
Twilio's first support hire joins engineering - reneighbor
http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2012/10/01/becoming-an-engineer
======
Timothee
Congrats! I remember seeing posts from you now and then about how you were
learning programming. (IIRC, your first contact with programming was for the
demo to get your track jacket?) It's great that you kept at it.

 _My first task was to add a dismiss button on a Javascript popup. I thought
the task would be easy, but each page actually has dozens of files of code
fitting together to make a page work– style sheets, controllers, distributed
all around the code base. (…) Instead of being off-put by how long it took, or
being overly sympathetic, he just said, “Yup. That’s what development is. It’s
very frustrating until it works.”_

I'm currently in a similar situation, working on a project with a guy who uses
libraries and frameworks I know very little about and it honestly frustrates
me. I've had other things to do on the project so far, so I've postponed
digging into it.

But it makes me wonder if that's how things should be. Often you're fine once
you're beyond the breaking waves of setting up your environment and getting a
grasp on the codebase, but before that, it can be _very_ frustrating…
especially, when you want to implement something, that you theoretically know
exactly what you want and what you need, and you get slowed down by some
problem with library incompatibilities or what not.

~~~
revelation
I think the lecture is broader here. Frustration is really at the core of
programming. And whenever you're frustrated, thats a wonderful lession ahead
of you in understanding what makes the systems tick that you take for granted.

I've recently had the pleasure to drill down (from C) to single machine
instructions in my quest to understand why a conditional branch was seemingly
having no effect, on an architecture that I couldn't debug on. As it turns
out, the compiler would sometimes use a memory addressing scheme that wasn't
supported on this particular architecture. I had to work around this bug by
writing assembly that correctly accesses the memory.

It's incredibly frustrating when you end up at a point where the only
abstraction (and seemingly faulty) layer below you is nanometer-sized
transistors. And all the more rewarding when you reveal the actual problem and
get to extend your knowledge.

(Of course, this doesn't really apply to all the ridiculous pain points that
annoy us by design. Things like browser compatibility come to mind.)

~~~
Timothee
I can certainly enjoy figuring out what's wrong sometimes (and unravel the
whole string of events: "oh now that makes sense: this was happening which
made this and that behave that way") and I the satisfaction you're referring
to; but other times, it's just so far removed from the real task at hand that
it's not even funny.

A recent example would be when I was trying to set up my local environment
with virtualenv, whose _whole purpose_ is to make that easy. Everything seems
fine but pip (Python package manager) was throwing errors. The culprit was
that virtualenv creates Python scripts in the local directory with a hashbang
for a local version of Python. The thing, it turned out, is that hashbangs
don't work when there's a space in the path. And there was a space in my path
because I wanted to use Box's sync folder which (stupidly I must say) is
called "Box Documents". Now I know.

Long story short, the point is that I wasn't trying to debug virtualenv but
had to dig deeper than I wanted into it just to get started on the problems
_I_ created. :)

Though you're right: just recalling this, I have a feeling of victory over the
problem.

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hblanks
I said this elsewhere already, but I've been really proud to see Twilio take
steps such as this one to bring more people (and more women in particular)
into programming. Not being a part of the web team, I've only watched from the
sidelines as Renee, who's consistently been in the office before I arrive in
the morning and after I roll out in the evening, has worked to master a whole
slew of technologies, and to ship new, non-trivial features for our customers.

I'm really not sure how the two facts we see here -- of people working
exceptionally hard to better themselves, and of a company going out of its way
to help people do that -- have to do with a bubble. It's hardly a new idea
that companies do better financially when they help their employees learn to
do work that they couldn't do before, or to do it better.

As the technology community, it's in all our interest to help people learn
things they couldn't do before. Twilio's story is one example. Other great
ones include RailsBridge, PyLadies, the Boston Python Workshop, and PyStar.
Let's do more of this!

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mbellotti
This makes me love Twilio even more :D I wish more companies would realize the
benefit of cultivating talent from within instead of mining other companies
for "rockstars"

~~~
MartinCron
My first job was at a company that did exactly this. Most of the developer
staff came in the same way I did: part time college student software
tester/tech support.

It was only after the company was purchased by a company with a very different
mindset did I realize that this wasn't universal. This makes me just love
Twilio a little bit more.

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nowarninglabel
Congrats, that's a great move and I'd think a good decision for Twilio. My
product manager came from our Customer Service team and is the best PM I've
had. I think you nailed it when saying programmers don't need to be brilliant,
but rather "it’s more important that you’re diligent and a methodical problem-
solver."

~~~
wlesieutre
Especially when you're working on an existing product. Maybe it took some
brilliance to come up with the first version of Google, but once something
grows into a bajillion lines of code with tens or hundreds of people all
working on little parts of it, brilliance will only get you so far.

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ultrasaurus
Congrats Renee. I've only met her a few times, but she's an insanely good
listener, which is rare enough in programmers to count as a super power :)

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jdavid
I love this. Companies should develop great employees not hire them. It breads
loyalty and honor.

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rpq1480
The company I'm a contractor for originally hired me as a customer support
agent. 9 years later, I'm one of the lead developers. Keep up the good work!

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telecuda
Renee has handled a good portion of our support tickets over the years and
does a fantastic job. It's refreshing to have someone treat even the smallest
problem of yours so personally - making sure everything is resolved to your
satisfaction. It's huge having someone who's overseen thousands of customer
tickets becoming directly involved in the engineering process. Good luck
Renee!

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corwinstephen
I consider myself to be a relatively experienced developer, and even still,
reading this blog post really lifted my spirits.

I write code for a living, and even though no one has ever told me they
weren't happy with my performance, the constant influx of new techniques,
languages, algorithms, and systems in the programming world have always made
me feel like an inferior developer. I constantly feel like there's so much to
learn, that I can't possibly be good, as if the only worthy developers in the
world are the top 500 geniuses that work for Google and Facebook and are
somehow capable of magically knowing everything.

Knowing that this isn't the case, and that companies like Twilio are finding
value in employees with skill sets much narrower than mine, is a good feeling.
It's also really nice to know that they're open minded to the point that they
respect this guy's talents as a developer just as much as they did as a
customer service rep. #thehighroad

~~~
cantankerous
A more cynical quip I like to use is that the corollary to "you're never the
smartest guy in the world" is "you're never the dumbest guy in the world".

The more advanced you get in your field, the more you understand how little
you really know. I feel like this every day. It's easy to forget that to a ton
of people you're still a guy/gal who works magical wonders with computers.

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pushtheenvelope
I love reading stories by people getting started. On software dev, and other
things too. Keep on hacking !

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Eduardo3rd
Very cool. I think that stories like this one contradict the often quoted
advice to hire only rock star hackers in a good way. People aren't born A,B,
or, C players - they learn those skills over time.

Keep up the great work!

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knerd1
Congrats! Really awesome that you followed your interests and made the leap.

It says great things about twilio that they are willing to train and grow
their employees. Other companies should take note.

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leonhuu007
Congrats! I've always wanted to be an engineer but never have the talent to
become one. Great job!!!

~~~
jonny_eh
It doesn't take much talent, just an interest.

~~~
wilfra
And persistence. You're absolutely right.

For years I hired developers and told myself I was incapable of doing what
they did, never tried to learn. After the job market got hot and I was having
to pay good devs $100+/hour I decided I had to finally learn myself. Less than
six months later I can now do 80% of what I used to pay people to do for me
and 100% understand what they were doing from a high level and why. In another
year I think I'll probably be a better developer than most of the people I've
hired in the past (mostly because I sucked at hiring good devs because I had
no idea how to evaluate their skills).

There's nothing I've had to learn that was especially difficult or that
requires someone a lot smarter than me or a lot better at math etc. It just
requires persistence and a willingness to put up with frustration until you
finally solve problems.

My only regret is that I didn't start learning 5+ years ago.

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jiahuang
Nice to see you stayed with dev :)

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jackhammer2022
Congrats Renee!! Keep calm and carry on.

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dmor
Renee you are such a badass, nice going!

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SpashVandahue
And if anyone didn't think the tech sector is in yet another tremendous
bubble, this article is all you need.

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michaelrkn
Awesome, Renee!!!!!!

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TwilioJosh
Yay Renee!

