Yes, they told me to join business school - at this age the best to infect a teen with the tech-topic, because you will do the converse of what your parents tell you :-)
My dad introduced me to HTML through a program called hotdog pro when I was a kid. He's a professor and was using it to make class websites. Since he was an early adopter of new technology, that rubbed off on me.
Nope. There never was much emphasis on education at home. The climate was that if you were old enough to work, you should go work. School was for those not quite strong enough to do "real" work.
I always had the education bug in me, so when I could afford it I went to school, finished my bachelors degree and landed a programming job. (This was two years ago, I am currently 31 years old, so a late bloomer). However I have always had a deep inclination towards tech, and started coding around the age of 10-11. Over the years I just didnt think much of my skills as I didnt have a degree, thus deeming myself not good enough :P
And currently I couldnt be happier :) I understand where my parents were coming from. It was a different time.
Not the OP, but once upon a time, when you think of a programmer, you'd think of an underpaid, overworked slob hacking away in some dark corner of the office while the cool kids were out having fun.
Quite simply, they thought it would be too hard for me. I don't actually program for a living (yet?), although I do work in a related field where programming knowledge is useful.
So perhaps there was something to it, but I still enjoy programming so I'm going to continue with it as a hobby.
In my case, my father was intellectually absent and my mother convinced me that programming was too blue-collar. Her father had owned his own heating company and raised his kids to despise anything remotely blue-collar. My grandmother had been his administrative person, and we were raised thinking that being CPAs, lawyers, etc were 'respectable' jobs. Engineering was 'acceptable', if not 'respectable'; ironically we were discouraged from pursuing it because it would "take a lot of math" (wouldn't becoming a CPA require a lot of math also?). And we weren't allowed to take anything apart because "that would void the warranty!" (heaven forbid!). On the upshot, my mother is now an academic adviser and because I've chewed her out so many times about this subject, she advises all of her students to take every math class they can and she has no heartache recommending someone follow a blue-collar path, if that's what the student's interested in.
This is a dire contrast to most Asian parents I've encountered, who seem to think that medical and engineering are the only fields that are respectable. Everything else is a waste of time.
They of course supported me. But the worst part was that I had to share a personal computer with 1 sister and 1 little brother. We had to take turns which slowed me down in my development.
My children will each get their own computers for sure :-)
They bought home an old 386 machine from work when I was around 6 or 7. It just attracted my curiosity... So I got it up and running by myself when I got home from school the next day, before my Dad had got home from work (with the intention of setting it up for me himself). He came in stunned to see me playing with Paint, with all the bits plugged in correctly, sprawled out across the floor. It just made sense somehow. After a week, my kitchen was covered in dot-matrix printed pictures printed on reams and reams of paper (with those funky perforated holes on the side). I used up the whole ribbon in less than 2 weeks, which was apparently naughty haha. I also used to like making letter and signs, which I helpfully placed all over the house.
The modern equivalent is leaving a Raspberry Pi out for a kid to play with, I guess. So much fun :)
I went on to study Computer Science at uni and am now a Software Engineer, aged 23 and a quarter!
Legos [1] (starting with Duplo Train) and Kapla [2] were probably the most stimulating toys I played with. Also, Logiblocs [3], Meccano. Oh, and some random basic electric components (lamps, batteries, switches, etc). I did have some more "sciency" toys like chemistry kit or such but I quickly got bored with these.
But I think that, before that, being given the opportunity to read books, play around with a computer and having limitations (restricted computer time, limited Internet subscription, finite number of books) really made me think to find workarounds or other ways to pass the time.
tl;dr: Science and IT skills are just results of a stimulated mind from the early age
Italian here (again, for context).
My mother instilled the passion for reading in me when I was a little child. It didn't push me towards anything in particular, but it gave me the possibility to find what really interested me. I'll never be able to thank my mommy enough.
yes, my dad invested in technology in the 80's as that was the future and he and mom thought should get used to it. I remember he bought home the Commodore 64 from Germany. Besides of gaming there was always a push to look at how the machine worked etc. Reading the manual and playing with Basic and later machine code.
Good times!
No. Or maybe yes, they bought me a Commodore 64 and a BASIC book when I was a kid. It was quite popular at that time for people to have a personal computer. The OS presented itself essentially as a basic interpreter, so learning how to use the computer usually consisted in learning BASIC.
My dad brought me a book from a library when i was 8 years old:related to astronomy. Also, i found some old geography boojs around that time which made me develop interest in world geography maps!
My father was an electrical engineer. His ability to just repair/fix all manners of electronics about the house and go into depth detail about how stuff worked gave me deep insight.
We also had a ZX Spectrum 48k in the house which I learnt how to code BASIC on and read/write from tape.
The turning point for me, though, was when I wanted a SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) for Christmas and he persuaded me that I should have a Commodore Amiga instead.
So I got the Amiga 1200 and ran with it. That introduced me to more programming languages, a GUI that was pretty much replicated across the PC platform and beyond and all sorts.
My father got me a subscription for a computer magazine (finnish Mikrobitti) as a part of it you got an email account some space on their servers /~username/ and a 56k modem connection. He helped me do some fiddling around on Frontpage Express and I made websites with oh-so-cool flame gifs and 3D text banners.
