| HN Mirror

First, let me say that I love how HN has matured to a point where an article like this can make it to the front-page and not get overrun with insanely long threads of people debating the definition of "racism" and if it exists or not in tech.

Believe it or not, the story below is actually the very-shortened version.:

I as a male with Nigerian-born-and-raised parents can tell my story about how I didn't know a single thing about start-ups or SV/bayarea scene or anything until 2007. So I went to school in CSU Hayward and got my BSCS __only__ because I wanted to make videogames. All my college friends talked about becoming videogame betatesters and I wanted to make games. A classmate of mine got me my first job in AT&T as an analyst. Before this job the only computers I've been exposed to was my home Win95 computer on dial-up and the unix terminal on school campus; oh and writing programs in BASIC on AppleII's in junior highschool and that wasn't even a class. It just happened that there was a teacher who was a geek and brought his computers to school for kids like me to play with. I probably owe that teacher a lot. My dad being in a job involving fortran & punch-cards helped to. When I first saw a bunch of computers networked together, I had no idea what that meant. Windows SAMBA mounts and copying files between 2 machines blew my freakin' mind in 2002. Computers talk to each other?! I had AOL and no idea how the internet worked until a few weeks after starting at AT&T; then I got AT&T DSL and it was horrible so I hardly used the internet. AT&T was always putting enterprise software books in the lobbies so that's all I knew existed; expensive proprietary tools. It was only one day, after like 5 yrs, I got fed up with AT&T and tried to leave but couldn't. I used computerjobs.com to attempt finding another job. Found out that all my skills in writing ABAP programs for SAP, JCL on OS/2, tools like QuickTest & LoadRunner didn't actually mean anything when only a few major corps have the money to pay for the licenses of said softwares. Also, the VB macros I wrote for MSExcel and got me so much praise at AT&T turned out to not be a high-demand skill. I was floored; I had no idea. I really thought I was highly skilled and could find a job anytime I wanted. At one point I thought my email just didn't work, but a few tests proved that not to be the case. Then one day I got even more frustrated and tried to get into Pixar. I learned how to use Alias(purchased by Autodesk) Maya and sent a resume. They called me back, but I didn't get the job because I didn't know enough of a programming language called "python".(Maya has python bindings for automation 'n stuff)

Python? What's that? I went to go find all the info I could on this strange programming language. Tried to apply to Pixar again after learning some but they never replied me again. Then I searched online to look at resumes of people who have Pixar on them to see where they worked before ending up at Pixar. I saw a bunch of companies I have never heard of. Remember, AT&T was my first job out of school and my internet was unusable. Almost all my coworkers were old enough to be my parents and 99% of them had no interest in computers beyond just using them as they were trained 5+ years ago. The only companies that came up in conversation were corps like Oracle & HP. Looking up all the companies I saw on these resumes, I eventually stumbled upon the term "start up". What's a start-up? Oh, a company that just started! That makes sense, I guess a company has to start from something. So where do I find these start-ups? OH! They're all around me!!! San Francisco is less than an hour away! Whoa there's a whole bunch!!!!! Look at these salaries! AT&T was just paying me $46k! Okay, so what kind of tools do they use? What? Linux? What's that? Oh, I remember Redhat in school for one of my classes. What's mysql? Why not Oracle? Nobody likes Windows? What's a Macbook? Why are all these people so young and happy-looking? They don't have to wear a suit & tie to work?

My internet was so bad and AT&T couldn't fix it after multiple calls, so I switched to Comcast because I needed to start downloading all kinds of stuff. I bought a laptop at this time as well. This way I now had 2 computers in my house(yes, a house. I got it in 2003 when they were just giving houses to anyone who walked in off the street) and I could learn more about what an IP address is and how 2 computers talk to each other.

This was in 2006, so by 2007 I fully discovered the world of Linux and open-source in general. Found out that Windows the OS isn't not the same thing as the computer. That I could delete & reformat the Harddrive with Linux without physically destroying the computer. Fully comprehended what open-source meant to my career. Free software meant that my skills followed me to any company I went to. Knowing how to use JMeter instead of LoadRunner, Selenium instead of Quicktest, mysql instead of Oracle - I've increased my skillset and I didn't have to rely on anyone to buy some $80k license before my skills became usable. Learned some more skills that were hot at the time and started applying. This is when I learned that start-ups liked Craigslist so that was the only place I used for my job-search. One memorable phone-interview was with babycenter.com. The lady interviewing me used all kinds of profanity on the phone. While I personally don't use profanity, I found it amazing that start-ups were so care-free that they can just F-bomb people during an interview like it's nothing. Eventually I ended up in a start-up with about 8 people. My family was freaking out that I was about to leave a huge company like AT&T to work with 8 people in San Francisco.... but I did it anyway and from there it's all roses, rainbows and puppies. My career goals have changed though so I don't seek Pixar like I use to.

The overall idea here is that it's totally possible to grow up right in this bay area, even get a BSCS, and not know about any of the tech scene going on right under your nose if you're not around those kinds of people. My family wasn't rich but way better off than the inner-city, low income kids. If I didn't know about the BayArea tech-scene until 2007, it's easy for me to imagine them not having a clue even today.

NOTE: That house I got in 2003? I totally should have been one of the people that got foreclosed on; but the extreme jump in my salary after leaving AT&T saved me.