From McDonald's to Google
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> Meanwhile, Hightower was starting to get noticed in the Atlanta open-source community thanks to a series of talks at Python meetups when he caught the attention of James
It's a bit much of a gap - as that seems to be around 2013 and you seem to have still been installing internet in 2003. I get there was a time of being an IT consultant, and then a store opening with a few people you hired. But - where's the software engineering happening that lead to giving talks and what not?
I ran my own computer store with a small IT consultancy attached to it for a few years. Then I chose to pivot and get a "real job". Things change once you're married with a child on the way.
Like many, I started out doing 3 months to perm contract jobs. The first contract was a Linux system administrator at Google in Atlanta automating the huge fleet of servers there. I learned enough shell scripting to be dangerous, but it was mostly racking and stacking servers, and provisioning top of rack switches -- hello minicom.
3 months later I was working in tech support, for more money, at a company called Vocalocity, who was early in the VoIP game. That's where I learned how to PXE boot and flash Cisco IP phones to work with our custom Asterisk based backends. I was there almost a year and then it was time to move on.
This would continue every three months or so. I held jobs at places like Cox Communications working in the NOC during the night shift so I could be home with my daughter. Three to six months later I quit.
I know what you're thinking, this guy jumped around a lot. I had to, money was tight, and it was the fastest way to get a raise, and it also accelerated my learning. Coming from being your own boss it's really hard to get excited about an entry level job and look forward to working your way up the corporate ladder.
My skills really leveled up when I landed a full time job at Peer 1 Web Hosting, where I started in Tech Support working tickets and taking calls helping people with Linux servers, Plesk, and MySQL. It's true, it's always a DNS problem.
Peer 1 is where I really learned how to write code, it started with bash, and eventually Python. I automated the SSL certificate provisioning system, and wrote some scripts that allowed me to close tickets faster than anyone else.
About 6 months later I was promoted to the engineering team and worked on our automated provisioning system for Server Beach, acquired from Rackspace, which was the part of Peer 1 that hosted YouTube before YouTube was bought by Google. Server Beach ran those "Latency Kills" ads to help sale dedicated gaming servers.
That provisioning system was responsible for allowing people to order a server back in the early 2000s from a web form and have it provisioned in less than an hour. We PXE booted servers, configured RAID controllers, and bootstrapped the OS, including Windows, and handed back an IP address and login creds to the larger system.
I was there for over a year before landing a job that would double my salary around 2008, 2009.
I joined the company mentioned in the article, TSYS, where I brought in a lot of automation, thanks Puppet, and learned enough Java to earn the respect of the broader organization and really help transform the place.
I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) from my days at Peer 1 and I leveraged that set of skills to package all the production applications into fat RPMs (Java, JBoss, and all the war files required to make it work) in the same way we use containers today. I also revamped the CI/CD system leveraging Bamboo with tight Jira integration. I also helped the company move on from CVS to SVN. Don't ask.
We had automated deployments and tight integration with our apps over the course of the 3 years I was leading the team. We automated everything from Oracle running on AIX, to provisioning SSH keys and access to production servers based on Jira tickets and Puppet.
On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments industry.
During my time at TSYS I really got exposed to open source and made some major contributions to Puppet and Cobbler -- I added a feature to Cobbler that enabled us to configure servers while leveraging Cobbler metadata and tools like Puppet.
I also started contributing to distutils and pip back in the day. I did some of the work that made pip and virtulenv play nice together. I also started public speaking at local meetup, PyATL, in Atlanta, and found my voice in the Python community.
It's my PuppetConf 2012 talk that landed me a job at Puppet Labs, the rest is history.
Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.
For reference, I don't think you've jumped around a lot. I've had 5 different software engineering jobs in the 5 years I've been in the bay area. I moved to learn more, increase my pay, and hopefully find a rewarding environment. Still looking. Most everyone wants money, recognition, and control...
Do you think what the article wrote about is more important to your success (managing a standup act, mcdonalds, joining puppet) than the years that were not really mentioned? I wonder if maybe the person you were managed by, if the people who mentored you (if any), and what not were influential to your success and desire to push yourself out into conferences and making talks. I guess - I just wonder if your formative years of becoming a more senior software engineer meant nothing. Was it all just your own internal desires and no one would've influenced anything regardless and you were bound for whatever an L8 gets compensated?
