> 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.
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?
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?
Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.
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.
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!
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.
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?
[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?
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).
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
What's wrong with a bit of inspiration / hope?
I'm (possibly wrongly) assuming you've never had to work through that shit.
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.
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.
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 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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
