Poll: Was one of your parents a programmer?

No

Both parents were programmers. Mom has been retired since before I was born, Dad is still working as a DBA nearing retirement. My brother and I are both employed as programmers, and my sister is due to graduate this summer with a CS degree.

My dad was a self-taught programmer (he was a chemical engineer and loved to learn new things). I started by playing games on our Apple IIe (with a tape drive and 114k of RAM!), then typing in games from magazines, then tweaking those games to work the way I wanted.

When I was 15 I got a job at a gas station and built a service reminder system for them, based on some software my dad wrote. I had to replace about half of his code, so it probably would have been faster to start from scratch but I didn't have the confidence to do that at that time. I got a little help from my dad, but not much.

Most of my friends were geeks (we played D&D at lunch in the math wing of our high school, and most of us were in the band) but only one of them became a programmer as a career.

I'm surprised by this poster, not at all surprised by the results. I thought my experience was pretty standard, and the results seem to indicate that. My dad had an Apple IIe and a Dos machine while I was growing up, and I quickly surpassed his (very limited) technical knowledge once we moved up to the DOS box. Everything else was self taught. A lot of my skills I never remember learning - I just grew up always on the computer.

In fact, if being a programmer was his job, I'd probably be turned off by it. I remember a friend of mine had a dad who was a programmer, but while the kids were all pretty good with the computer I never remember him teaching them things as such - in fact, I turned this friend on to a lot of game creation engines, etc. myself.

No one mentored me when I started programming. We had Internet fairly early so I looked into how to make my own website. This taught me HTML (no CSS back then!) and some basic PHP. Then I became interested in game programming (I was still a kid after all) and entered the world of "real" programming: C++, the Win32 API (urghhh) and OpenGL.

My dad studied electrical engineering at the Navy and had a library of study books that I never bothered to look into. One day, one or two years after I got into C++, I decided to have a look. Surprisingly, I found some really interesting CS books, amongst others the OS book by Tanenbaum, with the full source code of Minix printed at the end of the book (12,000 lines of code iirc).