A lot of the technical stuff has been covered in other places. Tom pulled on a different thread, one that even taught me some things about myself. Tom did the homework, interviewed a lot of people, and presented the person behind the keyboard.
My current role does little to describe where I am today. The path for others will be different, and what I think is most important, beyond the technical achievements is the person I've become. The higher you go up in the engineering world the less you lean on the skills that got you there.
In my opinion the best engineer can change the world with zero lines of code.
I have a few questions I hope you don't mind answering as I'm trying to change careers to work full-time on public cloud for a technology driven company.
A little backstory (feel free to skip):
I began my career working in a company that did structured cabling, PBX systems and rack and stacking data centers. I was rapidly taking on more responsibilities and was managing a team of 40 people within 2 years.
Things were steady but I felt like I was missing out on all the incredible things that were happening in tech (I spend a lot of time on HN). After discovering AWS I was blown away by the possibilities and decided Linux and cloud were what I wanted to focus on as a professional.
I resigned to start my own consultancy and got the pro level AWS SA certification (with mostly self practice and no real-world production experience) and approached many businesses to sell services as an 'AWS certified' consultant. I got a few small wins but the sales cycle was longer than I expected and many potential clients would engage in long technical discussions but then cancel once they saw the TCO calculations.
The unstable cash-flow made things like paying rent on time very stressful so after two years I got a job at a small consultancy that provides mostly on-prem IT infrastructure services. I've learned quite a lot over the past two years and realized there were many holes in my knowledge. Yet, most of the clients' work was still on premise and now because of the pandemic many of them put their projects on hold or outright canceled them to cut costs. I've been furloughed without any income and right now I'm trying to survive by installing internet in homes and taking support calls while looking for a new job.
Many of the cloud related jobs - either solution architecture or Devops, require experience working in an agile software development environment, which is something I don't have and I have a major case of imposter syndrome because of this.
Now for the questions:
1) Is it possible to learn enough about agile practices and development to be productive without real-world production experience?
2) When you were looking for a 'real job' after running your own IT business, did you face any objections during the recruitment process on why you were looking for a job despite running your own business?
3) I was thinking of applying for 'cloud support engineer' type of roles because I really want to work in this field, but would that be a negative signal to recruiters because I'm an experienced (albeit in other areas) candidate?
After all these years I started to question if it was possible to go from rack and stacking to cloud but since you've explained it in such detail I see a path now. Thanks!
That's how you open doors for yourself. Many great Q/A and operations engineers started in tech support where they honed their troubleshooting skills.
2) Yes, I use to get those questions. My answer was, "I'm starting a family, and I'm looking for something a bit more stable, and bigger challenges than the ones I was getting on my own".
It's all about being able to demonstrate your skills. Some times it's whiteboard coding exercises or logging into a live system and "making it work". My IT certifications helped me earlier in my career and now things like GitHub and blog posts are a great way to showcase your skills.
3) Remember, you can always tailor your resume for the job you want. If you want to avoid looking over qualified, then re-frame your experience to align with the job requirements. Instead of "I ran a business doing X,Y,Z", you can re-frame it, "As a _ I did X,Y,Z".
During the interview you can show off your full skill set by giving deep answers demonstrating your understanding of the big picture and how to make a business impact.
If you ever want to discus this stuff further, shoot me a DM on Twitter, I've been where you are, and I know what's possible.
I wonder, what was it like being the people who helped YouTube before they were a Google company? Did you ever interact with them on a day-to-day basis?
And with your payments stuff - how did those changes help the business you worked for? Faster batch reconciliation / processing or something else?
Tech support for a hosting company is a really sweet deal. It was my first real job in college (I’m aware of how incredibly lucky I was to have that opportunity) and you really do learn a lot in a short period of time.
- Random Internet Stranger.
Before that I was writing PL/SQL in a remote tropical town for peanuts.
Before which I spent about a decade working a parade of jobs that varied from shitty to crappy in the same town.
