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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I was at your awesome talk at GopherCon some years ago, and it was one of the major reasons why I wanted to work at Google rather than FB or other companies. I kept telling all my friends to watch your recorded talks if they need inspiration :)
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.
I think part of it may be that, if he's the (good kind of) hustler his friends state he is, he probably did a million things over that decade period which is really hard to translate into a narrative acceptable for an article like this. I'm in no way equating our situations other than I have ~10 year "consulting" period on my resume that includes probably 20-30 contracts, projects, a few jobs, etc. and it's really hard to break it down into a simple timeline to answer "what did you do from ...". That's my take.
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.
> 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?
I'm not sure why dang didn't break off this subthread with this post and did it with one of its children instead, but if you look at the GP and then your comment again, you'll notice they never ask for advice on jobs (seriously, who is the "them" you're referring to in your first sentence?) and the friendly tone is belied by the fact that you're responding to a statement that it's nice to have representative role models by making an association between role models and quota systems. Maybe consider the second order effects[0] of posts like this in the future before making them.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person posting based on actual relevance to the conversation at hand or wedging in their own biases just because they can?
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.
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.
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).
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.
If someone does not say something because of fear of how they will be perceived I’m not sure the policy is the root cause ... and if a whole group of people behave that way (as I would assume often more than one person would have the same reservation) then that points to other issues.
And if a company’s culture uses affirmative action or quotas to hire people who they should not have, then that’s just racism of a different kind, and, I’d argue, not necessarily unique to or always caused by the policy.
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.
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.
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.
I'm going to flag this as lazy flamebait, but I hope you think hard about why you felt compelled to post this in this comment thread and then not do so in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
Your Udacity course https://youtu.be/zZ2NgJ2-A4c 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
Oh wow that saying brings back memories. All this time I thought my store manager had invented it.
McDonalds for me was pretty fun. At the time I could well see how the ease of promotion trapped some people. If you had any motivation at all you'd soon find yourself running a night shift.
Even now, a decade later, I get nightmeres where I'm back working there. Nothing feels longer than an 8 hour shift at McDonalds.
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.
> So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
I'm confused, you started by agreeing that highlighting the McDonald's experience is a good thing, then asked 'what does that have to do with anything'. I don't know what position you hold, here.
As for me, I never worked at McDonald's or any other fast food, but I did spend some time working at a local pizza joint, where I started as a busboy, and eventually assumed cook and delivery driver duties. I'd already taken programming classes and knew Java and Python, but had never considered software as a professional option. My time in the service industry was still super valuable to me as a software professional - I learned about time management, prioritization (working as a busboy and dishwasher who also makes some minor food items is an implementation of a priority queue where the priority values can change very quickly), and how to identify repeatable business processes. These are all highly valuable skills for someone who writes code, and pretty much any service industry job, taken seriously, requires understanding them. They apply equally in SaaS.
So my answer to your (possibly rhetorical?) question is: working at McDonald's for 3 years in high school has quite a lot to do with the rest of the career, as valuable fundamental business skills are there to be learned even in the lowest wage jobs.
It's the "American Dream". They need to reiterate again and again how every dishwasher can become something if they just work hard enough lol. It's these things that make me pity Americans, but other stuff offsets it as well, so there we go.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
> But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
I'm happy you ended up with a great job that pays well. Congrats to you!
But I think you underrate what and how much you may have or could have learned from working at UPS. UPS is a fantastic logistics operation, and while being a package sorter is obviously not the same as being a VP, the job still exposes you to a system that's highly optimized for profiting from being good at logistics, and that reaches every job in the system. Maybe you didn't learn anything at the job, but that doesn't mean there was nothing there to learn for someone observing and trying to learn.
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.
No, it's just a manifestation of the rags to riches-trope. Please don't bring this "aggressively looking for things to crucify people with"-culture onto HN.
Wow, that's a huge stretch. I read the reference to McDonald's only as a job where significant numbers of teenagers first learn about team management and cost/quality optimization. It's not merely "flipping burgers" but more generally the McDonald's program and a strong corporate work ethic.
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!
>Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds
It sounds soooooo weird to us normal "working class" folk. I assume literally everyone, no matter their current career/job/education level, worked a menial job as a teenager. That's because where I am from ALL teenagers were expected to participate in paid employment (and some were expected to help with the family's bills) and where else are you going to work as a teenager? I wouldn't ever consider bringing it up - I consider it very bizarre to bring it up like that, it would be like bragging about how you graduated college even though you went to public school growing up.
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.
This comment reflects a pretentious disdain that is exactly what I dislike. I have worked menial and frustrating jobs, and you learn a lot by working through tough situations. I’ve also absorbed similar lessons from sailing offshore in difficult conditions.
Sailing offshore in difficult conditions sounds much more interesting and skillful than any amount of entry-level hospitality. Anyway, of course I have no 'disdain' for working menial jobs - I have worked in them too, I just don't really view them as anything particularly positive, and certainly for me they were formative only insofar as they provided major motivations for completing my degree so I could escape them.
I think you probably learned a lot more from those menial jobs than you realize. People who never did that kind of job often lack empathy for blue-collar workers; I used to work with one engineer who didn’t care whether production staff got laid off because our project was late (whereas others believed we had a duty to our co-workers). You also either demonstrated or developed an ability to cope with working on tasks that were tough, uninteresting and monotonous; many white-collar workers expect work to always be fun, with constant positive reinforcement, variety, and no failure (like school).
You learn the second lesson from sailing, but not the first.
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
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 :)
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'm very glad the story started with Peter Idah and it's nice to see someone like Kelsey get this recognition for his hard work. The industry (and the world at large) is skewed in ways we can't really understand without being in other people's shoes and this is a small glimpse into that reality. You should be rewarded for the merits of your work and instead we're marginalised by the colour of our skin. I've never experienced what Kelsey has, or maybe I'm just ignorant to the signs, but it's important that more people like Kelsey come to be in positions of "power" and become role models for those who need to see someone like them can make it to where he has.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
Kelsey! Missed you at CoreOS by a few months. Your shadow loomed large over us. Would’ve loved to have seen you stay and seen what we could’ve done as a team. CoreOS was the big fish that got away from us all. Either way as a brown person in tech I admire you greatly. Keep rocking.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
>It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.
I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
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.
This is a ridiculous comparison. There are around 500 NBA players during a given season. Amazon alone just passed one million workers. You're going to have odd results if your sample size of society is absurdly tiny.
Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.
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.
Maybe this is true about tech, but you really must have never met anybody that even made it to pro camp in the NFL or NBA. I was pretty close with a dude that had only one year of football before being drafted and then won the NFL rushing title the next year. On the other hand, I played since I was 7, won a state title at 9, and put everything into it for years afterward, but it wasn't long before I couldn't be drafted to carry water bottles for a real team.
> That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work.
That and luck are well over 90%, yes. Otherwise the scions of the wealthy would be vastly more prominent in sports with low entry barriers. In practice the most decorated Olympian ever is the son of a police officer and a middle school principal[1]. The best basketball player ever comes from a less distinguished background[2]. College sports specially chosen to be niches to maximize the chance of being a recruited athlete are so competitive the children of hedge fund managers routinely fail to get in that way[3]. The outer extremities of talent distributions are people who are staggeringly talented, hard working and lucky. Then they complete with each other and the ones who win are better than that .
> 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.
Where I am as a lowly IC in a non FAANG company most software engineers are not white. Majority are Indian with white or Chinese second. This has been the case at multiple places. Maybe it is different at FAANG?
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.
That ruling did overturn the specific rigid quota system which that university used as unconstitutional and therefore illegal discrimination, but that is different than ruling that it was racist because racism is not illegal in the US. Literally, going up to someone on the street and using a racial slur at them is not illegal in the US, despite it being very classically racist. As another example, the federal law against race-based discrimination in employment does not apply to employers with fewer than 15 employees who meet certain frequency-of-work requirements; mere failure to meet that statutory threshold does not eliminate the racist character of racist behavior, but it does make it legal in the absence of a relevant state or local law.
Many specific racist behaviors are of course either sometimes or always illegal, but those concepts are individually known to the law, not outlawed as racism per se.
What's more, the ruling you linked did not address the kind of quotas which the FANG company was discussing in the quoted email. The university was setting aside a certain percentage of the total and rejecting white people who might otherwise have qualified to keep room for racial minorities, which was key to the ruling. The FANG company was evaluating white people just as it would have done without the quotas, but it was simply allowing extra hiring of racial minorities beyond the normal budgets until certain targets/quotas were met. Whether this is legal or not is out of scope of that ruling. (Maybe other rulings have addressed this; I'm not sure.)
Fair enough, I guess I was referring to legal entities acting in outwardly racist ways as racism. I should have been more specific. I am aware most of the protected class laws had some kind of exception.
I'm aware of the specificity of the ruling but the basis on which the ruling was made is much more general. Depending on the entity different laws would be in question; a fully private entity would probably be violating the civil rights act of 1964, while in the case of university admissions and funding the current systems are still in violation of the equal protection clause. Interpretations of the civil rights act of 1964 that advantage groups for no reason other than race are also unconstitutional.
Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation. Instead substitute it for socioeconomic background.
I'm not sure yet how to fully clarify this, so consider the Missouri government's statutory commitment to spend X% of the budget with women or minority owned businesses. In a degenerate case this means e.g. even the most unqualified candidate could be awarded a contract solely on the basis of race, violating the equal protection clause.
(Practically this expenditure law means larger companies have "independent" women and minority owned businesses as subcontractors who might contract the work back to a business owned by the larger company that can do the work.)
> Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation.
My understanding of the state of the law is that race is currently allowed to be considered as a factor in university admissions if available workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice, and that (as of 2016) the University of Texas at Austin's policy of using race as such a factor was found to be constitutional for this reason.
