Ugh. I sympathize with this argument but its flaws are so glaring that it's trivially knocked down, which is a shame, because there is a class privilege argument to be made about this field. Before you say "programming since age 8 just means you had rich parents", you have to address the fact that most kids with rich parents don't become hackers, and that even if you're not impoverishing yourself to support the hobby, you're still making sacrifices (notably social) to support it.
I've had a computer for a long time, but looking back, when I was 8 I was lower-middle to middle-middle class at best. I say "looking back" because I didn't really realize it at the time, but in hindsight it's pretty clear. My dad bought a Commodore 64 not because he was rolling in filthy upper-class lucre, but because he saw the future coming and made that a priority for himself. And it had been out for a while before I got one; I think my dad said he bought it at $299. Which is of course still more than $299 today, but there's a lot of people who could scrape up enough for the C=64, disk drive, handful of floppies, and some TV somewhere (mine certainly wasn't a new TV!).
I find it hard to apologize for being lower-middle class at the age of 8-ish. Over the years he clawed his way up to middle-middle class and I did end up with a family computer of more value in my midteens, but, well, again, I have a hard time apologizing for this.
(Which was actually somewhat harder to work with than the C=64, in many ways; open source was terribly young and I had no access to the Internet for quite a while. The BBS software percolation system wasn't necessarily the best. Everything commercial was out of my reach, especially before open source started forcing dev environments down in price.)
There has to be some point where people take responsibility for themselves, after all; nobody forced me to actually learn about it instead of just playing games like all my friends of equal class who also had such machines.
The key here is you were able to snag influence from your Dad. Luckily he was bright enough to see the potential and was resourceful which spawned your interest.
I was just thinking some more about this on the same line. If you want to call that privileged, you know, I'm open to that. In fact I'd say arguably this is "more privileged" that merely being rich, which is sometimes oversold.
It's just that I don't feel like I can apologize for this or feel bad. It isn't in anybody's best interest for me to try to pretend this was somehow bad.
I wouldn't expect even the privileged to apologize. It's awesome that some people were able to shake up the world of computers sooner, otherwise, we wouldn't have what we have. It's people taking advantage of what they can get that ends up producing some great stuff. So I'm a little late to the party? Doesn't mean the party isn't going to be awesome in my book!
Please don't miss the point: you had the opportunity, as did many of your middle class peers, to discover your aptitude for computers at an early age. This is not an opportunity afforded to children in low income homes. You are not required to apologize for this. Please don't. Just recognize it for what it is, and be grateful you had an early chance to discover something you love.
My 8 year-old and I are starting a side project to build Ubuntu machines out of discarded parts for low income families in our city. One of the reasons we're doing this is that kid out there who might be a genius programmer, but would otherwise never get the chance to hack a kernel or troll a newb on IRC.
I agree that "recognize it for what it is and be grateful for it" is the right reaction to having had an opportunity that a lot of people didn't have, but it's much different from the attitude of this and similar articles.
Good luck with that project -- if you find even one kid like that or anywhere close, you'll have done a lot of good.
First, just because you're well off doesn't require you to become a programmer or a hacker, the author is not claiming that. However if you were so inclined, you immediately have a leg up on others due to the circumstances you find yourself in, and the resources you have available to you. Denying that just seems stupid.
Second, the notion that becoming a good hacker requires social sacrifice is pathetic; misleading; stereotypical. Pick your poison. If you've made social sacrifices, don't blame computers.
On top of that, you still have the opportunity to make that sacrifice. If you have 12 siblings and live in the ghetto, or out in coal country, there's not much choice about who you have to interact with or the obligations you've gotta fulfill.
That's the whole point. If you grew up in a well off family who had access to a computer at home, or attended a school system that was able to get PCs, you were part of a fortunate group, as distinguished from people who did not have those opportunities available to them.
I'm not denying that class plays a role --- in fact, I think I made that pretty explicit. I'm arguing that "hacking since you were 8 isn't so much a badge of geek cred as it is an artifact of your social class" is a really bad way of making that argument, since hacking since you were 8 actually is a badge of geek cred.
If you look, you'll probably find that people who've trained for pro-tennis since early grade school also tend to be well-off. Guess what? They really are fanatical tennis players; they aren't just "people that had the opportunity to be shuttled to expensive tennis lessons in their childhood".
You seem to be trying to engage me in an argument where we're both on the same side. That sounds boring. Let's instead engage with the article article that was posted.
I completely agree that I'm privileged (believe me, I've been through this particular debate more times than I can count, since my geek wife grew up in Orchard TX and paid her college tuition as a hotel maid).
Yes. I agree there is a class issue here. I agree so much that I think bad arguments about the class-based glass ceilings are harmful. Why even go to this place, about how committed 8 year olds really are? It's just silly.
Why? Why is it a badge of geek cred? Cause you're so old sk00l?
The fact that you have more demonstrable experience may be a badge of honor. That you have had more time to hone your craft perhaps that's worth something.
But the fact that you've been programming for 10 years longer than someone else by itself doesn't mean anything, and it is otherwise irritating to hear people tout that as some sort of credential.
So perhaps your right that the author is not addressing the key point, which is that bragging that you've been using a computer longer than someone else is dumb. The author however is also pointing out that it's also pretentious.