It is a normal state of being for many folks that their life doesn't run directly from a fancy highschool to a fancy university to a fancy job.
parent is wondering about the transition to software engineer, not saying that nothing happened for 10 years
There is a big push and accompanying quota to get more black/latin/native american people into tech companies at all levels.
While I don't agree with this quota system for the inherent racism/unfairness and second order effects[0], possible beneficiaries should take notice and act on it and be a role model.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person here on merit or on quota?
Seems like it comes more from people making that assumption than the quota system itself, assuming that everyone's held to the same standard of competence (which I would imagine is the case for FAANG companies).
In my experience, 1) being not inclined on such a hire leads to more scrutiny 2) managing performance is prone to more scrutiny
So: while the standard is expected, it's enforced to a lesser degree in practice. Which means a few bad apples abusing this unfortunately make everyone else (in the group who meet/beat the standard) look bad.
And if a company’s culture uses affirmative action or quotas to hire people who they should not have, then that’s just racism of a different kind, and, I’d argue, not necessarily unique to or always caused by the policy.
Consider a system for selecting for characteristic X from a population. This system considers traits A, B, and C, which each have some (positive, negative, or 0) correlation to X in the global population.
With a perfect selection process, there should be 0 correlation between any of the traits and the desired property. If trait A was positivly correlated with X within your population, then you could improve the selection process by favoring trait A more. Simmilarly, if there were a negative correlation, you could improve your selection by disfavoring A more. This is completly independent from the correlation that exists in the global population.
There is no evidence that suggests that the diversity policies pursued by FAANG companies is being pursued because they found that within their population white and asian employees were less competent.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person posting based on actual relevance to the conversation at hand or wedging in their own biases just because they can?
Always enjoy his videos whenever I come across them, even if I'm not working on anything remotely related to the content. Waiting for whatever random tech surprise he throws in sometimes.
It was my way of saying thank you and hoping those stories would inspire others and bring a little joy to their day.
Not taking away anything from him, just saying, there is a world of difference between being in your late 20s or 30s, at a dead end fast food joint and clawing your way up to Google vs once upon of time working part time in high school at typical blue collar job.
Not quite the underdog story I was looking for. Nice try at an origin story though.
I do wonder whether the title of the article accidentally (and ironically) reveals a subtle racial bias. McDonald's is a typical shorthand for a lowly job, staffed by the nation's underclass. But tons of successful people in tech flipped burgers in high school (I did!) and it's never worth highlighting in press articles. Their public story usually starts at college or their first job or their first big break. But this article specifically highlights a traditionally menial position as his starting point.
Unconscious bias?
You learn the second lesson from sailing, but not the first.
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!
In some ways I regret I wasn’t just taking in my youth at that age (and I recall some customers, in good nature, commenting to me I was too young to be working) but at the same time it helped in giving my the work ethic and drive to make retiring very early an option if I want it.
I guess I just saw the chance to work as an opportunity. An opportunity to build myself.
It sounds soooooo weird to us normal "working class" folk. I assume literally everyone, no matter their current career/job/education level, worked a menial job as a teenager. That's because where I am from ALL teenagers were expected to participate in paid employment (and some were expected to help with the family's bills) and where else are you going to work as a teenager? I wouldn't ever consider bringing it up - I consider it very bizarre to bring it up like that, it would be like bragging about how you graduated college even though you went to public school growing up.
> He began working at McDonald's, earning $4.15 an hour working nearly 40 hours a week, mostly on the weekends. He was quickly promoted to shift manager at the age of 16,
> He enrolled in certification classes sponsored by CompTIA to get his A+ certification, which led to a job as a DSL installation technician for Bell South at the age of 19.
So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
What's wrong with a bit of inspiration / hope?
I'm (possibly wrongly) assuming you've never had to work through that shit.
A lot of stuff did not make the article but who I am today was greatly influenced by that job. I chipped in on the bills, bought my own school clothes, and my first car (1987 Jeep Cherokee), thanks to that job, so for me it was very foundational.
McDonalds for me was pretty fun. At the time I could well see how the ease of promotion trapped some people. If you had any motivation at all you'd soon find yourself running a night shift.
