Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective

I always encouraged my son to follow his own interests, but exposed him to what I was into. Once he got to high school and started taking "computer science" he really opened up to it and became passionate about it on his own terms. This was amazing to watch unfold and really morphed our relationship into something even more special. Unfortunately the universe decided it was his time to and he passed away a few weeks ago, a week after his 18th birthday and high school graduation. I know he would've gone on to do marvellous things to help our world become a better place, miss ya bud.

No. Unless it&#x27;s her passion, but I&#x27;m not going to encourage her specifically in this direction. I want to invest equally (as much as I can) in other STEM, in art, in sports. Maybe she&#x27;ll be a playwright? Or an athlete? Or a scientist? Or dedicate her life to help other people or animals?<p>Even if she is interested in programming, I&#x27;d warn her about burnout, about the ultra long feedback cycles, about the exhausting rate of technology progress. Make sure she knows the path ahead. It&#x27;s weighted, I know, because I can only tell her about this path and not others. On the other hand, there&#x27;s weight to the other side by seeing me doing that, being able to get advice and direction.<p>I want her to be happy. Fulfilled if possible. Good work-life balance, preferable on the side of &quot;life&quot; than &quot;work&quot;. If I can leave her enough money to choose her profession rather than have to follow the money.

I want my children to be happy and fulfilled. Whether or not they&#x27;re &quot;like me&quot; in doing so is of no importance.<p>But I do want them to learn from my mistakes (as well as the mistakes of everyone else they are exposed to). One of the things I&#x27;ve tried to instill in them is &quot;Make your own mistakes, not someone else&#x27;s&quot;.

Short interesting story: My mom is an Architect, one day when I was about 8 or 9 she said: don&#x27;t be an Architect, you won&#x27;t get paid fairly (developing country). It got burned out in my mind, like a command. And slowly moved to &quot;Don&#x27;t do art stuff&quot;. I stopped drawing and started using computers more and more.<p>Only in my adulthood I started to explore Architecture, and ooohhh boy, I freaking love it. And I would have loved worked with my mom, taking clients, etc.<p>So, just be careful on what you say to your kids about a career, or how you say it.<p>I&#x27;m not complaining btw, just a fact of life from a very simple comment mom made one random day.

<i>&gt; We are all full of all sorts of bad behaviour. Instead of accepting our faults we should strive to fix them, so that we don’t pass them onto our children.</i><p>We should work on our faults, yes. But we should also strive to accept them, so that our children learn to accept their own faults as well.<p>If you treat any imperfection as an intolerable flaw, you will teach your children to treat any of their own flaws as intolerable.

The ability to pass on passions is dependent on your ability to detach your ego from work and suppress subconscious hierarchy behavior. As in if display how great you are and your kid is not, you destroy the base of the whole transfer. This is not a company environment were the senior lectures the junior. Better yet, hide your ability and just encourage passionate behavior. It&#x27;s okay to stay up late doing a thing you love so much it&#x27;s not work anymore.

&quot;A programmer&#x27;s perspective&quot; but nothing unique to a programmer parent. I assumed it was going to be about all of the bad habits that go with being a dedicated tech worker, because there are lots of them.

<i>Adults think that the best thing you can do for a child is to turn the child out like them. Think about that, that&#x27;s got to be one of the dumbest ideas ever.</i> - Alan Kay ... via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;globalcitizen&#x2F;taoup">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;globalcitizen&#x2F;taoup</a>

&gt;I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.<p>- John Adams<p>I do soulless and artless crap like programming so my kids maybe don&#x27;t have to. I&#x27;m doing it to acquire &quot;fuck you money&quot; so my kids can come out of the womb saying &quot;fuck you&quot; and then they can go pursue more virtuous, noble, artful things.

In terms of programming, if my child wants to imitate me and learn to code, then fine, but doing so is riddled with problems. Firstly, code is so unforgiving, unlike art, where mistakes in art can be tolerated and even add to the aesthetic of the art, but one single misplaced comma in code ruins the whole program.<p>Then there&#x27;s the countless times you have to bang your head against the wall whilst coding because of some unrelenting problem&#x2F;bug that just won&#x27;t go away and you&#x27;ve spent 5 hours straight combing Google for a solution, but you need the grit to solve it all by your lonesome. No savior of a snippet will solve it for you.<p>Then there&#x27;s the mental gymnastics required to envision the end result of your code and the delayed gratification you endure when everything is in prototype mode for long periods of time. You have to have the vision of the end product and execute accordingly.<p>Coding is not for everyone, but imitate at your leisure.