And agreed, starting a fight for the sake of starting a fight is not the best use of either of our hours :)
Yes. Because being old sk00l does count for something.
In fact, I'll go further than that: the graph of payoff vs. practice over age is nonlinear, and the time you spend from 8 to (say) 14 is probably more valuable than the time you spend from (say) 18 to 22.
My friends growing up who coded were writing their own protected mode operating systems, building 3d engines, and modem file transfer protocols. Why? Because that is something that is easier to do when you're too fresh and ignorant to know what a pain building those things turns out to be.
Is the lack of access some 8 year olds have to this uniquely valuable development time a problem? Yes, friend, it is. That's a good argument. Which is exactly why arguments that boil down to the notion that it isn't valuable or a credential are bad arguments.
In what world do you live in that honing a skill for 10 years longer than someone else counts for nothing?
In fact, as computing moves forward, I believe the amount of insight gleaned in the early years of programming decreases. I think I would be farther along in my knowledge of programming and CS if I had started with assembly instead of BASIC. So I think being 'old sk00l' counts for quite a lot.
"most kids with rich parents don't become hackers"
That is a very good observation that I hadn't noticed before. Of the scores of rich kids I knew who had computers in their rooms, I can name on one hand the number who now code or do anything close to coding as part of their jobs.
As evidence, the author mentions the late average age that the underprivileged "received" their first computer. As I recall, one Bill Gates began hacking at an early age, not because his privileged family showered him with cutting-edge technology, but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.
but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.
iirc, gates went to a pretty well-off private school that actually HAD computers. i doubt that most people attending public schools in the 60's could even find a computer anywhere nearby. this is documented in Gladwell's Outliers (ducks!)
Trying to take this point back to the 60s is stretching it beyond usefulness, though; in the 60s even having privilege would hardly have been a guarantee of access to computers. It depended on many other things, too.
Note that I do not accuse the original author of trying to stretch this, nor you; just pointing out that if we're going back that far it becomes a completely different issue. (We can wish really hard that every child of the 1960s had access to computers for learning, but we might as well wish that every child of the 1860s had such access for all the practicality that has.)
Yeah, that definitely helps. I wasn't rocking a computer at home until 15 and I'm incredibly thankful I was able to get that when I did. My public schools in the middle of KS wasn't doing anything with computers when I was 8 and I didn't know anyone who talked about them.
oh wow, this article is bound to get flogged on HN ;) before the onslaught begins, i'd like to add my own short anecdote. reading this article reminds me of when i took my first CS course as a freshman in college over a decade ago ... i remember that there were clearly 2 groups of students (i belonged to the latter):
- those who, like this article describes, had hacked since a young age (sorry for the gross generalization, but these tended to be middle or upper middle class white males)
- those who had maybe taken AP Computer Science in high school but otherwise had no real programming experience (these tended to be minorities in race, social class, and gender)
i remember that despite the best efforts of the teaching staff to 'level the playing field', the people in the former group clearly had a much easier time while many people in the latter group were intimidated by those in the former group (even when no ill will was intended). i dunno where i'm going with this anecdote, but that just popped into my head :)
The same attitude is effaced on HN about persons in liberal arts studies. A hacker was brilliant enough to see that the world was headed into computers, or their parents were, and they were led down the right path.
People are bound to want to claim that people deserve what they get, it justifies their wealth, and comforts them in the face of another's misfortune.
Anyone who had access to a computer at 8, whether their parents worked hard to buy it, or had flows of wealth, was damn lucky, and needs to recognize that they are damn lucky. Anyone smarter than the average has to recognize that they're damn lucky. And if there's any posthumanists in the crowd, they should figure its quickly in their interest to view society from a perspective where the weak get supported: we're all of us quickly falling into the category of the weak.
Lucky, yes, but not privileged. The plethora of stories listed here, to which my own could be added, show that we were just lucky to get hold of computers so young.
Honestly, I don't think those computers were that expensive. My first Computer was not even a C64, it was a ZX Spectrum. Not sure how much it cost - but if that was too much, you could get "build your own" kits for ZX 81, I think they were << 100$ (maybe 50$)?
Without a doubt, there were a lot of people in the world who couldn't afford it. But in the western world, I suspect not that many. The privilege is more having parents who are understanding and caring enough to make the investment.
Granted, you also needed a TV... How common were TVs back then? I am pretty sure a TV was way more expensive than a ZX Spectrum.
While for the C64 you needed an extra storage medium, the Spectrum could save to and load from normal tape recorders.
I remember mine (1981-2) being $100, but that was a long time ago. We hooked it to a junky old black and white TV somebody had thrown out. I think TVs were pretty ubiquitous by then.
The class privilege in hackerland is when Youtube gets bought for a billion dollars because one of the founders is getting married to the daughter of SV royalty, not that your parents could afford a $600 computer in 1985.
Jim Clark got them the investment from Sequoia.
Google would have bought them, but the reason they bought them for a billion dollars instead of a hundred million is because of the intertwined social aspect of all the people at Google and Sequoia involved with the deal.
i attribute a lot of my success and my love of computers to my dad buying me an apple 2E and a programming book when i was 10. now hardly a day goes by when i don't think how lucky i am to be doing something i love. so yes, i was privileged and for that i am incredibly grateful.