Even now, a decade later, I get nightmeres where I'm back working there. Nothing feels longer than an 8 hour shift at McDonalds.
I know so many successful peers, including myself, who have worked at fast food and other menial jobs, during late teen years. If anything, this is actually a positive signal that someone cares about their future and is willing to put in the work.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
I'm happy you ended up with a great job that pays well. Congrats to you!
But I think you underrate what and how much you may have or could have learned from working at UPS. UPS is a fantastic logistics operation, and while being a package sorter is obviously not the same as being a VP, the job still exposes you to a system that's highly optimized for profiting from being good at logistics, and that reaches every job in the system. Maybe you didn't learn anything at the job, but that doesn't mean there was nothing there to learn for someone observing and trying to learn.
I'm confused, you started by agreeing that highlighting the McDonald's experience is a good thing, then asked 'what does that have to do with anything'. I don't know what position you hold, here.
As for me, I never worked at McDonald's or any other fast food, but I did spend some time working at a local pizza joint, where I started as a busboy, and eventually assumed cook and delivery driver duties. I'd already taken programming classes and knew Java and Python, but had never considered software as a professional option. My time in the service industry was still super valuable to me as a software professional - I learned about time management, prioritization (working as a busboy and dishwasher who also makes some minor food items is an implementation of a priority queue where the priority values can change very quickly), and how to identify repeatable business processes. These are all highly valuable skills for someone who writes code, and pretty much any service industry job, taken seriously, requires understanding them. They apply equally in SaaS.
So my answer to your (possibly rhetorical?) question is: working at McDonald's for 3 years in high school has quite a lot to do with the rest of the career, as valuable fundamental business skills are there to be learned even in the lowest wage jobs.
I'm impressed by the lack of an Ivy-League sheepskin.
My own education is basically self-taught. It served me well (I'm smarter than the average bear), but boy, oh boy, have I looked up a lot of noses.
It's given me a fairly irreverent attitude that does not always win me friends.
It has also given me a drive to help out others that have challenges breaking through obstinance and prejudice (see "not winning friends," above).
All good - and I look back at my McDonald days (somewhat) fondly, and it was good experience at doing fairly unpleasant work - but my nights hack and phone freaking and coding had 100x more to do with my success then that first job :)
Thank you Kelsey, keep up the good work.
What about Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and Worf (Michael Dorn)?
How do you feel your early experiences at McDonald’s, in terms of operations, influenced your decision-making or thought processes as part of devops strategies or perspective?
Thanks!
Running a shift at McDonald's required some leadership, you have to be able to work the drive through and clean the bathrooms when the time came. You have to be able to handle any tasks in a fast paced environment. I learned how to be a team player and keep the customers happy. Kinda of the same things I'm doing now.
He's this generation's Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob.
I was literally CC'ed on an email that said "[...] I want to remind everyone that the hiring season for 2021 is not complete and we are still missing our target for diversity [...]. For those who already reached their headcount for 2021 there will always be more budget for a candidate that brings more diversity to our workplace".
So forget it, it's just a new name for discrimination.
Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...
I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits.
Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.
They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it.
Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise.
At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020.
If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are.
In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage.
So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?
In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.
By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.
Tech exacerbates this problem even further. How can you get anywhere as a kid if your parents don't have a computer, and neither does your school? And that's just one example.
That and luck are well over 90%, yes. Otherwise the scions of the wealthy would be vastly more prominent in sports with low entry barriers. In practice the most decorated Olympian ever is the son of a police officer and a middle school principal[1]. The best basketball player ever comes from a less distinguished background[2]. College sports specially chosen to be niches to maximize the chance of being a recruited athlete are so competitive the children of hedge fund managers routinely fail to get in that way[3]. The outer extremities of talent distributions are people who are staggeringly talented, hard working and lucky. Then they complete with each other and the ones who win are better than that .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-...
Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.
Well no, that would be assuming that whatever traits help one be meritorious are equally distributed among all the populations, which seems highly unlikely given what we see literally everywhere else (e.g. athletic pursuits).
What I think is more important than nailing some magical quota or ratio or percentage, is ensuring that the individual is judged as an individual instead of as a subset of a group.
