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Great over all story. Not sure what the McDonalds part has to do with it - a huge number of kids start there. I did - and in the next 40 years I've been Chief Architect of a startup, found my own startup (with a install base over 12 million), and am currently a Principal Architect at Microsoft (and was a lead in Microsoft Research a few years ago)
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 :)
He seems like an awesome guy. Well-deserved success!
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?
Completely agree.
> 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.
McDonald's was my starting point. It's where I developed much of my work ethic and my first taste of leadership in a professional setting. I was a shift manager for most of that time and remember learning about the restaurant business, food cost, working with customers, and managing people.
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.
If you have time to lean you have time to clean!
Because it shows all those teenagers who are working at McDonalds in high school who feel hopeless that they can go so much further.
What's wrong with a bit of inspiration / hope?
I'm (possibly wrongly) assuming you've never had to work through that shit.
Exactly.
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.
Alternatively it highly depresses you and you drop out never to re-enter the job market, or to enter very late only once it becomes a necessity for survival.
It gets the clicks.
I could not fit the entire title "From McDonald's to Google: How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing" when submitting the post.
Hi Kelsey! I hope my comment didn't offend or in any way take away from this excellent exposure.
Not at all! I read it as an honest question so I answered it.
It's more clickbaity for sure.
And there’s no shame in “flipping burgers” to be sure. Anyone who takes the personal responsibility to earn a living has earned respect.
Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds.
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!
Yeah same. Not on a farm but as a busboy when I was 14. I had to convince the owner to hire me but I knew my parents didn’t have extra cash to give me a guitar so I worked for it. And it was cool being around adults in that environment. Being treated like anyone else and earning the respect from the immigrants who were busting their ass and the other young people from working class backgrounds.
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.
I've been involved in hiring engineers, and see previous employment 'flipping burgers' as a massive plus. It shows someone is willing to work hard when they need to.
I'm not sure if that says more about the workers or your requirements. By 'work hard' you can only mean 'performing hours of tedious unthinking labour' if you're saying 'flipping burgers' is relevant and necessary to 'working hard'. The qualities just don't seem to match up for a job that requires real, rigorous, logical thinking, except for selecting out anyone incapable of the bare minimum effort to sort of just survive in the workplace. That's fair, but doesn't really map to what I commonly see which is a lot of wasted potential being consumed by menial labour because 'just doing it' is seen as more important than developing genuinely useful new approaches.
I worked with a QA who used to be a cook. He was unstoppable.
Well-deserved success, and very inspirational!
There seems to be a rather large 10 year gap in this story that kinda glosses over the part where you went from installing internet to being a software engineer. It makes it sound like you just magically became a software engineer while road tripping around the country managing a friend's comedy tour. I mean, it goes from managing that tour to suddenly:
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?
Maybe I can help fill the gaps.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's nice to see the resume listed out here. I did try to look you up on LinkedIn to maybe find out more (before writing my previous comment) - but found nothing.
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 read it for the first time today like everyone else and love the way it turned out.
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.
What an amazing "fill-in-the-gaps" comment!
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?
> 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.
Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.
Thank you so much for posting this! I found many things in your story that are similar to my experience and it gives me hope.
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!
1) The answer to this lies in the question. Agile is a practice and it'll take some to get up to speed. One path I took was taking jobs in tech support, answering phones calls, and finding opportunities to engage with the product teams. You can start by giving feedback on the top issues you're seeing and breaking down ways the product can improve to reduce related support calls. And Boom, you are now apart of the Agile process, providing a feedback loop that helps development teams incrementally improve the product. You also help reduce support cost; don't worry, if you automate yourself out of a job, there will be a better one waiting for you.
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.
So how does it feel to realize that the article and all the fawning responses are due to your race and not your accomplishments?
People can work dead-end jobs a long time before getting "called up". I work in "real tech" these days, have gotten to write a book on a trendy technology, have had a hand in multi-billion dollar projects.
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.
The question is about the transition, not the length of time before software programming.
I don't agree with your reading of the question. I feel like "rather large 10 year gap" is fixating in part on the length of time.
> glosses over the part where you went from installing internet to being a software engineer. It makes it sound like you just magically became a software engineer while road tripping around the country managing a friend's comedy tour.
parent is wondering about the transition to software engineer, not saying that nothing happened for 10 years
This is a fascinating and inspiring story! I'm also an African-American in tech working in Silicon Valley. I have a strong interest in systems, and I had the pleasure of interning for Google's cloud division twice: once to work on the Google Cloud SQL team, and another time to work on the Spanner team. It's great to hear of other African-Americans in Silicon Valley.
You should definitely encourage them to apply to FANGs and not be intimidated by the interview process.
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?
Not meaning to attack your comment, but want to point out that race quota systems are racist per a supreme court ruling. That's why colleges use a point system (which is still arguably racist by basically being the same thing, but a different topic).
I work at a FANG company and I can guarantee you that there are quotas and no one is willing to speak out about it.
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.
First time I heard about "minority quotas" I just didn't believe it. But then YouTube got sued for doing exactly that [0]
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...
>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.
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.
It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.
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.
> Do quotas actually help minorities?