I presume that they weren't interviewing school children for the survey. You can hardly say that, because 39% adults thought that a computer was unnecessary, deciding (rightly or wrongly) to not get a PC wouldn't disadvantage their potential hacker children, when compared to hacker children who did have parents who jobs required them to have computers.
The article argues that most hackers are hackers because their parents were wealthy. At some point you must accept that this argument is no longer applies for some generation of hackers and those that follow it. I submit that 10 years ago, economics no longer played a role in whether some one could afford a computer.
Your point could apply to any generation of hackers because it's analogous to "what if some parents didn't let their children use a computer until they were 12?" or "what if some parents didn't allow their children to install a python interpreter?"
Also, you should consider that in 2000 nearly all school children had access to school computers.
At some point you must accept that this argument is no longer applies for some generation of hackers and those that follow it.
Of course, but it looks to me like most of those working in the industry are still a fair bit older than I am (and it's been a few years since I was an incoming undergrad).
Whether this is true for a given person depends on when they were 8.
For a 48-year-old, this would certainly be true. For an 18-year-old, not so much. The march of technology has more or less solved this one particular issue.
I don't buy it. I grew up on a subsistence farm and we were, I think, living well below the poverty line. I started programming when I was 8, on a Timex Sinclair 1000, which my brother and I saved up to buy. We learned by trial and error and a ZX81 assembly book that came from the library. I picked raspberries one summer (among other things) to buy a C64.
> Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that.
That's an unfortunate attitude and just not true. This reminds me of a thread (on mathoverflow I think, but I can't find it) where the general consensus was working hard throughout grad school (in math) was the great equalizer, and mattered more than how much background you came in with. The same is true for undergrad and CS.
Moreover, it isn't a competition. Someone else being an amazing hacker doesn't detract from what you know. In fact, having such people around can teach and inspire. I'd much rather be a small fish in a big pond (as I am.)
"working hard throughout grad school (in math) was the great equalizer"
The trouble is that so many people don't do that. But also there is only so much that effort can overcome. I have been coding for nigh on 30 years, having started with a hand-me-down Trash 80, Model I, Level 1. I have worked in all kinds of environments and hired coders who fell variously into both camps. Almost without fail, the coders who have been coding since they were kids do better. It is almost like breathing for them. I don't know how to explain it, but they have almost a Zen-like relationship with the machine that no degree or amount of compressed effort will match. I would like it to be so, but it just isn't the case in my experience.
Bull. Shit. When I was 8 years old, I started computing, but not at all because I was privileged. Just because someone has a computer at a young age doesn't mean they're parents went out and bought a state of the art computer. As an immigrant family we couldn't afford much in the way of leisure, but they at least knew a good deal when they saw one. So, when they saw a "computer" at the local flea market for a $100, they went for it. That means that I was hacking BASIC in DOS on a Tandy 1000 while all my friends played flight simulators in Windows 3.11 on their immensely more expensive/powerful 486's.
Seriously. My parent were broke, too, and they went to some spiel on a timeshare to get a blisterkey timex mini computer thing (this by the way is how we got our family toaster, as well). But it spoke basic. And I started there. With a free POS computer that was more like a calculator.
Arguments about privilege and CS degrees are apologetic and sound an awful lot like excuse-making.
Access means a lot, but it's irresponsible to alienate entire classes with broad-stroke generalizations. This is the same sort of crap that makes the Left look so lame. And I can't quite get the intent behind the post. If it's simply to increase access, then that's a noble cause. But it sure seemed more like whining.
When I was eleven my father -- a painter who worked fourteen hour days -- bought me an Atari 400 because it was the one thing I wanted most in the world at the time. We were not privileged...my father just recognized a desire and talent in me that he wanted to help foster. I love you, Dad.
My parents were working class slobs, but they bought me a computer at the age of 10. It was a TRS-80 Color Computer which was the cheapest thing you could get at that time. It was just about the only thing they spent money on for me. I got no piano lessons, no braces, no model rockets, nothing -- except a Dad who wouldn't take a foreman position when he was offered one, a Mom who taught me to "stay in a dead end job you hate no matter what"... Hell, the schoolteacher and carpenter next door wouldn't talk to me family since they thought my parents were just a bunch of scabs...
What a load of bollocks. My parents were dirt-poor (on an first-world scale) growing up. I did all my early learning on an IBM PC-XT (which was given to us). It was nearly decade-old technology by the time I started in on QBasic, and not worth very much at all. I bought my first computer at age 14, with money that I'd made over the summer gutting and renovating houses.
Sure, in a sense, I was privileged, in that my dad did everything he could to give me a competitive advantage by introducing me to logic (I wore out his Martin Gardner books), chess (he never pulled a punch. We played for years before I beat him), classical literature (what extra money he had went to books. He has a library I still envy), music (he has a degree in music, which helps explain the lack of financial resources), and mathematics (he taught me algebra and trig years before I ran into them in school). He inspired a thirst for learning in me, and did everything he could to develop my ability to think critically because he didn't have financial resources. If that's a "disgusting flaunting of privilege", then I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to apologize for having parents who cared about me enough to push me to develop my ability to think. They did the same with my other siblings - two younger sisters and a brother. None of them are programmers, despite the fact that they grew up with more money and technology than I did.