Regardless of how a specific trait is distributed among a human population, you are bound to find individuals within each group that display it. The problem comes when you discard individuals because they don't belong to the group you want, or when you take in individuals without the trait you're looking for just because they belong to the group you do want.
Anyway, it's not as if most of the tech industry cares about strict adherence to the law in other areas, such as Uber running roughshod over many jurisdictions' pre-existing transport-for-hire legislation, Airbnb doing the same for short-term rental/hotel legislation, and the whole "gig economy" bringing their gig workers close enough to the definition of misclassified employee that many rulings say they're past the line.
If this one case of powerful tech companies ignoring the law is working in favor of hiring more suitably qualified members of minority demographics than they otherwise would, then I'm happy they're doing it as long as they're generally willing to violate laws for worse purposes.
Many specific racist behaviors are of course either sometimes or always illegal, but those concepts are individually known to the law, not outlawed as racism per se.
What's more, the ruling you linked did not address the kind of quotas which the FANG company was discussing in the quoted email. The university was setting aside a certain percentage of the total and rejecting white people who might otherwise have qualified to keep room for racial minorities, which was key to the ruling. The FANG company was evaluating white people just as it would have done without the quotas, but it was simply allowing extra hiring of racial minorities beyond the normal budgets until certain targets/quotas were met. Whether this is legal or not is out of scope of that ruling. (Maybe other rulings have addressed this; I'm not sure.)
I'm aware of the specificity of the ruling but the basis on which the ruling was made is much more general. Depending on the entity different laws would be in question; a fully private entity would probably be violating the civil rights act of 1964, while in the case of university admissions and funding the current systems are still in violation of the equal protection clause. Interpretations of the civil rights act of 1964 that advantage groups for no reason other than race are also unconstitutional.
Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation. Instead substitute it for socioeconomic background.
I'm not sure yet how to fully clarify this, so consider the Missouri government's statutory commitment to spend X% of the budget with women or minority owned businesses. In a degenerate case this means e.g. even the most unqualified candidate could be awarded a contract solely on the basis of race, violating the equal protection clause.
(Practically this expenditure law means larger companies have "independent" women and minority owned businesses as subcontractors who might contract the work back to a business owned by the larger company that can do the work.)
My understanding of the state of the law is that race is currently allowed to be considered as a factor in university admissions if available workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice, and that (as of 2016) the University of Texas at Austin's policy of using race as such a factor was found to be constitutional for this reason.
More reading on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...
The viability of this precedent is highly uncertain since it was a 4-3 ruling (one SCOTUS seat vacant at the time and one justice recused), and since its majority was four of the liberal justices of whom one (the late RBG) has now been replaced by the conservative Justice Barrett. But it hasn't yet been overruled, and it was a SCOTUS majority ruling and not dicta, so it's likely to be followed by lower courts unless and until it's overruled by SCOTUS.
Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
>Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
Disingenuous. If the law is not agreeable soon it will be unenforceable. I consider the rulings inappropriate both on the basis of constitutionality and on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause. You can try to claim the state has an overwhelming interest to ignore the protection clause, but then can't it just have an overwhelming interest to violate whatever parts of the constitution it wants? Where does it stop?
Lots of awful laws remain enforceable for very, very, very long times. For example, the whole industry of private prison contractors profiting from prisoner labor, with prisoners sometimes being legally required to participate and always being paid far below the usual minimum wage, and with contractual provisions between the prison companies and the states about how full the states will keep their prisons, leading to the creation and proactive enforcement of lots of crimes with prison as a punishment to keep that pipeline filled. Non-inheritable slavery never got outlawed as a criminal sentence, even if states have chosen to limit their implementation of that to prison labor instead of "you but not your family are now literally a slave for the rest of your lifetime."
> I consider the rulings inappropriate [...] on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Many people agree with you, and I believe they share your reasons. But many people disagree with you, including me, on the basis that properly crafted affirmative action efforts are addressing an existing inequality in our not-at-all-egalitarian society.
That's not to say a qualified white person should see their application refused on the basis of rigid racial quotas - we both agree that should be illegal, and as we discussed it already is.