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?
> If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.
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.
That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work. Instead, much of it is about access to training opportunities, coaches, having parents who can afford to send you to various camps, drive you to weekend tournaments, and buy you the equipment necessary.
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.
> 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 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.
Well why is that? Wasn’t everyone and there mother going into CS and IT around the dotcom bubble? Not sure why we even have a pipeline problem (which is real).
> > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.
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.
The rhymes with a few emails I've received.
maybe we work for the same fang.
Not get into the politics, but this seems like an interesting potential incentive misalignment where a team is incentivized to fill up their budget with non-diverse employees so they can try to hire even more (diverse) help with "overflow" budget.
The Supreme Court rulings didn't say whether race quota systems are racist since that's not a concept known to the law - they merely judged legality. The set of racist things includes both legal things and illegal ones (e.g. in the US calling someone a racial slur is usually racist but not itself illegal); so does the set of non-racist things (e.g. explicitly refusing to hire people over age 40 is usually illegal but not itself racist).
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.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that.
Regardless, IMO points or quotas or "target": same difference :) Someone call the justice department.
Update: Interesting that this is getting downvotes. I must have a blindspot. Would be great if you could provide context with the downvote. Thanks!
As a tangent: when did FAANG become FANG? I feel like I missed something.
It doesn't matter, it's not used as an acronym anymore (since most would put Apple over Netflix in that list) and is just a buzzword referring to the major tech/software companies.
Typically people saw Apple as hardware then software company. The. FAANG came along because of some business tv program. And now we dropped apple again.
Would the problem with that side effect lay on the shoulders of the person making the assumption that it's not possible for there to be multiple candidates of roughly equal merit (at which point a quota would then be applied) ?
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).
There is a statistical property at play here.
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.
I would describe it as more of a chilling effect on voting "not inclined" or raising concerns on performance.
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.
It may be a minor quibble, but but the irrelevant "From McDonald's" is pretty tiring clickbait. Many of us that now work in the tech industry, whether black, white, etc, have worked these shitty food service and retail jobs, but unless you worked your way up through McD's tech statk from the grill, it just doesn't matter. Of course Mr. Hightower here is just reusing the title of the article, so this isn't a slight against him, but journalist should try harder, even in this clickbait world we live in. I'd hate to think my time working at Hardee's, McDonald's and Walmart has any bearing on my current career.
Also, he had the job when you’re supposed to have a McDonalds job (before or around college).
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.
Was about to suggest adding Kelsey Hightower to the title, as he's someone in the community many may already know of...then I look at the username! :D
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.
Posting a puff piece about yourself on a tech news site feels... something though.
I got a bit fed up with the amount of 'I love Kelsey' tweets he shared today too. Felt a bit much.
Many of those Tweets reminded me how much I've grown as a person. Those Tweets reminded me that I made the right choice treating everyone with respect and in some cases helped them in their own careers.
It was my way of saying thank you and hoping those stories would inspire others and bring a little joy to their day.
You resemble superheroes on the "The Boys".
I'm very glad he's getting the attention and hope he keeps getting it. He's an inspiring fellow, and I'm happy that he will be the one who will inspire some folks out there to enter tech.
Oh I'm not arguing that he's had an outsized impact on a lot of people, it just felt like he was clapping himself on the back for the entire day.
Humans are weird. We like seeing people succeed against hardship and enjoy reading success stories. But the enjoyment of their success can’t be to excess, otherwise people will see them as unscrupulous or arrogant. Not a slight against you or OP just interesting that we have our own individual thresholds of what kind of self congratulating is acceptable until it turns sour
Almost everyone you see who has a personal brand that is popular on the conference circuit is willing and able to do this kind of self promotion. It’s not for me, but I don’t see it as objectionable because I see it as part and parcel of the role, and I think the role is a valuable one that should continue to exist. Technologies benefit from having some well known and well liked “names” behind them, and it gives them the confidence to try something new instead of the old thing which moves the industry forward.
Perhaps, but I suppose I'd personally nudge a friend to post it for me? Maybe humility isn't valued much in the Valley, but coming from elsewhere it feels off.
This is a side of me I would like more people to see. The whole person. So I submitted the article. I grew up in the South and don't live in the Valley. It required a bit of humility to even share this side of me, it's very personal, and in someways, not very flattering, but I wish I knew that successful people also come from very average backgrounds.
Personally I find the idea of asking a friend to post a self-promotional link without disclosing the affiliation, because I'm too "humble" to post it... quite the opposite of humble.
Probably an imitator or clone. (:laughing:)
It's me, Kelsey Hightower.
Your Udacity course
was my first taste of k8s and really got me excited about it. I eventually decided to focus and specialize around it and couldn't be happier. Thank you!
Hi Kelsey! I love your origin story. You've come a long way. Do you mind if I introduce you to a friend of mine? He's not publicly famous but he hustles pretty hard and he's a great friend... I think you two would get along really well. (I'll get in contact with you on twitter)
Make it happen.
Apparently you've already had coffee with Mark T. Small world innit?
exactly what a clone would say!
My thoughts exactly.