What this article really reads like is someone with a martyr complex making excuses for why they aren't good at whatever. Sure, there are people who are in CS who were privileged, and given a leg up by parents who could afford expensive technology, but it's flatly offensive to say that everyone who was interested in computers from a young age is a spoiled child of privilege who flaunts that privilege in others' faces.
Same story here. Our family was poor-- getting evicted was like a family past time. My brother and I were salvaging 8088s and 286s when 486s/Pentiums were selling for an unimaginable amount of $1400. We would dial into the library with our 2400 baud modem-- I designed my geocities homepage offline and then uploaded it using Lynx because it was the only free internet access I could find.
True - when I was ten in 1966 I, following the instructions in a library book, built a Turing machine out of two sheets of paper and, following the program there, added two symbols to three symbols to get five symbols. That was a ll the computer there was for kids in 1966.
Also, this article is total PC crap, following the standard anti-male, anti-white, wahwah bullshit.
She DOES actually touch at the truth for a second when she quotes this
“There is a subset of boys and men who burn with a passion for computers and computing. Through the intensity of their interest, they both mark the field as male and enshrine in its culture their preference for single-minded intensity and focus on technology.”
This is totally true and I was one of them.
Oh, and of course, we're racist too. Here's an exchange-
Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:
“Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.”
– Undergraduate CS Major
Magically, when the black BB guy owns you on the court it is somehow NOT unfair at all.
We weren't poor growing up but we were not far from it (at least according to the Western standards). I remember having to eat only once a day and wearing clothes with holes in them because we couldn't afford to go clothes shopping. My father, a good engineer with a university degree lost his job after the Soviet collapse and my mom had to work 2 janitor jobs.
However, if my father knew someone who had a broken radio or TV he would get it for me so I can take it appart and play with the innards. I had a soldering iron and a neighbor had given me his old voltmeter. So I was learning quite a bit without having expensive equipment.
I started to like computers, because I saw them at schools. The Americans had donated us some nice shiny IBM computers and we were fighting to get access to them after school. My mom notice my new infatuation with computers, and she saved enough money for half a year and then bought a Russian ZX Spectrum knock-off and a tape player.
I had asked my neighbor (who was a TV repairman) to hook the console up to our old black and white TV. Then I learned English so I could read all the programming manuals. My friends used to copy and pirate games. But I enjoyed writing basic, assembly, pascal and C. If you segfaulted, you had to reaload the compiler from tape so you waiting for 10 minutes. It was a fun but very arduous process.
Anyway, the fact that we were poor didn't prevent me from hacking since I remember. All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education.
(By the way mom was not allowed to go to school after her 7th grade because she had to support her family. I think she vowed that her children will get all the education they want no matter what).
"My father, a good engineer with a university degree"
Are you sure you (and those who upvoted) know what social class is? To be fair there are many definitions, but having a university degree would be put your father as middle class in most of them.
"All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education."
And that's in most cases parents who themselves are educated, which has been shown in countries with free education.
"That is simply not true."
Just because you have a different experience doesn't mean you're the norm or that the argument is invalid.
> And that's in most cases parents who themselves are educated.
Read my comment again. My mom wasn't educated past 7th grade. She knows simple arithmetic enough to count money and pay bills. She doesn't know what an isosceles triangle is though.
My father was educated well but he had lost his job and didn't have work for years. We didn't have enough food to eat. But what my parents had, was a desire for me to be educated. Not by forcing me to necessarily get good grades but by encouraging my hobbies.
EDIT: removed an unclear sentence
> Are you sure you (and those who upvoted) know what social class is? ... having a university degree would be put your father as middle class in most of them.
What about a homeless person on the streets who has a PhD? What class are they in? I would say they are in the "poor" class. What about not being able to buy food or clothes? What class is that? I would say in the Western society nowadays that would qualify as "poor". Granted there were some who didn't have a place to live and fared a lot worse, but we were not far from it either (at least that's how I felt and remember it). Education and social class don't necessarily go together.
> Just because you have a different experience doesn't mean you're the norm or that the argument is invalid.
Of course. I think that is implied since that statement is followed by my personal story. However I knew some kids my age that went through a similar experience.
It seems in general these type of situations are common in countries that have decent education but ultimately suffer an economic meltdown. So my experience was probably more common for those who grew up in ex-Soviet union and experienced its collapse. We ended up with a lot of educated people who, despite their education, became very poor.
Wrong, unless "privileged" means "not in abject poverty." We were distinctly lower-middle-class. I bought my first computer myself with my lifetime-accumulated birthday/lawnmowing/snowshoveling money.
I wouldn't say privileged, but certainly lucky. My father worked very hard on the railroad for his money. He wasn't 'privileged' himself, either; he came from a poor family and rose to the middle class by working like a dog.
Also, I knew some 'very poor' kids who had these machines. Funny, I don't remember them being expensive (but what did I know; I was 8 ;) Maybe they were; I'm too lazy to research it.
He was "privileged", it's just that the term has a particular meaning when used here that is different from "rich" or "wealthy" which you and it seems every other poster in the thread so far has missed.