But yes, to me it seems fair and egalitarian to take into account something like race that routinely leads to disadvantage and discrimination (or alternatively advantage and privilege) even in today's society when evaluating a person's achievements and obstacles, and in planning outreach and recruitment efforts. People do likewise for other similarly impactful factors like poverty, disability, and migrant status, and rightly so. I view this as appropriate both in university admissions and in viewing success stories like Kelsey Hightower's as even more impressive than if he were Just Another White Guy In Tech(tm) ... highlighting the sad fact that stories like his are so rare is part of the point of the article.
> Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause.
I haven't properly thought through the case about state government statutory expenditures, so I don't have a strong opinion there right now on what is either constitutional or appropriate. I think that case's constitutionality or lack thereof is a far less clear question than you apparently do.
But if any such programs are making significant progress toward fixing disproportionate imbalances in government expenditures that come from the systemic sexism and racism in society without getting the government substandard value per dolllar, any invalidation of those programs should be coupled with the adoption of some adequately effective replacements with fewer constitutional issues.
This is why affirmative action as implemented is, to me, a very bad idea: there's no way to tell if it is working.
I'll also note that every team I know of at any FAANG company is desperate to find really great candidates. The idea that a team would willingly refuse to hire an excellent <insert group here> candidate to instead fill some kind of diversity quota slot for <other group here> is so bananas to me I can't even comprehend it. It's so wrong I can't even laugh at it. Every manager I know has a backlog of important work a mile long and is desperate to fill open reqs. I've never once seen or heard rumor of anyone from upper management to HR to execs discussing anything even remotely like a "diversity quota". Not even water-cooler gossip.
Whenever I ask for proof of a diversity quota system there is no evidence. When you look at the stats on who is hired (for companies that publish it) to the degree the needle is moving it is moving very slowly. So slowly if there were a quota system it would mean they're very very bad at it. So as far as I can tell from personal experience and my discussions with my peers "diversity quotas" are by-and-large either made up or being run illegally by a small group that gets shut down immediately once legal gets wind of it.
"Diversity quota" could be an attempt to stir up race or gender resentment: 'you didn't get that job because one of "those" people stole it' or some such notion. Having worked at plenty of other software jobs over the years I've met more than my share of developers who were garbage at their jobs but thought they were God's gift to programming. They were also the same people who tended to have complaints about "diversity quotas". I'm sure blaming "those other people" is an attractive way to justify not getting what you think you deserve. It's an old trope but one that keeps being re-used over thousands of years because it works. Just convince people that "those others" are the enemy and have stolen what is rightfully yours and you can justify anything.
It's also a really cheap way to tear down someone else - just dismiss them as a "diversity hire". You need a certain amount of insecurity, cruelty, or hate in your heart to act out like that. I prefer to judge people based on their job performance but YMMV.
I like Kelsey’s spirit of “hustle” and pursuing what he’s passionate about. Totally agree. Find what connects with you; don’t simply try to fill other people’s shoes! I now work outside of tech entirely, because life is is full of endlessly fascinating things to pursue, and unfortunately life is far too short to try them all.
For example, just 10 minutes ago there was a comment (quickly flagged and removed, thankfully) in this very thread talking about black people having lower IQs.
Of all the companies out there, Google can afford to be that picky. More importantly, they can look into why some people aren't choosing to study CS or apply to google, and adjust things to get a more diverse group of CS grads or fresh applicants.
Adjusting things so that CS is a more attractive career field, that would be great for everyone!
I've not seen his stuff personally, but based on what people are saying he seems like a really talented guy whose talent was overlooked when he was younger - and his race/background played a part in this.
It was fun. I don't think it really should mean one thing or another for one's professional destiny. I definitely don't miss smelling like hamburgers!
People who never flipped burgers don't know what it's like to have to basically peel off your candlewaxed shirt and trousers when you get home, and that grease smell embedded deep in your nasal cavity.
My parents still remind me how terrible I smelled!
It sounds like he got to where he was the same way most of us probably got to where we are....by working at it and getting better over time. A good public speaker with a passable technical background being successful at a job where they need to speak publicly about technical topics just isn't very surprising to me - regardless of skin tone.