Blog/2024-11-20/What Stopped Me

People often say that something or someone forced them to stop doing things. In tech, this is often because someone made fun of them not knowing something and so on and so forth. For me, I've never quit doing something because of that. I have sewn, fenced, shot a bow and arrow, rode a motorcycle, skated, wrote code, danced, and so on and loads of these things involve looking foolish to many people. And to be honest, I'd always wonder why someone "quit programming because engineers are dicks" or things like that. But someone else on Hacker News described it quite well in a way that I'm fond of:

You know what stopped me from becoming a professional programmer? It wasn't the fact that I didn't get to study CS in high-school, nor that I didn't have a PC until I was a university student, nor the lack of Internet access at home until I was 20+ years old, nor the language barrier (English is my third language), nor being limited to free resources by my finances. Nothing. Nothing stopped me from pursuing my interest.

— stefantalpalaru, Hacker News

Colony 76 @colony76

Go home Jeets we don't need you here, we don't want you here, stay in India and work there.

Jeets are absolutely devastating to our labor market. Our jobs belong to Americans! We are FULL. We don't want you in USA, Europe, or Canada.

1. MassDeportationsNow #JeetsGoHome

Nov 14, 2024

A similar sort of thing comes up occasionally on Twitter or Reddit where people get upset that folks like me come to the US and have nice lives. One could imagine the question coming up about whether they want us here and why we won't leave and all that. And I won't deceive myself that every American is enthusiastic about immigrants like me. I won't claim that folks like me have our backs against the wall either - America is, in general, very immigrant friendly and my life here has been wonderful. But even if America hated immigrants, it wouldn't matter that much.

There are lots of people for whom this is true. Most commonly, I think this is true for Jewish folk, who have been hated by various European and Middle-Eastern cultures for millennia. I particularly appreciate that when American universities set a Jewish quota to prevent 'too many' of them from going to university, they set up one of their own.

And perhaps that's the truth of the world: the conditions will never be perfect to do anything, because as those conditions improve, those who can operate under less perfect conditions will grasp the opportunity - removing the opportunity in the process.