When I grow I wanna be . . .
As I set in the waiting room at my local Subaru dealership I overheard a conversation of young boy and his mother and it went something like this:
Mother: So what do you want to be when you grow up?
Boy: I want to build web-pages!
Mother: Okay, then you can go build web pages.
What struck me about this conversation is that when I was a child I wanted to be a firefighter or a policeman I never said I want to build web pages or program or even work on a computer. Does that mean that web programmers have the same status in society as a firefighter did 20 years ago? Do kids think that sitting behind a computer all day is just as exciting as fighting a fire or chasing bad guys? Has movies like Swordfish, Hackers, and The Matrix swayed society to think that all programmers live in an underground world were bullets fly by your head when you hack the DOD? Well I got news for all you kids out there it is just that exciting. You set at your desk for 10 hours a day under fluorescent lighting in gray walled cubes and type as fast as you can because your line of code will save the world. Ok, so maybe it sucks but if I keep telling myself how cool it is maybe one day I’ll believe it.
July 24th, 2002 at 1:23 am
All I can say is… disturbing. Deeply disturbing.
July 25th, 2002 at 2:56 pm
No, that’s not what it means at all. I wanted to be a programmer from the first time I laid my fingers on a computer. That would be roughly the late 70’s, when I was in kindergarten. It was a Commodore PET, incidentally.
Not every job “will save the world”. To quote Caddyshack, “the world needs ditch diggers, too”.
I think it is refreshing to see a kid with realistic goals.