Hi Kelsey. Here's a story about you at Google:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy4QXLKHlI
Thanks for posting that.
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).
I'm lucky enough to go to a decent university, but having looked up a few noses I find it each one makes me want to work harder. I've met people who I honestly believe have been born well (expensive schools etc.) to not have any zest for learning
I've had the opportunity to know Kelsey for a number of years, and we've worked together closely on occasion. He is the genuinely good human the article portrays him as, and unlike some who evangelize - Kelsey understands his technical area (k8s) deeply and is on the CLI daily. Top notch human, and I thought I'd add a POV from a regular HN reader.
I follow him on twitter, that guy is always so positive its great. Even when I'm drowning in YAML he stops me from giving up! :)
Awesome article, I still remember Kelsey talks about CoreOS it was amazing, that got me introduced to containers and I have the privilege to be his colleague now. Overall great story except the title and the race thing, I find it irrelevant, he is just an awesome human being.
Always wondered were Kelsey got his comedian skills. Now I understand it was working with his buddy Ronnie Jordan, driving him around, coaching him, learning with & from Jordan. Reminds me of the Beatles and their time in Hamburg were they got their Performance skills. Even in his extensive answer her in HN describing his IT career made me laugh a couple of times.
Thank you Kelsey, keep up the good work.
Ronnie taught me that making people smile should be part of the job. We both learned that you really need to understand the world around you if you want get people to laugh at it.
Kelsey's a great part of the DevOps community - always helping and promoting others and their work in addition to leveling up his own game. I've benefited from every interaction with him for sure, at conferences and stuff - he's super knowledgeable and tireless about spreading knowledge and raising others up. A class act through and through, and I was excited to see the article.
Good story. I'd be happy to work for you anyday. I wouldn't be too quick to judge the guy who asked for directions, unless he didn't believe you could be an attendee or speaker. I'd never heard of you before, and I'm not afraid to ask random possibly-prestigious people for directions at conferences. I occasionally attend NANOGs, hosted by Edward McNair.
Met Mr Hightower for the first time, at a CoreOS meetup, and it was memorable. I wish I was this cool and good at presentations and demos :)
It has been awesome to see over the years, the deserved recognition, and reaching more people !
I wonder if they made him grind leetcode whiteboarding at google.
This guy is one of the most charismatic dudes I have ever met. I remember also being struck by the fact that he is very intelligent.
Applied to a G DevRel internship getting inspired by this
Kelsey,
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!
McDonald's helped me establish a work ethic and learn what it means to be a professional and earn a paycheck. I was a shift manager in the 11th grade so I had to learn how to manage people and make sure the numbers added up at the end of the night, while doing homework in the back office, with one eye on the drive through times.
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.
Too few people recognize how many valuable skills a job like this can teach you, and it feels like too few people I meet professionally have these entry level jobs anymore. I always feel like the interns or new hires that I see that have never had a hard, exhausting non-office environment job are just missing a pretty fundamental experience. Whether it's fast food, waiting tables, washing dishes or other manual labor, it can be formative and instill a great work ethic.
Super dope!
Definitely a motivating and inspirational story
Kelsey Hightower is unstoppable. It's the combination of humor, self-deprecation, knowledge and unflagging optimism.
He's this generation's Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob.
Yes! It’s about time we replace Uncle Bob and his whiny antics with someone more worthy of the spotlight and our attention. Kelsey gets my vote here.
Nice to see another former fast-food worker working in tech. There’s dozens of us! Dozens! My first job was at Wendy’s earning minimum wage, and during my tech career I’ve helped take 3 tech companies through IPO, with all 3 tickers still ticking away on the NYSE.
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.
My job at 16 was also McDonald’s. I loved it. The floor managers would make sure we all got free food basically any time at our store, so I could go with my friends and we’d all get dinner. Nobody took it too seriously and most people tried but we definitely worked hard.
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!
> 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!
Awesome!
US blacks have one standard deviation lower IQ than US whites and IQ correlates with skin color. This means blacks are expected to be very rare among leading engineers which are typically selected for very high IQ. There are rare outliers though and it would be a shame if they couldn't contribute their brain power. People with lower IQ can still contribute to society, just not at the forefront of engineering.
re-upped
Wasn't there however exactly a google controversy where an engineer was claiming that people who represent some minority groups get accepted easier and have a lower bar of entry because of diversity recruitment requirement?
Emphasizing diversity in your hiring doesn't necessarily mean lowering the bar. It may mean trying harder to find candidates.
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!
Not saying that what you're talking about never happens, but I think the article was focused on the fact that different people have different cultural backgrounds and were granted different opportunities, and in order to hire the best candidates you should take that into consideration.
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.
What is the relevance here?
The article claims that for reasons that should be "clear" (assuming they mean him being black) he has had to go through much tougher route.
Well I think that whatever advantage Google supposedly gave him was probably offset by spending the rest of his life as a black man.
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.
("Flagged" does not mean "removed", FYI. People like me with showdead enabled can still see it.)
Put this one at the top and keep it there!
Thats cool, but I've never heard of him and this story is a bit "predictable"? Maybe uninteresting, but with less negative connotations? I'm not sure what word would work best.
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.