I would not want my children to be like me. Not because of my imperfections or whatever the article is trying to say. Even if I were a perfect model human the same would hold. Simply, the world has already had its opportunity to experience me. It doesn&#x27;t need to try again.

Yes and no. I would like my children to grow up to be a better version of me, one where my mistakes are a foundation for their education, where the good I do they do better etc.<p>I made up my mind a long time ago that my children can be anything they want, as long as it is good, as long as what they want does not hard others.<p>I want to introduce my kids to programming, but I also want to see them experience art, sport, and music and everything else the world has to offer. I don&#x27;t care if they are programmers, I care that they get a bit of an experience at it.<p>I would rather they grow up to be better than me.

I have a hard time imagining a role that places one closer to the center of the human universe. Enabled &amp; creative &amp; empowered.<p>The major downside is the Aladdin problem. Vast cosmic power. Itty bitty living space (&amp; mortal lifespan to spend). These capabilities we have could be better spent, do end up entangled in so many frustrating stifling enterprises. But they&#x27;re still <i>amazing</i> abilities. I&#x27;d wish such great adventures for anyone.

I would love that my kids applied code to automate stuff and solve complex problems. Would I want them to become software engineers? I wouldn&#x27;t, because they would most likely end up working on some SaaS product or something equally stupid, and burn out every few years. But if they went into something like aerospace engineering, energy, or whatever, and happened to write a bunch of code, it would be really cool.

My 0,02€: Having become a dad late in life, I have plenty of perspective. When discussing our 3yo with my wife, I note that I&#x27;ve identified a couple of deficiencies in my own upbringing &amp; school-age experiences that I don&#x27;t want my kid to have to repeat. Just trying to leverage the benefit of experience.

Nah.<p>Don&#x27;t be a programmer sweet child o&#x27; mine. Unless you wanna go bald.<p>&#x2F;s

Time for a happy story, and a sad one.<p>When I was a kid in the late 1950s, we had a typical TV of the day, with a dozen or so tubes that would often burn out, so the TV would &quot;go on the fritz&quot;.<p>Dad would pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box, take them to the corner grocery and plug them into the tube tester one by one, and buy a replacement for the bad tube. And I would tag along with him.<p>The next time the TV went on the fritz, I asked him, &quot;Dad, can I pull out the tubes and test them and find the bad one and put the TV back together?&quot; He said &quot;Yes, you can!&quot; So I did.<p>He was also an avid fisherman and took me and my sister on his fishing trips. I didn&#x27;t take much interest in that, but he never pushed me into it.<p>Mom was an accomplished seamstress but didn&#x27;t have a knack for mechanical things. So when her sewing machine needed oiling or minor adjustments, I found the manual and took care of it for her.<p>She also had a Smith-Corona Portable Electric Typewriter that came with a touch typing course: a little paper easel with exercises and a set of phonograph records with voice instructions. Given my interest in machinery, I thought this was cool and worked through the entire course, learning to touch type at the age of eight.<p>Fast forward 40 years.<p>I will call my late wife Carol, and our two daughters Alice and Becky.<p>I was working one evening when Alice walked in and asked, &quot;Dad, whatcha doing?&quot; I said &quot;I&#x27;m working on some JavaScript code.&quot; She asked, &quot;Can I do that?&quot;<p>My eyes lit up and I said &quot;Yes! You can!&quot;<p>I grabbed another laptop and set her up next to me and showed her how to write a simple loop and an if statement.<p>The next evening, Becky asked, &quot;Dad, what was Alice doing last night?&quot; &quot;She was learning to write JavaScript code.&quot; &quot;Can I do that?&quot; You can guess my answer.<p>Over the course of a few days, they started competing with each other! &quot;Dad, am I ahead of Alice?&quot; and &quot;Am I ahead of Becky?&quot;<p>Around 11 a few nights later, my late wife Carol walked in and said, &quot;Why is Alice up so late?!&quot; I explained that she and Becky had taken a sudden interest in programming and I was tutoring them.<p>She would have none of it. &quot;They have school at 8 in the morning and we have a curriculum to follow. They can&#x27;t stay up late doing this!&quot;<p>We were homeschooling at the time, which I thought was a great idea because it would allow our daughters to find things that interested them and pursue them. But Carol only wanted them to follow a strict schedule with a standardized curriculum that she had bought, even if it bored them to tears and kept them from finding their real interests.<p>I can&#x27;t really blame her. She did what she knew how to do. I can only blame myself for not pushing back and insisting that it would be great if our daughters could have an opportunity to dig into something that interested them.<p>An opportunity like I had when I was young.<p>Both the girls dropped out of our little programming course after that and never took an interest in it again.<p>I don&#x27;t know what could have happened if they had been allowed to pursue this interest.