There's a fairly comprehensive introduction to it here:
"Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.
Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege."
That's just male privilege, you get others from class, sexuality, religion, health etc.
I bought my first computer in the 80s, when I was 9 years old, for 10 UK pounds that I had saved from delivering papers. My family was quite poor, and my parents never would have bought me a computer. My ZX81 was considered old and crappy when I bought it, but I taught myself to program using it.
When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a normal kid. This means I was made to play outside a lot.
A couple of my friends' parents were programmers, so they had computers at home. They could write programs in BASIC and Pascal and make them do cool things. I wanted to do that too.
I had a notebook where I would secretly write BASIC (it was terrible code, by the way). My school had computers, a whole 10 of them. They were 286s running DOS. When I would get a chance, I would plead with a teacher at my school to let me stay in the computer lab after hours and try out my code.
I got my first computer at 14. Now, it wasn't my computer. I could have at most an hour a week on it. This was a rule that was strictly enforced. So I was still writing a lot of code on paper (usually hidden under my math notebook).
So I was never encouraged to become a programmer, I was actively discouraged from doing that. But somehow even without access to a computer I wanted to code.
At a certain point my parents just gave up trying to make me a lawyer or doctor. So there's a happy ending. Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of story.
Screw you lady. I'm tired of you and your "social justice" cabal that try to make me feel guilty about EVERYTHING. I started programming in high school and I've worked my fucking ass off getting to where I am.
Your article does nobody any fucking good. All it does is try to make certain people feel guilty about their success and gives everyone else an excuse to not work hard because "well, the cards are just stacked against you". Fuck you. You rob people of motivation.
I think you've misread the article. You have worked hard, which is great. Other people have also worked hard, but they started later and had fewer opportunities in this field. Does this mean you should feel guilty? No. It means that you should try to treat everyone with respect, not just the lucky ones who had the right kind of access to the right kind of tools as children. It means sneering at that person in class who doesn't know what a for-loop is is unhelpful and jerky. If you don't behave that way, you have nothing to be ashamed of.
I'm not sure where I fit in this discussion. I was comfortably middle class growing up. But I didn't have a computer until I was a sophomore in high school. And while I thought it was cool and I spent time on it, I didn't do any actual programming until I took a course my senior year of high school.
In my freshmen year of college, as a CS major, there were plenty of students who had been programming much, much longer than me. In theory, I was at a disadvantage because just about everything was new to me. But, in practice, everything evened out by about junior year. Yes, the students who started programming well before college were at an advantage for the first few programming intensive courses. But very quickly, a CS curriculum goes into material most people don't teach themselves.
The article doesn't really have a point. The title is really the only thing that the article is trying to demonstrate. "Privileged" is a code word in feminist discourse, and is applied to virtually any and every distinction that social beings make.
The overall thrust of the article is to shame—i.e. if you had an opportunity that others didn't have, you should feel guilty about it. It's not clear to me how this kind of discourse moves society forward. Everyone has different opportunities, no one is pretending that poor people have just as easy a time as rich people. If you have a claim to status ("I've been hacking since age 8") that's based on a pre-existing advantage, you should feel guilty for claiming such status.
This type of discourse is not about hacking or hackers or geek culture, it's a discourse that is deeply offended by the very existence of status or distinctions, and has trouble believing that any source of privilege has been earned (unless you happen to have a subaltern identity).
Well put. To use an example that's well-known here, this is like pretending that Bill Gates only became Bill Gates because he had rich parents and got access to a computer at 14 years old in the late 1960s, and that his great intelligence and willingness to work harder than most people have even considered working at developing his ability were irrelevant or incidental.
The implication that if you're white, male, middle-class or up, etc., then you're only where you are because of unfair advantage and should be considered an "oppressor" is everywhere in this sort of so-called discourse. Look to the Soviet Union or Khmer Cambodia for what this ideology, empowered and taken to an extreme with some slightly different axioms, can lead to.
By the way, thanks for teaching me a word -- "subaltern." I was disappointed to see that it's mostly an identity-politics buzzword, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI find it hard to apologize for being lower-middle class at the age of 8-ish. Over the years he clawed his way up to middle-middle class and I did end up with a family computer of more value in my midteens, but, well, again, I have a hard time apologizing for this.
(Which was actually somewhat harder to work with than the C=64, in many ways; open source was terribly young and I had no access to the Internet for quite a while. The BBS software percolation system wasn't necessarily the best. Everything commercial was out of my reach, especially before open source started forcing dev environments down in price.)
There has to be some point where people take responsibility for themselves, after all; nobody forced me to actually learn about it instead of just playing games like all my friends of equal class who also had such machines.
It's just that I don't feel like I can apologize for this or feel bad. It isn't in anybody's best interest for me to try to pretend this was somehow bad.
My 8 year-old and I are starting a side project to build Ubuntu machines out of discarded parts for low income families in our city. One of the reasons we're doing this is that kid out there who might be a genius programmer, but would otherwise never get the chance to hack a kernel or troll a newb on IRC.
Good luck with that project -- if you find even one kid like that or anywhere close, you'll have done a lot of good.
First, just because you're well off doesn't require you to become a programmer or a hacker, the author is not claiming that. However if you were so inclined, you immediately have a leg up on others due to the circumstances you find yourself in, and the resources you have available to you. Denying that just seems stupid.
