I have astronomical luck, I really don't think it's that hard. Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. I learned programming (reading programming books and coding) while I watched warehouses, trucking depots and the gate at gated communities. It was still a fuckton of hard work but, the hard part was the programming not figuring out how I was going to feed myself. Maybe I'm somehow this unicorn of blind exceptionalism but, while I felt depressed and that it was hard at the time, it doesn't feel that hard now. I just kept working and it was more of less inevitable. Even today, I keep telling my brother that if he keeps working at it, it will eventually work.

carussell 10y ago
> Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. Minimum wage work may be enough to sustain someone who has a high school diploma, but well does that work for someone who did go to school, sank tens of thousands in loans, and then had to leave before finishing, assuming they have no support network?
projektir 10y ago
I don't understand you talking about genetic lotteries and then using the phrase "if you have the intelligence to program". I grew up outside of the US and I wouldn't trade that for being an average American kid at all. Being an average American kid, from what I've seen, is a lot worse than growing up in many other countries, even if overall conditions are better. There seems to be a stronger trend of immigrants making it in the US than Americans themselves making it in the US. > I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. A lot of Americans have a social policy of not allowing their child to live with them past the age of 18... Americans also assume they need to college, you skipped that entire bag of worms. Immigrants often have advantages they don't appreciate, such as being able to see the system from the outside and simply solve it, especially given that immigrants are unusual people in general, while Americans look at the system from the inside and are molded by it, and look at it as reality itself. There are plenty of people like that in the country one immigrates from, too, but those are not the immigrants.
wpietri 10y ago
Perseverance is a skill, a habit one develops. I think it's worth considering what circumstances in someone's life make learning that habit easier or harder.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
>all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Any good CS college program will teach you version control. I learned it in college first day. (Not specifically git because that didn't exist when I went to college)
- int_19h 10y ago
  Yeah, but you have to pay for good CS college programs, usually. Or spend a lot of effort to find them for cheap or free (and learn enough to be able the good ones from the bad ones first).
int_19h 10y ago
Your story is a perfect illustration of "anecdotes are not data", and self-selection bias. Think about it: the reason why you're telling us the story is that you have succeeded. If you didn't, you probably wouldn't be hanging out here on NH. And so we have your success story, but we don't know how many people persevered just as much, but didn't succeed because the curve was just too steep for them. So there's no practical way to gauge your exceptionalism from this story, or derive any practical conclusion from it. Most importantly, we don't know if your success was 90% hard work and 10% luck, or 10% hard work and 90% luck. (Note, this isn't to imply that you didn't have to work hard. What this means, rather, is whether working as hard as you did guarantees success, or merely buys you a ticket to the lottery, in which you still have a fairly low chance of winning, despite all that hard work. The latter is the "10% hard work and 90% luck" case.) And it's especially hard to self-evaluate. When you have heavily invested in all that hard work, psychologically, you're that much more likely to attribute your success to it rather than external factors, and you start thinking of it as "inevitable". The reason is that success as a result of hard work fits our notion of fairness (which ethologists say is hard-wired pretty deep on biological level) very well, and so we automatically assume a causative link between the two, on the basis that the world is "inherently fair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

carussell 10y ago

> Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. Minimum wage work may be enough to sustain someone who has a high school diploma, but well does that work for someone who did go to school, sank tens of thousands in loans, and then had to leave before finishing, assuming they have no support network?

projektir 10y ago

I don't understand you talking about genetic lotteries and then using the phrase "if you have the intelligence to program". I grew up outside of the US and I wouldn't trade that for being an average American kid at all. Being an average American kid, from what I've seen, is a lot worse than growing up in many other countries, even if overall conditions are better. There seems to be a stronger trend of immigrants making it in the US than Americans themselves making it in the US. > I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. A lot of Americans have a social policy of not allowing their child to live with them past the age of 18... Americans also assume they need to college, you skipped that entire bag of worms. Immigrants often have advantages they don't appreciate, such as being able to see the system from the outside and simply solve it, especially given that immigrants are unusual people in general, while Americans look at the system from the inside and are molded by it, and look at it as reality itself. There are plenty of people like that in the country one immigrates from, too, but those are not the immigrants.

wpietri 10y ago

Perseverance is a skill, a habit one develops. I think it's worth considering what circumstances in someone's life make learning that habit easier or harder.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

>all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Any good CS college program will teach you version control. I learned it in college first day. (Not specifically git because that didn't exist when I went to college)

int_19h 10y ago
Yeah, but you have to pay for good CS college programs, usually. Or spend a lot of effort to find them for cheap or free (and learn enough to be able the good ones from the bad ones first).

int_19h 10y ago

Your story is a perfect illustration of "anecdotes are not data", and self-selection bias. Think about it: the reason why you're telling us the story is that you have succeeded. If you didn't, you probably wouldn't be hanging out here on NH. And so we have your success story, but we don't know how many people persevered just as much, but didn't succeed because the curve was just too steep for them. So there's no practical way to gauge your exceptionalism from this story, or derive any practical conclusion from it. Most importantly, we don't know if your success was 90% hard work and 10% luck, or 10% hard work and 90% luck. (Note, this isn't to imply that you didn't have to work hard. What this means, rather, is whether working as hard as you did guarantees success, or merely buys you a ticket to the lottery, in which you still have a fairly low chance of winning, despite all that hard work. The latter is the "10% hard work and 90% luck" case.) And it's especially hard to self-evaluate. When you have heavily invested in all that hard work, psychologically, you're that much more likely to attribute your success to it rather than external factors, and you start thinking of it as "inevitable". The reason is that success as a result of hard work fits our notion of fairness (which ethologists say is hard-wired pretty deep on biological level) very well, and so we automatically assume a causative link between the two, on the basis that the world is "inherently fair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis