
Ask HN: Who were you before you were a silicon "valley-type techie"? - dmor
I read this comment regarding the post about being the doctor on board http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974122<p>"I think it's awesome that you're a commercial pilot and participating in HN. It can sometimes get too insular with valley-type techies here. Thanks for participating."<p>We aren't just "Silicon Valley" after all, it seems like almost everyone I meet is from somewhere else.  I love this community, and would love to hear where people came from and a bit about their identities that aren't particularly sexy or ready for reality TV.  Here's an example the kind of answer I'm looking for, this is me:<p>I was living in Seattle, grew up riding horses and teaching tennis in the parks and rec and moved out my senior year.  I was convinced that I should be a writer, but I knew there was no money in it and I started in the family business.  I college I was playing in a (terrible) metal-core band and making coffees.  I dropped out of community college after 1 year to work for a big global logistics company at 19.  I was into coding on AS/400 systems and automating business processes with a combination of Delphi, Pascal, Excel spreadsheets, and Windows OS automation so no "real" developers wanted to talk to me.  I joined a cover/jam band with a lower pressure schedule, got married young, and moved here with Twilio when I was 23.
======
AYBABTME
I was an infantry officer deployed in Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces
when I found myself hacking VB(A) programs to relief me off my HQ charge. Then
I ended up automating all of my HQ's stations such that nobody had to do
anything anymore. The things I made were so ugly [1,2,3], it's laughable. But
they were very functional, in comparison to the crap we were supposed to use,
and for which the Army had paid millions of dollars.

I was reserve. I tried to transfer reg forces (full time) during my tour, but
budget compressions left no position available for me to fill. Meanwhile, I
received recognition for the work I had done [4].

So in spite of my failure to transfer full-time infantry officer, I realized a
quite credible alternative would be to actually code things for a living,
since anyway that's what I end up doing when I'm thrown in a giant sandbox.

When I came back to Canada, I enlisted in a Software Engineering undergraduate
program. I'm 2½ years in, this Summer will be my first COOP term (out of 4)
and I've succeeded in getting an offer to intern with Amazon.

Life is strange. I was quite disappointed that I couldn't transfer to reg
force. It's quite a blessing, in retrospective.

[1]: [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
too...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
tools/incident_manager/Screen%20Shot%202012-12-27%20at%208.34.13%20PM.png)

[2]: [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
too...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
tools/j3_avn_helper/overview.png)

[3]: [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
too...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Project/blog-post-afgh-
tools/incident_manager/Screen%20Shot%202012-12-27%20at%208.38.42%20PM.png)

[4]:
[https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Pics/AIR%20WING%20COMD%20C...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21733074/Pics/AIR%20WING%20COMD%20COMMENDATION%20-%20LT%20GRONDIN%20-%20Aug%202010.jpg)

~~~
notJim
[Wo?]Man, little "apps" like that built using Excel or Access or VB with drag
and drop RUN THE WORLD. I worked at a few BigCos, and they were riddled with
things like that, where some enterprising person realized computers are better
at tedium than people, and learned _just barely enough_ programming to make
something to make their job easier.

~~~
AYBABTME
I didn't know any programming (aside from Assembly, but that's another story!)
when I initially started doing this! When I caught on, I kept going, fuelled
by my anger against the older folks in my team who couldn't type fast enough,
putting in jeopardy lives of casualties on the ground who were waiting for a
chopper to bring them to the hospital.

The ugly mess of MEDEVAC things you see there, replaced a 15 minutes process
of: measuring on a map, computing on a calculator and manually typing things
on the computer; with just a dozen of clicks and consistent, reliable and
precise information.

Now, I learnt a whole lot since 2010, so this is not quite representative of
products I would produce nowadays.

Oh and I'm a man; Antoine is a French name solely used for men. ;)

~~~
rdl
If this was the tool at KAF, thank you for writing it! (a friend of mine was a
CF doctor there, and I spent some time in radiology getting the US PACS stuff
integrated with the Canadian stuff)

~~~
AYBABTME
I know it was used at TFK for I was there and originally, at that time, we
were the only unit operating around KAF (aside from the defence team of KAF
itself). Later our area of operation got split in half and shared with TF
Striker, a US mechanized brigade. I shared my tool with them and I know my
counterpart in their brigade HQ used them, but I don't know for how long as I
left a little later.

For a period between April 2010 and Sept 2010 (maybe going later than that),
all of TFK's MEDEVAC, which must have accounted for over 70% of MEDEVACs in
KAF, were fulfilled using this tool.

------
bluehat
I was born in a small town about 30 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line,
frought with its share of social issues. My parents were not engineering-
friendly, and were surprised and relatively unprepared for a daughter
interested in the sciences. You'd imagine I'd be older to have this story, but
I was born in 86.

Computers would rot out my soul and so I wasn't permitted to code. I started
robotics with an after school program, got a scholarship to college, started
CS in college at 18, got a job at NASA at 20 and worked my way up while
finishing my degree. Upon graduation I couldn't find ethical work in robotics
in the recession of '09 and returned to NASA. NASA decided to not return to
the moon in the fall of '09. I wound up related to the web by working
infrastructure for a large tech company, and eventually in startups via Hacker
Dojo.

~~~
daeken
> I was born in a small town about 30 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line

If you don't mind my asking: where? I'm originally from Chambersburg, PA,
which is just over the line as well.

~~~
bluehat
York PA

(People responded surprised that York had social adventures so
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robertson_%28York,_Pen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robertson_%28York,_Pennsylvania%29)
)

------
pbiggar
I did a PhD in compilers in Dublin, and wanted nothing more than to work on
compilers for a living.

In March 2009 I came out to give a Google Tech Talk. My flights and hotel were
paid for by my stipend, but a few weeks before I came out I saw a "Hacker
house" being advertised on HN, on some obscure site called "AirBnB". I stayed
on a airbed for $15 a night and met founders of some aspiring startups,
notably Wattvision, Divvyshot, 280 North and Airbnb.

This was during demo day, and the energy was just incredible. If it weren't
for my girlfriend (now wife), I'd probably have dropped out of college right
then and tried to join Wattvision.

Instead, I finished college, got into YC, failed at my startup, then moved
back to Dublin, got that compiler job, and then moved to SF. By then I
couldn't stop thinking about startups, so when I had enough cash saved my wife
let me do a startup again. A year ago I met Allen, and we started
<https://circleci.com> together!

[edit: here's the ad that started it all for me:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494067>. Interesting comment on that
page: "It seems like <http://www.couchsurfing.com/> is a bit more mature than
airbnb.com"]

~~~
nbashaw
That old Airbnb hacker house link is broken, but holy crap the background of
their 404 page is awesome!

~~~
dmor
Love PG's comment about the light fixture of death. Was this "the warehouse"?

~~~
pbiggar
This was a house in Poe St in Palo Alto.

~~~
dmor
Different place, similar light fixture

------
notJim
Grew up in Arizona, lived in Germany for about a year, went to Arizona State
University. Studied aerospace engineering, interned at Honeywell, where they
were using a VAX mainframe[1] to build software and do "revision control" in
~2006 or 2007. My job was to manually fix requirements tracking that had
gotten out of sync (basically, I was editing a bunch of PDFs, except it was
some document software running on the mainframe.) I got in trouble for
spending a couple weeks helping another engineer replace 90% of the work I was
supposed to do with a relational database. I didn't even have to build the
software, they previously had it and then it broke and rather than fixing it,
they were just doing it manually.

The next summer, I interned at Boeing where I spent the first month reading
dry paper manuals because I was waiting to get a computer, and because my boss
was too lazy/busy to find real work for me to do. The next month was spent
filling out paperwork that could have been replaced by a very simple web
application, except that it had to be paper and it had to be a Word doc
because of bizarre process requirements. They were paying a full-time engineer
$70k to do the same thing I was doing as an intern. The final month was
finally spent doing some real engineering work (something about dissimilar
metals.)

After those two experiences of how backwards and fucked up the aerospace
sector is, I decided I would just keep doing web dev, which I'd been doing
since I was about 15 (programming since I was about 12 or 13.) Currently in
NYC working for Etsy.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX>

------
daeken
I grew up in Chambersburg, PA -- tiny town, very poor overall -- but was lucky
enough to have an uncle that built PCs (so we always had one in the house) and
an Apple II in my classroom. I can't remember a time when my dream wasn't to
"go to MIT to be a programmer"; thankfully, I happened to start gaming at a
local computer shop, and they turned me onto Perl and PHP. Started doing
contract work around 14 or 15, and then got a job in the field at 17, out in
San Diego. Bounced around from place to place since then, never landing in the
valley for more than a couple days. Now residing in suburban CT, and splitting
my time between here and Barcelona in a few months.

------
ladon86
I'm from the UK. As a teenager I was really into making music, and I was
determined not to go to college, as music was starting to work out pretty well
professionally.

My parents convinced me to go to college for one semester, I ended up staying
and graduated with a computer science degree. It pretty much killed my music
career unfortunately, but I really enjoyed it.

Afterwards I worked as a game developer in Cambridge and then went back to
college for a CS PhD, but I dropped out a few years in, and moved to
California to start a company. That was a year and a half ago!

~~~
pbiggar
What's your company?

------
mattdeboard
I was a US Marine for a decade, first an infantryman then a combat
correspondent. I tried civilian PR for a while but it didn't agree with me to
say the least. Lost my job, and instead of looking for another I dove into
teaching myself to program. A couple of years later I'm here being paid well
to work on a project I enjoy and believe in. Couldn't be better.

edit: Should be said I'm not in the valley anymore, but may be back.

------
JoeAltmaier
I am an Iowa farm boy. Grew up with hogs and cattle, making hay and walking
bean rows. My older brother went to college, showed my how to program in
BASIC, got me an online account at the CAI lab which I hung on to through
junior high and high school.

After a BS I went to Stanford, found they had a sucky computer situation and
got a job in Silicon Valley doing OS work (CTOS). Been working startups ever
since...which was '82.

~~~
nnnnnn
Nice to see another Iowa farm boy on here!

I also grew up a farm in Iowa, near Waterloo. Started doing web development in
middle school because there wasn't much else to do. Moved to California for
school in '09 and am now consulting for a few valley companies while I finish
my BS in CS from Claremont McKenna/Harvey Mudd.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
My youngest looked at Harvey Mudd - nice!

------
yarianluis
I was born in La Habana, Cuba. When I was five my family moved to a city in
Mexico called Cuernavaca. There I saw and used a computer for the first time.
A few years later I had my own and used the internet for the first time. This
was like 1998/1999.

Funny enough, during my middle school years I thought programming would be
boring. It wasn't until college that I found that I really enjoyed it. By
chance I came across PG's essays perhaps 16 months ago. Now I am moving to San
Francisco to work for a startup. Funny how things happen.

------
ww520
I'm a native growing up here in the SF Bay Area. Even for school, it's just in
Berkeley across the bay.

For programming, I started with Basic and assembly in high school, then
Pascal/C/Scheme/Lisp in college. Got some very valuable CS classes that I can
use till today. For one semester I bought Guy Steele's Lisp reference and
wrote a Common Lisp system from ground up with C while funking the complex
analysis math class (low attendance); no regret.

I probably didn't know it at the time but there were a lot of advance in CS
fundamentals at the time, and I felt like I've missed out on those cause I
came at the tail end of them. What's funny was that I did join a database
startup some time later that happened to be started by my CS professor.

Over the years, I did work in databases, network protocol/drivers, kernel
device drivers, native UI apps, p2p, security, ecommerce/auction, ERP
integration, complex event system, regulatory compliance, CRUD apps, fault-
tolerant system, index/search, data mining, fault detection, financial app,
storage system, full stack webapps, mobile apps/games, and railway analysis
apps. It's very rewarding to be able to go from the very low level in the
system all the way to the user facing level. Nowadays I mostly work on full
stack webapps or mobile apps.