I had a huge stack of random 386 and 486 hardware that was brought home from flea markets and such after recession, which I used for my first Win95 "servers" (only running apache)
He was a construction worker and a taxi driver, but had an interest in technology. He's always been very supportive of my nerdy ways, even though my knowledge quickly surpassed his.
My father got a master craftsman certificate in electronics and worked a lot from home. At some point I decided I want to know what he's doing and also wanted to understand it - one of the ideas a kid has when he sees his dad doing things he doesn't understand I guess. My interests changed after we got our first computer (286dx IIRC), I found it way more entertaining.
One day I've seen a book about programming in QBasic and my parents got it for me. They always wanted me to learn new things and to learn things I like / enjoy, so I had the pleasure of regularly getting my hands on one or two new books about programming and other IT related things.
They supported everything I did, especially LAN parties when they still we're not as mainstream as they became. This was the only way for me to meet more people who enjoyed IT and gaming. I'm not sure how much of what I have become and what I know came only from me or is caused by them, but I am grateful for everything they did, they are not perfect but they could have been far worse as parents.
They bought my sister and I a Commodore Vic 20 in about 1982. A fairly serious expense for them back then. I don't remember her using it at all, but I did and I owe my career as a developer to their generosity.
My father bought an Amstrad CPC to learn computing when he got in charge of supervising IT deployment in the company he worked in. I was around three by then, and they let me play a little to a game [1]. I developed a fascination to all electronic device, especially ones with screens. My father did not need the CPC for very long, and sold it. We did not have another computer at home until I was 14, not long after Internet could be reached with RTC dialups. Needless to say, I got completely hooked on this machine.
When I was very young, my dad traded a motorcycle for our family's first computer, because he recognized them as being "the future". He didn't end up learning to use it very much, but I learned just enough DOS commands to play Space Invaders. Our next computer was a 386 with Windows 3.11, and that's where I really got interested. That computer and the NES probably contributed more to getting me into IT than anything else. For a short period of time in elementary school, my parents encouraged me to get straight As with a Nintendo game each quarter - they had bought several in a garage sale or pawn shop and had them hidden. Once I got in that habit, along with the interest in the computer, my nerdy tendencies were sealed.
My dad taught CS at high-school beside math, physics, and chess. He got a C64 when I was in kindergarten and showed me how to load up games and write simple three liners in Basic.
As a young teen I got interested in game development and my dad taught me some Pascal and C. I never really gained much traction because I just couldn't see how learning about data structures and OO could benefit me if all I wanted to do was putting pixels on the screen. But it was enough to realize that programming could be fun.
Later I decided to study CS because I thought I had a knack for solving logical problems and that learning how to program wouldn't be too hard for me. This turned out to be true, and although I would drop out of college soon I was always in the top 10 percentage when it came to doing programming assignments or exams.
I spent my 20s making music, getting drunk and chasing after girls. When my dad became ill with cancer I had to find a job fast in order to support myself, so I skimmed Michael Hartl's Rails book and put Rails on my CV. Shortly thereafter I scored a job at a corporation working on a Rails project with about 50-ish Models and what felt like hundreds of routes and controllers, not knowing why the parentheses were missing from the method calls or where some of those Methods are defined (in the Helpers folder).
I showed my dad what I was working on when I visited him at the hospital and he seemed pleased. Two months after he died I got laid off after working there for a year because the company made some losses (about 22 million Euros if I remember correctly) and I wasn't contributing to the core business. I was going to quit anyway because I didn't feel challenged anymore.
Anyway: Yes. My dad has done a lot to make me interested in Science and IT.
Programming-wise... when I was around 10 I had an old 80386 machine with MS-DOS, BASIC, Borland C++, Turbo Pascal and Windows 3.1. I learned to hack in BASIC pretty fast and made a good number of scripts and games for myself, and then I learned to optimize those since the computer was so slow, so that helped a lot.
My dad used to teach stochastic processes at the university, so he would try and explain me set theory and complex numbers when I was 5 years old (and also, play Civ 1 with me!)... eventually, I finished high school when I was 14 and college (MSc in CS and applied math) when I was 19. So I'd say my parents have done a lot in making me interested; although they've never pushed it.
My mother comes from a Biology background and my father is self-learnt in Computer Science. Today, I am in my final year of Engineering and all this has happened because I had a strong family background in Science where I learnt every single bit of Physics and Mathematics from my father and my mother taught me every other subject until college.
My major motivation to code comes from my father because he was the one who taught me C++ when I was 13.
My interest has more to do with the effort my parents put into teaching me and providing me with resources to pursue what I liked.
Also, we own an assembled PC which has undergone numerous upgrades and is still with us for over 20 years.
We had a lot of books, on a wide variety of topics, and I loved to read. Dad was a phone installer, Mom a secretary until my brother was born (I'm the youngest of three).
But both loved to read, and Dad had eclectic interests. Neither was particularly scientific or critical in their approach, but curiosity was prevalent.
One of my favourite books when I was very young was called "Prove It" (a quick Google search turns up all the wrong books, including theology - wha?).
