[HN Gopher] From McDonald's to Google
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From McDonald's to Google
Author : kelseyhightower
Score : 224 points
Date : 2020-10-30 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.protocol.com)
| ryanja24 wrote:
| Put this one at the top and keep it there!
| linguae wrote:
| 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.
| tanotcare wrote:
| 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?
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| 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).
| tanotcare wrote:
| Ah, I wasn't aware of that.
|
| Regardless, IMO points or quotas or "target": same
| difference :) Someone call the justice department.
|
| Update: Interesting that this is getting downvotes. I must
| have a blindspot. Would be great if you could provide
| context with the downvote. Thanks!
| throwaway007071 wrote:
| 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.
| tanotcare wrote:
| The rhymes with a few emails I've received.
|
| maybe we work for the same fang.
| adamsea wrote:
| 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).
| tanotcare wrote:
| 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.
| longtom wrote:
| US blacks have one standard deviation lower IQ than US whites and
| IQ correlates with skin color. This means blacks are expected to
| be very rare among leading engineers which are typically selected
| for very high IQ. There are rare outliers though and it would be
| a shame if they couldn't contribute their brain power. People
| with lower IQ can still contribute to society, just not at the
| forefront of engineering.
| ensiferum wrote:
| 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?
| alexilliamson wrote:
| What is the relevance here?
| ensiferum wrote:
| The article claims that for reasons that should be "clear"
| (assuming they mean him being black) he has had to go through
| much tougher route.
| alexilliamson wrote:
| 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.
| HUSSTECH wrote:
| 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.
| monksy wrote:
| Probably an imitator or clone. (:laughing:)
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| It's me, Kelsey Hightower.
| osipov wrote:
| Hi Kelsey. Here's a story about you at Google:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy4QXLKHlI
| data_ders wrote:
| exactly what a clone would say!
| monksy wrote:
| My thoughts exactly.
| monksy wrote:
| 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)
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| Make it happen.
| monksy wrote:
| Apparently you've already had coffee with Mark T. Small
| world innit?
| moondev wrote:
| 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!
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Posting a puff piece about yourself on a tech news site
| feels... something though.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| I got a bit fed up with the amount of 'I love Kelsey' tweets
| he shared today too. Felt a bit much.
| pen2l wrote:
| 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.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Oh I'm not arguing that he's had an outsized impact on a
| lot of people, it just felt like he was clapping himself
| on the back for the entire day.
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| 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.
| ponker wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| ponker wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| 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.
| 49yearsold wrote:
| Awesome!
| mxyzplk wrote:
| 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.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| 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!
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Kelsey,
|
| How do you feel your early experiences at McDonald's, in terms of
| operations, influenced your decision-making or thought processes
| as part of devops strategies or perspective?
|
| Thanks!
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| 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.
| bradlys wrote:
| 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?
| kelseyhightower wrote:
| Maybe I can help fill the gaps.
|
| I ran my own computer store with a small IT consultancy
| attached to it for a few years. Then I chose to pivot and get a
| "real job". Things change once you're married with a child on
| the way.
|
| Like many, I started out doing 3 months to perm contract jobs.
| The first contract was a Linux system administrator at Google
| in Atlanta automating the huge fleet of servers there. I
| learned enough shell scripting to be dangerous, but it was
| mostly racking and stacking servers, and provisioning top of
| rack switches -- hello minicom.
|
| 3 months later I was working in tech support, for more money,
| at a company called Vocalocity, who was early in the VoIP game.
| That's where I learned how to PXE boot and flash Cisco IP
| phones to work with our custom Asterisk based backends. I was
| there almost a year and then it was time to move on.
|
| This would continue every three months or so. I held jobs at
| places like Cox Communications working in the NOC during the
| night shift so I could be home with my daughter. Three to six
| months later I quit.
|
| I know what you're thinking, this guy jumped around a lot. I
| had to, money was tight, and it was the fastest way to get a
| raise, and it also accelerated my learning. Coming from being
| your own boss it's really hard to get excited about an entry
| level job and look forward to working your way up the corporate
| ladder.
|
| My skills really leveled up when I landed a __full time __job
| at Peer 1 Web Hosting, where I started in Tech Support working
| tickets and taking calls helping people with Linux servers,
| Plesk, and MySQL. It 's true, it's always a DNS problem.
|
| Peer 1 is where I really learned how to write code, it started
| with bash, and eventually Python. I automated the SSL
| certificate provisioning system, and wrote some scripts that
| allowed me to close tickets faster than anyone else.
|
| About 6 months later I was promoted to the engineering team and
| worked on our automated provisioning system for Server Beach,
| acquired from Rackspace, which was the part of Peer 1 that
| hosted YouTube before YouTube was bought by Google. Server
| Beach ran those "Latency Kills" ads to help sale dedicated
| gaming servers.
|
| That provisioning system was responsible for allowing people to
| order a server back in the early 2000s from a web form and have
| it provisioned in less than an hour. We PXE booted servers,
| configured RAID controllers, and bootstrapped the OS, including
| Windows, and handed back an IP address and login creds to the
| larger system.
|
| I was there for over a year before landing a job that would
| double my salary around 2008, 2009.
|
| I joined the company mentioned in the article, TSYS, where I
| brought in a lot of automation, thanks Puppet, and learned
| enough Java to earn the respect of the broader organization and
| really help transform the place.
|
| I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) from my days at Peer
| 1 and I leveraged that set of skills to package all the
| production applications into fat RPMs (Java, JBoss, and all the
| war files required to make it work) in the same way we use
| containers today. I also revamped the CI/CD system leveraging
| Bamboo with tight Jira integration. I also helped the company
| move on from CVS to SVN. Don't ask.
|
| We had automated deployments and tight integration with our
| apps over the course of the 3 years I was leading the team. We
| automated everything from Oracle running on AIX, to
| provisioning SSH keys and access to production servers based on
| Jira tickets and Puppet.
|
| On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port
| some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal
| libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going
| forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments
| industry.
|
| During my time at TSYS I really got exposed to open source and
| made some major contributions to Puppet and Cobbler -- I added
| a feature to Cobbler that enabled us to configure servers while
| leveraging Cobbler metadata and tools like Puppet.
|
| I also started contributing to distutils and pip back in the
| day. I did some of the work that made pip and virtulenv play
| nice together. I also started public speaking at local meetup,
| PyATL, in Atlanta, and found my voice in the Python community.
|
| It's my PuppetConf 2012 talk that landed me a job at Puppet
| Labs, the rest is history.
| jbarham wrote:
| > 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.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| The question is about the transition, not the length of time
| before software programming.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| I don't agree with your reading of the question. I feel
| like "rather large 10 year gap" is fixating in part on the
| length of time.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| 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.
| ebenezerisaac wrote:
| re-upped
| [deleted]
| fspear wrote:
| I wonder if they made him grind leetcode whiteboarding at google.
| x87678r wrote:
| I follow him on twitter, that guy is always so positive its
| great. Even when I'm drowning in YAML he stops me from giving up!
| :)
| mraza007 wrote:
| Definitely a motivating and inspirational story
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Thanks for posting that.
|
| I'm impressed by the lack of an Ivy-League sheepskin.
|
| My own education is basically self-taught. It served me well (I'm
| smarter than the average bear), but boy, oh boy, have I looked up
| a lot of noses.
|
| It's given me a fairly irreverent attitude that does not always
| win me friends.
|
| It has also given me a drive to help out others that have
| challenges breaking through obstinance and prejudice (see "not
| winning friends," above).
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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
| wrnu wrote:
| Super dope!
| jquery wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
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