The viability of this precedent is highly uncertain since it was a 4-3 ruling (one SCOTUS seat vacant at the time and one justice recused), and since its majority was four of the liberal justices of whom one (the late RBG) has now been replaced by the conservative Justice Barrett. But it hasn't yet been overruled, and it was a SCOTUS majority ruling and not dicta, so it's likely to be followed by lower courts unless and until it's overruled by SCOTUS.
Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
I'm aware of the current rulings. I am explaining why they should be considered invalid.
>Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
Disingenuous. If the law is not agreeable soon it will be unenforceable. I consider the rulings inappropriate both on the basis of constitutionality and on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause. You can try to claim the state has an overwhelming interest to ignore the protection clause, but then can't it just have an overwhelming interest to violate whatever parts of the constitution it wants? Where does it stop?
> If the law is not agreeable soon it will be unenforceable.
Lots of awful laws remain enforceable for very, very, very long times. For example, the whole industry of private prison contractors profiting from prisoner labor, with prisoners sometimes being legally required to participate and always being paid far below the usual minimum wage, and with contractual provisions between the prison companies and the states about how full the states will keep their prisons, leading to the creation and proactive enforcement of lots of crimes with prison as a punishment to keep that pipeline filled. Non-inheritable slavery never got outlawed as a criminal sentence, even if states have chosen to limit their implementation of that to prison labor instead of "you but not your family are now literally a slave for the rest of your lifetime."
> I consider the rulings inappropriate [...] on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Many people agree with you, and I believe they share your reasons. But many people disagree with you, including me, on the basis that properly crafted affirmative action efforts are addressing an existing inequality in our not-at-all-egalitarian society.
That's not to say a qualified white person should see their application refused on the basis of rigid racial quotas - we both agree that should be illegal, and as we discussed it already is.
But yes, to me it seems fair and egalitarian to take into account something like race that routinely leads to disadvantage and discrimination (or alternatively advantage and privilege) even in today's society when evaluating a person's achievements and obstacles, and in planning outreach and recruitment efforts. People do likewise for other similarly impactful factors like poverty, disability, and migrant status, and rightly so. I view this as appropriate both in university admissions and in viewing success stories like Kelsey Hightower's as even more impressive than if he were Just Another White Guy In Tech(tm) ... highlighting the sad fact that stories like his are so rare is part of the point of the article.
> Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause.
I haven't properly thought through the case about state government statutory expenditures, so I don't have a strong opinion there right now on what is either constitutional or appropriate. I think that case's constitutionality or lack thereof is a far less clear question than you apparently do.
But if any such programs are making significant progress toward fixing disproportionate imbalances in government expenditures that come from the systemic sexism and racism in society without getting the government substandard value per dolllar, any invalidation of those programs should be coupled with the adoption of some adequately effective replacements with fewer constitutional issues.
I'm a manager at a FAANG company who has gone through the hiring process a number of times now. I was at a startup before that where we grew from 30 to 200 people and I was involved in hiring for quite a few positions. I can assure you 100% that there is no quota system anywhere I've ever worked. It is absolutely prohibited. We are not even allowed to post something like "do you come from an under-represented group? we're hiring!". Anything along those lines is a big ol' nope. I suggest even if that email thread was real if the legal department found out about it they'd shut it down very quickly. (FWIW we're not allowed to ask about lots of stuff during an interview either like marital or parental status).
I'll also note that every team I know of at any FAANG company is desperate to find really great candidates. The idea that a team would willingly refuse to hire an excellent <insert group here> candidate to instead fill some kind of diversity quota slot for <other group here> is so bananas to me I can't even comprehend it. It's so wrong I can't even laugh at it. Every manager I know has a backlog of important work a mile long and is desperate to fill open reqs. I've never once seen or heard rumor of anyone from upper management to HR to execs discussing anything even remotely like a "diversity quota". Not even water-cooler gossip.
Whenever I ask for proof of a diversity quota system there is no evidence. When you look at the stats on who is hired (for companies that publish it) to the degree the needle is moving it is moving very slowly. So slowly if there were a quota system it would mean they're very very bad at it. So as far as I can tell from personal experience and my discussions with my peers "diversity quotas" are by-and-large either made up or being run illegally by a small group that gets shut down immediately once legal gets wind of it.
"Diversity quota" could be an attempt to stir up race or gender resentment: 'you didn't get that job because one of "those" people stole it' or some such notion. Having worked at plenty of other software jobs over the years I've met more than my share of developers who were garbage at their jobs but thought they were God's gift to programming. They were also the same people who tended to have complaints about "diversity quotas". I'm sure blaming "those other people" is an attractive way to justify not getting what you think you deserve. It's an old trope but one that keeps being re-used over thousands of years because it works. Just convince people that "those others" are the enemy and have stolen what is rightfully yours and you can justify anything.
It's also a really cheap way to tear down someone else - just dismiss them as a "diversity hire". You need a certain amount of insecurity, cruelty, or hate in your heart to act out like that. I prefer to judge people based on their job performance but YMMV.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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?