It was basically science experiments that anyone with a little curiosity and the normal sorts of things one found around a house in the '60s and '70s could do. Nothing harmful, nothing risky, just a whole lot of cool.
There were pictorial encyclopaedia, "real" encyclopaedia, Popular Mechanics magazines, a whole lot....
54 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadHe also used to wake me in the middle of the night when there was an eclipse on so that we could watch it.
We went to Sellfield visitors centre, museums, mines, etc.
I always had the education bug in me, so when I could afford it I went to school, finished my bachelors degree and landed a programming job. (This was two years ago, I am currently 31 years old, so a late bloomer). However I have always had a deep inclination towards tech, and started coding around the age of 10-11. Over the years I just didnt think much of my skills as I didnt have a degree, thus deeming myself not good enough :P
And currently I couldnt be happier :) I understand where my parents were coming from. It was a different time.
So perhaps there was something to it, but I still enjoy programming so I'm going to continue with it as a hobby.
My children will each get their own computers for sure :-)
The modern equivalent is leaving a Raspberry Pi out for a kid to play with, I guess. So much fun :)
I went on to study Computer Science at uni and am now a Software Engineer, aged 23 and a quarter!
Legos [1] (starting with Duplo Train) and Kapla [2] were probably the most stimulating toys I played with. Also, Logiblocs [3], Meccano. Oh, and some random basic electric components (lamps, batteries, switches, etc). I did have some more "sciency" toys like chemistry kit or such but I quickly got bored with these.
But I think that, before that, being given the opportunity to read books, play around with a computer and having limitations (restricted computer time, limited Internet subscription, finite number of books) really made me think to find workarounds or other ways to pass the time.
tl;dr: Science and IT skills are just results of a stimulated mind from the early age
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapla
[3] http://www.logiblocs.com/
[4] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano
We also had a ZX Spectrum 48k in the house which I learnt how to code BASIC on and read/write from tape.
The turning point for me, though, was when I wanted a SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) for Christmas and he persuaded me that I should have a Commodore Amiga instead.
So I got the Amiga 1200 and ran with it. That introduced me to more programming languages, a GUI that was pretty much replicated across the PC platform and beyond and all sorts.
He was a construction worker and a taxi driver, but had an interest in technology. He's always been very supportive of my nerdy ways, even though my knowledge quickly surpassed his.
One day I've seen a book about programming in QBasic and my parents got it for me. They always wanted me to learn new things and to learn things I like / enjoy, so I had the pleasure of regularly getting my hands on one or two new books about programming and other IT related things.
They supported everything I did, especially LAN parties when they still we're not as mainstream as they became. This was the only way for me to meet more people who enjoyed IT and gaming. I'm not sure how much of what I have become and what I know came only from me or is caused by them, but I am grateful for everything they did, they are not perfect but they could have been far worse as parents.
[1] probably this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Attack
As a young teen I got interested in game development and my dad taught me some Pascal and C. I never really gained much traction because I just couldn't see how learning about data structures and OO could benefit me if all I wanted to do was putting pixels on the screen. But it was enough to realize that programming could be fun.
Later I decided to study CS because I thought I had a knack for solving logical problems and that learning how to program wouldn't be too hard for me. This turned out to be true, and although I would drop out of college soon I was always in the top 10 percentage when it came to doing programming assignments or exams.
I spent my 20s making music, getting drunk and chasing after girls. When my dad became ill with cancer I had to find a job fast in order to support myself, so I skimmed Michael Hartl's Rails book and put Rails on my CV. Shortly thereafter I scored a job at a corporation working on a Rails project with about 50-ish Models and what felt like hundreds of routes and controllers, not knowing why the parentheses were missing from the method calls or where some of those Methods are defined (in the Helpers folder).
I showed my dad what I was working on when I visited him at the hospital and he seemed pleased. Two months after he died I got laid off after working there for a year because the company made some losses (about 22 million Euros if I remember correctly) and I wasn't contributing to the core business. I was going to quit anyway because I didn't feel challenged anymore.
Anyway: Yes. My dad has done a lot to make me interested in Science and IT.
My dad used to teach stochastic processes at the university, so he would try and explain me set theory and complex numbers when I was 5 years old (and also, play Civ 1 with me!)... eventually, I finished high school when I was 14 and college (MSc in CS and applied math) when I was 19. So I'd say my parents have done a lot in making me interested; although they've never pushed it.
My interest has more to do with the effort my parents put into teaching me and providing me with resources to pursue what I liked.
Also, we own an assembled PC which has undergone numerous upgrades and is still with us for over 20 years.
But both loved to read, and Dad had eclectic interests. Neither was particularly scientific or critical in their approach, but curiosity was prevalent.
One of my favourite books when I was very young was called "Prove It" (a quick Google search turns up all the wrong books, including theology - wha?).
It was basically science experiments that anyone with a little curiosity and the normal sorts of things one found around a house in the '60s and '70s could do. Nothing harmful, nothing risky, just a whole lot of cool.
There were pictorial encyclopaedia, "real" encyclopaedia, Popular Mechanics magazines, a whole lot....
Exposure and curiosity. Those help a lot.