I stand out a little bit, because although I'm a "Valley-type techie", I'm also a woman with purple hair. Being a woman in tech has its pros and cons.
The Silicon Valley I'M based out of is what some in the tech media refer to as "Silicon Valley North"- Toronto. (I also live near downtown, but that's irrelevant.)
I was a computer whiz ever since I was a very young girl. By the time I was 11, it was 1995 and I just got into web development, as a self-taught hobby. (There, I just dated myself.)
I didn't even consider a career in tech until I was already in my mid-20s. Why? I theorize that being female (girls aren't encouraged to get into computing as much as boys are) was a minor reason, but being told by teachers in the public school system for years that you have to be EXCELLENT at math to get into computing professionally is the main one. I'm not bad at math, but I thought I was when I was a kid. I blame former Ontario premier Mike Harris. In the 1990s, he really fucked up the school system. One of the policy/curriculum changes he and John Snobelen orchestrated was "show your work" in math. As soon as arithmetic and algebra get more complex, I use different techniques to solve problems than the mainstream ones in textbooks. For example, I don't do long division. I look at a division problem, figure out what the largest "X times Y" is that fits into the number I'm dividing, and I work back and forth from there. I can even get a decimal answer correct down to the first few places (3.451, for example), just give me enough time with a pencil and paper.
The way my brain is wired, you can try teaching me long division thousands of times, but my math work in practice will always be with the methods that correlate with how my brain thinks about numbers.
Getting the correct answer without cheating wasn't enough in the Mike Harris curriculum. If, when you "show your work", you aren't using the method that's on the blackboard or in the textbook, you get NO MARKS. Therefore, even though I'm competent enough in math (I wrote my GED later on without studying and got a higher mark than 99% of the adult test takers in the province that year, plus I scored perfectly in the math battery), I thought I was a "dummy."
And since I was told by teachers over and over again that you have to be EXCELLENT in math to get into a career in computing, and those same teachers convinced me I was HORRIBLE at math... guess what?
But in my teens and into my 20s, I kept using computers constantly every day, and I carried on with my web development projects. Web design was only a "hobby" for me, after all.
I had lots of jobs in retail and in call centres. In my personal life, if someone's Windows machine had a problem, I fixed it for them. But I never considered a tech career until I was 25. Which doesn't sound too late, until you consider the people who started working in IT when they were 18.
Well, guess what? People who entered my life in my adulthood kept telling me that I'm "really good with computers."
I started developing websites for a few small businesses because people close to me saw the work I did as a "hobby." I also wrote my CompTIA A+ in my mid 20s and passed with flying colours.
I got into consumer remote Windows tech support (as a call centre employee) for a couple of years. My tickets were varied, but a full 60% of them or more were malware related. Thus began my fascination with not only malware, but IT security in general.
Word spread that I'm good at removing really nasty malware (rootkits that malware removal programs don't have signatures for, etc.), and hardening/securing Windows (which, as we all know, is not a very secure OS platform to begin with, even with the NT kernel and NTFS file system), Mac (more secure because of its Unix roots, but no software is perfect), and Linux (ditto). So I got a job writing about IT security for the InfoSec Institute! http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/author/kimcrawley
Not too long ago, I met a wonderful man, in a setting that had nothing to do with IT or development. His name is Sean Rooney, and we fell in love. It probably helped that, by an amazing series of coincidences, we have the same interests for the most part. It was an amazing coincidence that he's one of the top IT security people Canada has ever produced. He's contributed to the curriculum of the CompTIA Security+ and the CISSP, among others. He's contributed to Canada's laws regarding digital security and rights. He helped catch the notorious USENET "hacker" of the 80s and 90s, "Hipcrime". He's worked for the Canadian Military, Alcatel (public transit system controllers in big cities around the world), and the RCMP, among other big clients.
Sadly, although the old IT security he founded, Coldstream, was very successful for 14 years, a corrupt accountant and a corrupt bureaucrat brought the company down.
Now that we're together, we've relaunched his old company as our new one, Cyberia Labs. http://cyberialabs.coldstream.ca
We have some of the old Coldstream team members with us, including a top cryptogapher, Sandy Harris.
I'm working with computer scientists who can blow me away in many areas of IT and development. But interestingly enough, I'm quicker and better at Windows tech support than any of them, and that also includes Windows Server. I'm the only web developer on the team. So whereas Sandy speaks C++ and Perl, and Sean speaks Assembly languages, I'm the only one who speaks HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and PHP. I'm also an art school dropout. I've had a passion for visual art ever since I was a little girl, and I'm equally comfortable in analogue mediums and digital mediums. I was also a good art college student, but seeing my classmates live as starving artists for the most part, and realizing that my teachers would be starving artists if it weren't for their teaching jobs... discouraged me. But in a group full of techies, I'm the only artist, so I can make our website look nice, etc.
I also have had a bit of a career in soft journalism. My tech writing is for the InfoSec Institute, but if you Google my real name, Kim Crawley, you'll find some op-eds I wrote which were syndicated in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other publications. I got the writing bug from my Dad, who is a rather successful novelist. So, I'm the only member of the Cyberia team who can write in "English" to a professional, readable standard. I've edited technical and scientific articles from many scientists and tech people. Their ideas are wonderful! Their content is amazing! But it's totally unreadable. If I had a penny for every time I had to turn a scientist's 500 word sentence into several paragraphs...
So you see, dmor, even though I'm a "techie" and I'm the co-founder of a tech startup (we already have clients!), my non-tech skills- art, creative writing, my ability to translate "techie speak" into language end users understand, and my instinct for marketing, make me vital to our team.
Although I really dislike Steve Jobs (his walled garden system for Apple products, and the way he's abused his subordinates over the years), no one can argue that he had a natural talent for marketing.
In THAT sense only, I see myself as Cyberia's "Steve Jobs" to my fiance Sean's "Steve Wozniak". I'm technically inclined enough to "fit-in" in Silicon Valley, but Sean is the one with the patents and white papers. (Sandy has patents too, and it's all very important IT security related technology.) But I'm the "pretty" one (not that Jobs was "pretty", but you know what I mean), and I'm the one who can market, make things look stylish and artistic, and sell our business to people who aren't "nerds."
I figure, dmor, a lot of the people here on HN have non-tech skills and talents that help them in their tech careers. And getting good at those non-tech skills would be impossible if there wasn't some non-tech in their backgrounds or experience.