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alteromHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at …

… I did; my mom was a software engineer in the USSR, and I grew up in the 1990s Ukraine with a PC at home, and went to a great high school in Odesa, and later, in Brooklyn when we immigrated. Like @susam, I played Digger on IBM PC 286 as my first game when I was 4. I have a PhD in math and Google/Meta/MS on my resume today. I owe this to many strokes of luck, but how tinkerable the PCs were was not the most significant one by far . The most important part was access to production tech, seeing it used, and having a role model that made it a natural consideration as a career choice. And the "luck" of what was available in my K12 was 100% the work of my parents who got me into those schools. Credit where credit is due, dude.

Original discussionChildhood Computing126 source comments · at import
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SA
safety1stHN

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting…

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YO
youngNedHN

Ok, just waiting on some Indian lad whose parents didn't work for ussr state software engineering to chime in, and put this guy in his place, and i can write my post-post-python class decontruction.

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EL
elektronikaHN

Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.

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SA
safety1stHN

My parents were broke. I grew up on food stamps. Mom worked retail. Dad had a few good years, his business went bust and we spent a decade below the poverty line. It was a public high school in the USA. It was in a rich neighborhood on the other side of town; our neighborhood was below median income and had one of the worst high schools in the state. My parents encouraged me to apply for attendance at the school across town via a magnet program. I got in and took a public bus 80 minutes each way for 4 years. I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my Privilege Index was. Rather to relate how public investment in resources which were available to anyone who was willing to make a bit of extra effort transformed at least one kid's life. It seems these days that public resources go mostly to those with the most money, or maybe those who were born into the politically correc…

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