For languages I just picked them up along the way, such as
C++/Java/Javascript/Perl/Python. I found that if I use them in my work, I
would become good at them, otherwise I forgot about them, like I've dabbled in
Fortran/PHP/Ruby/Haskell/Scala/Clojure but they become hazy after a while.

Besides the first two companies I joined, all others were startups.

------
robertlaing
Web designer/programmer working in agencies in London, back in 2004.

A freelancer who was working for us quit and raised some money for a product
idea. And friends, who had founded Last.fm, started getting a lot of traction.

About that time I realized "oh I don't need to work for agencies my whole
life". Was very inspiring. I think that unless you've grown up in SV, gone to
Stanford etc, that kind of idea is very uncommon.

Moved to Japan, started a startup.

All been downhill since then :) Gotta get off this crack :)

~~~
dmor
I love Gengo, and I know a lot of people who need to break out of agencies -
I'd never heard that part of your founding story before. How did you decide to
start your company in Japan, were you originally from there (you mention the
UK)?

~~~
robertlaing
Married a Japanese girl in London (I'm British/Australian). She had been there
for 10 years so perfect English. We decided to move to Japan a few months
after we got married (more because I wanted to live there and see what it was
like :)

Started Gengo a couple of years after arriving (in 2008). I wouldn't really
have had the idea for the company if I'd stayed in the UK, because obviously
it's all about the language barrier. Japan's not the easiest place to start a
startup (it's quite a bit easier now, more funding etc) but it wasn't insane.

Onwards and upwards :)

------
rdl
I ran an offshore datahaven in the North Sea in 2000-2002
(<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html>), worked in the
Caribbean (Anguilla) to do open-source crypto before that (due to legal
restrictions on US citizens, it was pretty complex; I could describe systems
in "papers" but couldn't actually work on the production code), and was at MIT
before that.

2003 I did some NFC payments stuff, consulting, and generally discovered the
Bay Area, and 2007-2008 I worked for a bubblicious facebook app/ad network.

I spent 2004-2008 and 2008-2010 doing tech stuff in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait,
UAE, Qatar Bahrain, and some other countries. Very much less "tech" in the
software sense, mainly satellite communications, some IP networking, lots of
politics, logistics, and security.

Now I'm working on a tech startup in silicon valley which is about to launch,
which is kind of a big change.

I kind of miss working outside the US, and on physical infrastructure instead
of just software and networks.

~~~
nmb
Wow, I read about HavenCo in my high school economics textbook. Kind of
surreal to see you here now. Best of luck on your new venture!

------
michaelhoffman
I don't live in Silicon Valley, and I don't work for a startup or anything
like it. I do computational genomics and machine learning research at the
University of Washington in Seattle.

------
nbashaw
In college, before I became obsessed with startups, I was a policy debater at
Michigan State. Any other ex-debaters hanging around on HN?

~~~
brendano
Yes, i did policy debate in high school in Minnesota. It was really
influential in how I think about things, especially analytic/critical
thinking.

~~~
nbashaw
Totally! It also taught me what it feels like to actually work hard. Before
that I had only worked at a pretty leisurely pace, but in debate if you want
to win the amount of research and practice required are crazy.

------
jaytaylor
What about those of us who are SV natives? Startups are what I idolized as an
adolescent and I have grown up to live the dream!

~~~
dmor
You are so rare! Where did you grow up? I grew up with the lore of Microsoft,
what was it like growing up with the companies of SV? It seems like there
are/were so many more.

~~~
jaytaylor
I grew up in Palo Alto (I count myself extremely fortunate to have been raised
in such a wonderful place). I attended PALY highschool. Stanford was literally
right across the street, so lots of kids took (and likely continue to)
advanced mathematics courses over there. Google used to advertise in "The
Campanille", the school newspaper (this was circa 1998-2000).

These days I'm hanging out in Menlo Park at SendHub, and I look back on having
worked for a number of small to medium sized startups all over the bay area.
There are a few other people I know who have stuck around in tech and other
things, but I'm perplexed that more people didn't stay here!

I love it.

------
wglb
I was the son of a wheat farmer. And I am not yet, and may not ever be a
"valley-type techie". Wheat farmer, by the way, of my Dad's generation was a
way of life more affected by technology than any other.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
How can I get a 50 lb bag of wheat for $15 retail? I have no idea how food can
be produced at such a scale so cheaply -- this is truly amazing! I'm having a
hard time finding the per-ton subsidy, but I'd love to learn more about how it
can be so very, very cheap.