Second, the notion that becoming a good hacker requires social sacrifice is pathetic; misleading; stereotypical. Pick your poison. If you've made social sacrifices, don't blame computers.
On top of that, you still have the opportunity to make that sacrifice. If you have 12 siblings and live in the ghetto, or out in coal country, there's not much choice about who you have to interact with or the obligations you've gotta fulfill.
That's the whole point. If you grew up in a well off family who had access to a computer at home, or attended a school system that was able to get PCs, you were part of a fortunate group, as distinguished from people who did not have those opportunities available to them.
If you look, you'll probably find that people who've trained for pro-tennis since early grade school also tend to be well-off. Guess what? They really are fanatical tennis players; they aren't just "people that had the opportunity to be shuttled to expensive tennis lessons in their childhood".
You seem to be trying to engage me in an argument where we're both on the same side. That sounds boring. Let's instead engage with the article article that was posted.
Yes. I agree there is a class issue here. I agree so much that I think bad arguments about the class-based glass ceilings are harmful. Why even go to this place, about how committed 8 year olds really are? It's just silly.
The fact that you have more demonstrable experience may be a badge of honor. That you have had more time to hone your craft perhaps that's worth something.
But the fact that you've been programming for 10 years longer than someone else by itself doesn't mean anything, and it is otherwise irritating to hear people tout that as some sort of credential.
So perhaps your right that the author is not addressing the key point, which is that bragging that you've been using a computer longer than someone else is dumb. The author however is also pointing out that it's also pretentious.
And agreed, starting a fight for the sake of starting a fight is not the best use of either of our hours :)
In fact, I'll go further than that: the graph of payoff vs. practice over age is nonlinear, and the time you spend from 8 to (say) 14 is probably more valuable than the time you spend from (say) 18 to 22.
My friends growing up who coded were writing their own protected mode operating systems, building 3d engines, and modem file transfer protocols. Why? Because that is something that is easier to do when you're too fresh and ignorant to know what a pain building those things turns out to be.
Is the lack of access some 8 year olds have to this uniquely valuable development time a problem? Yes, friend, it is. That's a good argument. Which is exactly why arguments that boil down to the notion that it isn't valuable or a credential are bad arguments.
In fact, as computing moves forward, I believe the amount of insight gleaned in the early years of programming decreases. I think I would be farther along in my knowledge of programming and CS if I had started with assembly instead of BASIC. So I think being 'old sk00l' counts for quite a lot.
That is a very good observation that I hadn't noticed before. Of the scores of rich kids I knew who had computers in their rooms, I can name on one hand the number who now code or do anything close to coding as part of their jobs.
As evidence, the author mentions the late average age that the underprivileged "received" their first computer. As I recall, one Bill Gates began hacking at an early age, not because his privileged family showered him with cutting-edge technology, but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.
Let's not confuse resourcefulness with privilege.
iirc, gates went to a pretty well-off private school that actually HAD computers. i doubt that most people attending public schools in the 60's could even find a computer anywhere nearby. this is documented in Gladwell's Outliers (ducks!)
Note that I do not accuse the original author of trying to stretch this, nor you; just pointing out that if we're going back that far it becomes a completely different issue. (We can wish really hard that every child of the 1960s had access to computers for learning, but we might as well wish that every child of the 1860s had such access for all the practicality that has.)
- those who, like this article describes, had hacked since a young age (sorry for the gross generalization, but these tended to be middle or upper middle class white males)
- those who had maybe taken AP Computer Science in high school but otherwise had no real programming experience (these tended to be minorities in race, social class, and gender)
i remember that despite the best efforts of the teaching staff to 'level the playing field', the people in the former group clearly had a much easier time while many people in the latter group were intimidated by those in the former group (even when no ill will was intended). i dunno where i'm going with this anecdote, but that just popped into my head :)
People are bound to want to claim that people deserve what they get, it justifies their wealth, and comforts them in the face of another's misfortune.
Anyone who had access to a computer at 8, whether their parents worked hard to buy it, or had flows of wealth, was damn lucky, and needs to recognize that they are damn lucky. Anyone smarter than the average has to recognize that they're damn lucky. And if there's any posthumanists in the crowd, they should figure its quickly in their interest to view society from a perspective where the weak get supported: we're all of us quickly falling into the category of the weak.
Without a doubt, there were a lot of people in the world who couldn't afford it. But in the western world, I suspect not that many. The privilege is more having parents who are understanding and caring enough to make the investment.
Granted, you also needed a TV... How common were TVs back then? I am pretty sure a TV was way more expensive than a ZX Spectrum.
While for the C64 you needed an extra storage medium, the Spectrum could save to and load from normal tape recorders.
Edit: this link says the initial price was 125GBP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research Unfortunately I still don't know how much that was in $ or DM.
Presuming you're referring to Chad Hurley, you think that Google bought YouTube because he married Jim Clark's daughter?
Jim Clark, who as far as I can tell, didn't invest in Google, doesn't work for them, and isn't on their board.
And that's why Google bought YouTube for more than they were worth?
