| Thank you, you have answered many of my questions. I've myself tried to acquire VC funding and built my own MVPs, and gotten nowhere. It is not as easy as I thought it was. I grew up poor in a poor St. Louis neighborhood. All my father could afford was a Commodore 64 and I was laughed at by the IBM PC and Apple 2 crowd. My high school didn't teach computers so I volunteered for the desegregation program to be transferred to a magnet school on math and science that taught on Apple // and IBM PC systems and it was an integrated classroom. I had a friend at the time I got into an argument with, he claimed computers were a fad, going nowhere, and that I should try to become a sports star instead. He said in ten years that Microsoft and Apple would be out of business so there is no reason to learn computer programming. He went for Football and injured his knee and lost his scholarship but remembered the talk we had about computers so he went into learning computer networking and did better. Our high school had an anti bullying policy and zero tolerance on racial slurs. The high school before I transfered was full of bullies and they used racial and homophobic slurs. Picked on me for being a nerd and geek. So yeah it depends on the high school, it also depends on the support of friends. If I had listened to my friend that computers were a fad, I wouldn't have gotten to where I went. It was because of his statements that he influenced others not to study computers because he was popular and I was not popular. I find that we need more statistics on these subjects to fully understand them better. But I want to state that white privilege thing, I had a really bad childhood growing up and was picked on and bullied and harassed a lot for being a geek and nerd. Looking for a job was tough as well, I had to do temporary light industrial jobs and work in fast food even with a computer science degree until I was able to earn minimum wage at a computer shop building computers and then it lead to another job as data entry which led to another job in programming. I never had it easy, and even had times I went without a job and looking for whatever I could find. Diversity is a good thing, and I'll tell you why. People of diverse backgrounds have different ways of observing things and figuring things out and might notice something someone else might not notice. It might be a product or service has a flaw in it that gets noticed before it ships, it might be they make an improvement on it. If a business discriminates against people they are really setting themselves up for failure by hiring all of the same group of a type of people. But my story, I worked so hard I got a stroke in 2001 and ended up on disability in 2003. Trying to recover from that, but once you are disabled, nobody takes you seriously anymore. I assume my career is over? Nobody seems to be there for us who have a mental illness, esp when we developed it in the line of duty. |