~~~
wglb
Price to the farmer, when I left college, was about $1/bushel. A bushel was
generally 60 lbs.

So my question turns around to you--where do the other $14 go?

------
niggler
Not everyone here is a silicon valley type. There are plenty of finance people
here (not just finance IT).

------
ajdecon
Not sure that I'm a "valley-type techie" since I don't do web development...
but I am in Silicon Valley, so here goes...

During middle and high school my passions were physics and computers, but I
never thought that computing could be anywhere near as fun as doing lab
science. So I did a B.S. in Physics and a bunch of nano-scale and solid-state
research, then went on to grad school in materials science and worked on
polymer and colloidal physics and microfabrication. I still think that the
degree in Physics was the best thing I could have done at the time, and I
learned a ridiculous amount from it.

During grad school I learned that academia involved far more grant-writing and
politics than I enjoyed, and that I really did enjoy working with computers
more than doing bench science. I left with a Masters and got into high-
performance computing, doing a lot of sysadmin and a little software
development on compute clusters with a small company doing HPC as a service.

These days I'm in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara), but I still work on HPC
clusters (at Nvidia) and I'm still heavily focused on scientific and technical
computing. I love what I do and I love that I'm still supporting scientists
and engineers, though I do miss the lab bench occasionally. I still read a lot
about physics, but my work and most of my side projects are focused on HPC.

More importantly, I have a wonderful wife who plays roller derby and two cats
that demand an inordinate amount of attention; I fence epee, and have since
college; I play a lot of board games, read a lot of science fiction, and still
pick up my trumpet every once in a while. Life is good most days. :)

------
greghinch
I grew up in the North Bay and started coding on the web as a teenager in the
mid 90s. Not sure there was ever really a "before"

But there's been a lot in between

------
dfield
I was also very fortunate to grow up in North Bay. My first interest was
acting. I acted in plays, commercials, tv shows, etc. When I hit puberty, I
stopped getting parts and developed an interest in math and programming. Then
a friend helped me get a job at O'Reilly Media during high school and this led
to my discovery of the tech industry.

------
saosebastiao
I had an interest in VCs, and ended up interning with one before I woke up and
realized that VCs are bottom feeders, and the vast majority of them are idiots
with bad cases of confirmation bias. Graduated in Supply Chain Management, and
still work in the field. Became interested in programming when I realized that
it is really hard to convince programmers to buy into your vision, and decided
that I would hunker down and do it myself. Became interested in Operations
Research after learning R and saving my company a few handfuls of money by
using it correctly.

I still am not a SV techie, and probably never will be. But I still enjoy
learning from them. Way smarter than a bunch of VC gunslingers.

------
pacaro
Born in the UK, both my parents were programmers when they met (in the late
60s that wasn't so common!) I grew up around computers, but was convinced that
working with them was the last thing that I wanted to do...

So one degree in the History and Philosophy of Science and 9 months of
unemployment later...

I've worked on: Desktop GIS; Micro browsers for feature phones (in 1997); Core
operating system security; Robotics;

Currently I'm working on a team building an experimental operating system,
trying to revisit all the old assumptions and see which ones still matter.

Explaining to the US immigration people that a degree in philosophy is an
admirable preparation for working on OS security is an interesting exercise...

------
kapilkale
I worked in management consulting for three years. One year in pet food supply
chain, another in chemical distribution, and the third year scattered across
6-8 different projects.

It was a blast, to be honest. But not what I wanted long term.