Thanks for your time and responses.
i attribute a lot of my success and my love of computers to my dad buying me an apple 2E and a programming book when i was 10. now hardly a day goes by when i don't think how lucky i am to be doing something i love. so yes, i was privileged and for that i am incredibly grateful.
Most incoming undergrads were 8 in 2000 so I would assert that this argument has no basis going forward.
[1 http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/03/18/da... ]
I presume that they weren't interviewing school children for the survey. You can hardly say that, because 39% adults thought that a computer was unnecessary, deciding (rightly or wrongly) to not get a PC wouldn't disadvantage their potential hacker children, when compared to hacker children who did have parents who jobs required them to have computers.
Your point could apply to any generation of hackers because it's analogous to "what if some parents didn't let their children use a computer until they were 12?" or "what if some parents didn't allow their children to install a python interpreter?"
Also, you should consider that in 2000 nearly all school children had access to school computers.
Of course, but it looks to me like most of those working in the industry are still a fair bit older than I am (and it's been a few years since I was an incoming undergrad).
For a 48-year-old, this would certainly be true. For an 18-year-old, not so much. The march of technology has more or less solved this one particular issue.
> Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that.
That's an unfortunate attitude and just not true. This reminds me of a thread (on mathoverflow I think, but I can't find it) where the general consensus was working hard throughout grad school (in math) was the great equalizer, and mattered more than how much background you came in with. The same is true for undergrad and CS.
Moreover, it isn't a competition. Someone else being an amazing hacker doesn't detract from what you know. In fact, having such people around can teach and inspire. I'd much rather be a small fish in a big pond (as I am.)
The trouble is that so many people don't do that. But also there is only so much that effort can overcome. I have been coding for nigh on 30 years, having started with a hand-me-down Trash 80, Model I, Level 1. I have worked in all kinds of environments and hired coders who fell variously into both camps. Almost without fail, the coders who have been coding since they were kids do better. It is almost like breathing for them. I don't know how to explain it, but they have almost a Zen-like relationship with the machine that no degree or amount of compressed effort will match. I would like it to be so, but it just isn't the case in my experience.
Arguments about privilege and CS degrees are apologetic and sound an awful lot like excuse-making.
Access means a lot, but it's irresponsible to alienate entire classes with broad-stroke generalizations. This is the same sort of crap that makes the Left look so lame. And I can't quite get the intent behind the post. If it's simply to increase access, then that's a noble cause. But it sure seemed more like whining.
My parents were working class slobs, but they bought me a computer at the age of 10. It was a TRS-80 Color Computer which was the cheapest thing you could get at that time. It was just about the only thing they spent money on for me. I got no piano lessons, no braces, no model rockets, nothing -- except a Dad who wouldn't take a foreman position when he was offered one, a Mom who taught me to "stay in a dead end job you hate no matter what"... Hell, the schoolteacher and carpenter next door wouldn't talk to me family since they thought my parents were just a bunch of scabs...
Sure, in a sense, I was privileged, in that my dad did everything he could to give me a competitive advantage by introducing me to logic (I wore out his Martin Gardner books), chess (he never pulled a punch. We played for years before I beat him), classical literature (what extra money he had went to books. He has a library I still envy), music (he has a degree in music, which helps explain the lack of financial resources), and mathematics (he taught me algebra and trig years before I ran into them in school). He inspired a thirst for learning in me, and did everything he could to develop my ability to think critically because he didn't have financial resources. If that's a "disgusting flaunting of privilege", then I don't know what to tell you. I'm not going to apologize for having parents who cared about me enough to push me to develop my ability to think. They did the same with my other siblings - two younger sisters and a brother. None of them are programmers, despite the fact that they grew up with more money and technology than I did.
What this article really reads like is someone with a martyr complex making excuses for why they aren't good at whatever. Sure, there are people who are in CS who were privileged, and given a leg up by parents who could afford expensive technology, but it's flatly offensive to say that everyone who was interested in computers from a young age is a spoiled child of privilege who flaunts that privilege in others' faces.
In pretty much all of the western world, by the 1990s (and even mid/late 80s) owning a computer was within the reach of all but the retched poor.
My parents bought a PC XT clone in 1987 and they were at best middle-class.
Also, this article is total PC crap, following the standard anti-male, anti-white, wahwah bullshit.
She DOES actually touch at the truth for a second when she quotes this
“There is a subset of boys and men who burn with a passion for computers and computing. Through the intensity of their interest, they both mark the field as male and enshrine in its culture their preference for single-minded intensity and focus on technology.”
This is totally true and I was one of them.
Oh, and of course, we're racist too. Here's an exchange-
Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:
Magically, when the black BB guy owns you on the court it is somehow NOT unfair at all.We weren't poor growing up but we were not far from it (at least according to the Western standards). I remember having to eat only once a day and wearing clothes with holes in them because we couldn't afford to go clothes shopping. My father, a good engineer with a university degree lost his job after the Soviet collapse and my mom had to work 2 janitor jobs.
However, if my father knew someone who had a broken radio or TV he would get it for me so I can take it appart and play with the innards. I had a soldering iron and a neighbor had given me his old voltmeter. So I was learning quite a bit without having expensive equipment.