------
5vforest
Picked up programming at a young age, but then worked as a bicycle mechanic
all throughout high school and barely had any interest in computers. I thought
I would go to university for civil or mechanical engineering, but I ended up
coming down ill and postponing my matriculation. While I was still recovering,
I started picking up freelance gigs doing Wordpress installs and writing god-
awful code. I somehow turned that into a software development internship at a
big pharma company, quickly left that for a fledging startup, and now have a
fellowship doing startup-y stuff in the US Government.

------
johns
I was working a variety of software and IT jobs mostly related to Microsoft
tech in MN before I got noticed by a head of marketing for an up and coming
developer tools startup who gave me a job.

~~~
dmor
IRC chat is still the best community tool. ;)

------
lambtron
I was always interested in programming (started programming on my ti-83
calculator in middle school ~2002). Parents both worked at dotcom companies
from late 90s to 2000s. Went to college to study finance and went into
banking, but always kept an eye out on the technology sector and became more
and more interested in startups. Decided to leave after my banking stint to
renew my knowledge of programming and be a part of the tech/startup scene!
Haven't regretted it ever since :)

------
bbissoon
I was an artist looking for ways to make ends meet. I fell into UI - then
later into programming the very applications that used my designs... the rest
is history :)

------
aorshan
I was dead set on becoming a neuroseurgeon. Spent all of high school taking
science classes. Majored in Neuroscience for my first year and a half of
college, decided I hated everything about it, and decided to change my major.
Attended a hackathon or two (including one sponsored by Twilio) and haven't
looked back. I'm still in school, but I work for Freshplum as well. Hopefully
I'll be spending this summer out in the valley.

~~~
dylanz
May I ask what you hated about Neuroscience?

~~~
aorshan
For my entire life, I've always loved science. It was never a doubt for me
that I wanted to study science in school. But when I got to school, I was
accepted into an accelerated honors program for science students. So I was
taking a lot of hard science really quickly. At first it was great, but soon I
started to get really burnt out. I realized that I wasn't enjoying my classes
anymore and that I was starting to loathe the concept of studying the
material. I refused to allow school to ruin my love for science, so I changed
my major.

------
kux
I grew up around the energy industry and spent my childhood focused on
engineering and history. I was converted through my high-school's strong
computer science program. Next I picked up Android development. Now I'm a CS &
EE undergrad. In my internships so far I've done HCI R&D for the Oil Industry.
Not sure if I'll become a full blooded "valley-type techie" or a
software/engineer for some other industry.

------
slajax
Grew up in a different "valley". The one in Nova Scotia, Canada. Got into
computers because there was nothing else to do but tip cows. Moved to Vancover
4 years ago so I could ride downhill mountain bikes instead of tip cows. Love
hacker news but I definitely can't contribute to the silicon valley cliche.
Yet.

~~~
panih2o
I am in the valley but thinking about moving to Vancouver, how's the industry
there?

Btw, I work in data infrastructure team doing so called 'big data' thingy, but
I am all passionate about any kind of Databases.

~~~
slajax
Which valley? Vancouver has a good market and a great lifestyle. Toronto has a
great market, but only a good lifestyle.

I started my career in Toronto but now I lean more towards lifestyle so I
moved here to balance it out.

------
snambi
I studied in chennai and worked in bangalore for Unisys before moving to
silicon valley.

However, valley-type techie can be anywhere, they need not be programmers or
engineers. It is the attitude and mindset that matters.

------
interg12
A community organizer in Minnesota democratic politics.

------
ezl
traded options on the floor at the CBOE/CBOT. traded VIX. quant. developed
algo trading stuff. programmer/consultant for hire for other small prop
trading shops.

but now, all i want to do is work on my little real estate startup.

------
catshirt
i played in a hardcore band and had the opportunity to tour United States as
well as Europe for about a year before dropping out to do tech full time.

------
OafTobark
Non-Silicon Valley techie and entrepreneur.

------
Capricornucopia
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.

~~~
dmor
One woman in tech to another I'd love to meet you. I'm headed to Toronto and
Montreal in February but if you're elsewhere in Canada I'm sure we can find a
way for paths to cross. There are few of us (@bluehat is one as well) - email
me (info in profile)