I started to like computers, because I saw them at schools. The Americans had donated us some nice shiny IBM computers and we were fighting to get access to them after school. My mom notice my new infatuation with computers, and she saved enough money for half a year and then bought a Russian ZX Spectrum knock-off and a tape player.
I had asked my neighbor (who was a TV repairman) to hook the console up to our old black and white TV. Then I learned English so I could read all the programming manuals. My friends used to copy and pirate games. But I enjoyed writing basic, assembly, pascal and C. If you segfaulted, you had to reaload the compiler from tape so you waiting for 10 minutes. It was a fun but very arduous process.
Anyway, the fact that we were poor didn't prevent me from hacking since I remember. All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education.
(By the way mom was not allowed to go to school after her 7th grade because she had to support her family. I think she vowed that her children will get all the education they want no matter what).
Are you sure you (and those who upvoted) know what social class is? To be fair there are many definitions, but having a university degree would be put your father as middle class in most of them.
"All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education."
And that's in most cases parents who themselves are educated, which has been shown in countries with free education.
"That is simply not true."
Just because you have a different experience doesn't mean you're the norm or that the argument is invalid.
Read my comment again. My mom wasn't educated past 7th grade. She knows simple arithmetic enough to count money and pay bills. She doesn't know what an isosceles triangle is though.
My father was educated well but he had lost his job and didn't have work for years. We didn't have enough food to eat. But what my parents had, was a desire for me to be educated. Not by forcing me to necessarily get good grades but by encouraging my hobbies.
EDIT: removed an unclear sentence
> Are you sure you (and those who upvoted) know what social class is? ... having a university degree would be put your father as middle class in most of them.
What about a homeless person on the streets who has a PhD? What class are they in? I would say they are in the "poor" class. What about not being able to buy food or clothes? What class is that? I would say in the Western society nowadays that would qualify as "poor". Granted there were some who didn't have a place to live and fared a lot worse, but we were not far from it either (at least that's how I felt and remember it). Education and social class don't necessarily go together.
> Just because you have a different experience doesn't mean you're the norm or that the argument is invalid.
Of course. I think that is implied since that statement is followed by my personal story. However I knew some kids my age that went through a similar experience.
It seems in general these type of situations are common in countries that have decent education but ultimately suffer an economic meltdown. So my experience was probably more common for those who grew up in ex-Soviet union and experienced its collapse. We ended up with a lot of educated people who, despite their education, became very poor.
Also, I knew some 'very poor' kids who had these machines. Funny, I don't remember them being expensive (but what did I know; I was 8 ;) Maybe they were; I'm too lazy to research it.
There's a fairly comprehensive introduction to it here:
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...
"Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.
Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege."
That's just male privilege, you get others from class, sexuality, religion, health etc.
I bought my first computer in the 80s, when I was 9 years old, for 10 UK pounds that I had saved from delivering papers. My family was quite poor, and my parents never would have bought me a computer. My ZX81 was considered old and crappy when I bought it, but I taught myself to program using it.
A couple of my friends' parents were programmers, so they had computers at home. They could write programs in BASIC and Pascal and make them do cool things. I wanted to do that too.
I had a notebook where I would secretly write BASIC (it was terrible code, by the way). My school had computers, a whole 10 of them. They were 286s running DOS. When I would get a chance, I would plead with a teacher at my school to let me stay in the computer lab after hours and try out my code.
I got my first computer at 14. Now, it wasn't my computer. I could have at most an hour a week on it. This was a rule that was strictly enforced. So I was still writing a lot of code on paper (usually hidden under my math notebook).
So I was never encouraged to become a programmer, I was actively discouraged from doing that. But somehow even without access to a computer I wanted to code.
At a certain point my parents just gave up trying to make me a lawyer or doctor. So there's a happy ending. Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of story.
Your article does nobody any fucking good. All it does is try to make certain people feel guilty about their success and gives everyone else an excuse to not work hard because "well, the cards are just stacked against you". Fuck you. You rob people of motivation.
In my freshmen year of college, as a CS major, there were plenty of students who had been programming much, much longer than me. In theory, I was at a disadvantage because just about everything was new to me. But, in practice, everything evened out by about junior year. Yes, the students who started programming well before college were at an advantage for the first few programming intensive courses. But very quickly, a CS curriculum goes into material most people don't teach themselves.
The overall thrust of the article is to shame—i.e. if you had an opportunity that others didn't have, you should feel guilty about it. It's not clear to me how this kind of discourse moves society forward. Everyone has different opportunities, no one is pretending that poor people have just as easy a time as rich people. If you have a claim to status ("I've been hacking since age 8") that's based on a pre-existing advantage, you should feel guilty for claiming such status.
This type of discourse is not about hacking or hackers or geek culture, it's a discourse that is deeply offended by the very existence of status or distinctions, and has trouble believing that any source of privilege has been earned (unless you happen to have a subaltern identity).
The implication that if you're white, male, middle-class or up, etc., then you're only where you are because of unfair advantage and should be considered an "oppressor" is everywhere in this sort of so-called discourse. Look to the Soviet Union or Khmer Cambodia for what this ideology, empowered and taken to an extreme with some slightly different axioms, can lead to.
By the way, thanks for teaching me a word -- "subaltern." I was disappointed to see that it's mostly an identity-politics buzzword, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it.