Tell HN: From bartending to managing cloud infrastructure
----
I'm 37. I spent my twenties bouncing all over the place; did a stint in the Army Reserves while shooting for liutenant bars that didn't work out (failed out of college and I was in ROTC). Did construction, real estate, grew weed in Denver for a year (legally), ended up bartending for roughly a decade. It was great in my early 20s. Not so hot to watch my age group get raises and salary increases.
I have my GED and never finished college - left with a record-setting 1.2 GPA (I have severe ADD and I wasn't properly medicated, there were other problems too). Seemed like there was this universe of 'good jobs' that were simply not in the cards.
So there I am, in my early 30s, struggling to make NY rent and watching folks get promoted and getting married and buying houses and all that stuff. I was lucky enough to have friends that worked in tech, and I've always liked computers, and I'm so totally out of options. So, I start asking - can this be done? How do I go about it?
Responses were encouraging and daunting - "it can be done, but do you know what you're getting yourself into?" was the gist of most. I visited a friend in Utah, who happened to lead a tech team. He has a pet project he doesn't have the time to do, and offers to mentor me if I move to Utah and work on it. I credit him with providing the support I needed to feel confident that I could do this. Didn't end up completing the thing before I had to move on, but I learned enough to teach myself.
Spent the next year trying to figure out how to keep a roof over my head while teaching myself. I I couchsurfed for a while, trying to balance self-teaching with being a good guest (I failed at this at times). Got my second break when I found a place that I could afford, just moments before a cruise ship was reported to be in quarantine with some novel virus or some such.
Covid ended up having a huge silver lining for me; now I had time to work with no distractions. I joined the recurse center (1) and did a batch. I lived, ate, and breathed code. Built until my brain hurt.
Right after quarantine ended I got my first job - off the HN whoishiring boards (2). And with not a moment to spare - I was pushing up against my credit limit in ways that I'm still recovering from.
---
My advice to people that find themselves hounded by the money / career hounds and wonder if they can get into tech is as follows:
- Making this kind of change is an emotional journey first and a technical / intellectual one second. It is incredibly taxing to stick to it and many, many times it will look hopeless. Get in touch with your fears, insecurities, etc and work on those. Face the demons. You are bigger than they are, or they wouldn't fit in your head.
- Get hungry. Seek out information greedily. Get that google-fu up. Realize that any and all questions you have along the way have an answer that can be found, if not on the internet then through other programmers, which leads to... - Find community. Nobody does this totally alone. You won't be the first, and you shouldn't try to. Most of what I know came from someone else.
- Eliminate those things in your life that have control over you. I had a gaming addiction that I had to kick to do this - might be different for you. Oh yeah, I mothballed my facebook as well. Wasn't contributing to the goal so out it went. Be brutal with yourself, it will pay off.
- If you have any format of processing disorder like I do, for god's sake get help. Unmedicated I'm totally useless, and being real with myself about that was a necessary component to my survival.
- It can be done.
---
1 - https://www.recurse.com/
2 - https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/...
80 comments
[ 63.7 ms ] story [ 2726 ms ] threadEdit: Thank you!
You might say "customer service" is the key to success, but I prefer "code switching" because, although they are complementary skills, you can have great empathy and compassion yet still be incapable of communicating that to the customer in a way that works.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean put on accents or use unnatural slang. Instead, listen. Match cadence as best you can in your own accent. Become familiar with various subcultures you might encounter so that you can be a better (active) listener. Learn and remember which regular customers can tolerate banter and to what extent. Develop thick skin (within reason).
Remember your regulars, but avoid assuming what they want.
Be consistent with your schedule.
Lots more but that's initial suggestions from one who has been on both sides of this.
Berkeley?
You could become a bartender without ever having mixed a drink and hack it - much more important to understand people and how to keep the vibe lively.
Oh, and every bartender has lied on their resume at least once.
All managers really want is someone who is reliable, turns up on time and doesn't steal. Bars (especially night clubs) have a high staff turnover so people are always needed. When I needed a new job I would print out a CV on nice paper and walk round every bar in the city handing them in - that gives staff / management a first impression of you. Don't email or post. Be there and hand it over. Also, I found it much harder when applying for advertised jobs - more competition.
The work itself is not complex but is very physical. Be prepared to work unsocial hours and get called in because someone else has has phoned in sick (it happens a lot!). Be aware you're going to have to diffuse arguments and stop fights at some point. Tips tend to be garbage in the UK unless you're waiting tables. Be careful of your alcohol consumption -- the industry breeds alcoholics.
Oh, and you want it to be a dive bar. Or craft beer. Food is a pain in the ass, fancy cocktail bars are hyper competitive and not always profitable.
Dives get the best crowds/most dedicated regulars, and you can make a mint with high-turnover beer/shot specials.
And make sure to install a pinball machine.
Also, and I don't think this is bartending but just having survived to 30, I have an understanding that no matter how hard something seems, or how lost I am, it's never quite so drastic as it feels. Also that _thinking_ like it's drastic is a surefire way to make sure it becomes so.
There's a spooky kind of power in being able to curate a vibe and be easy to socialize with. It looks a whole lot like just fucking around, but there's probably not a thing in my life it hasn't improved.
Your story isn't too different from the struggles many feel when they do it the traditional way and get a bachelor's degree in their early 20s, or whatever age they do it at. This is very relatable. Thanks for sharing.
So let's hope for more people like yourself willing to have a go, and more people looking out for others.
I've become really interested in the whole concept of an apprenticeship - I think that it could be a great solution for a lot of folks, like it was for me. I intend to do more mentoring, and I'm always on the look out for more mentors.
edited to add: What I got from my mentor was almost not at all technical, and he didn't help me find a job when the time came. Mostly, he helped me feel like it was something that could be done (because he said so and had the credentials to be an authority on the matter), and he got me a little unstuck occasionally. If one could just "make up their mind" that it was a doable thing, they could make it happen without the mentorship - but like I said in the post, it's an emotional journey first and community is super important for that. None of us is an island.
I've done the exact opposite, I am super lucky in all sorts of ways and the last person I want to help is someone with a similar background to mine.
I don't mean this as a criticism, but more a counterpoint. It isn't what you know it is who you know is still true today. I do not think that is a good design.
Will it work out? only time will tell. but he's built some really cool shit so far and any team would be lucky to have him as a junior
I have landed every job through public job listings. I've maintained some contact with previous colleagues, but never had any real job opportunism pushed my way. I'm sure their good recommendations have helped, and I believe I interview well.
Just putting this out there for people who have smaller social networks or feel shut out.
In other words, I think there are parallels between serving food and serving data.
Had to run up and down stairs carrying cases of beer and armchairs.
Slept very little. Consumed a load of sugar and caffeine to try to stay alert.
Switched to software. Wasn't very good at it. Still not very good at it, but I'm proud to have built a really great company full of lovely and talented people around the world. We're making some real waves now too[0].
[0]: https://www.globalreinsurance.com/home/over-24-billion-premi...
I went back to bartending where I've been quite happy ever since even if poor - it also gives an outlet to my artistic side, as you're partially a performer behind the bar. After a while i started getting more and more into digital art tho and as i turned 40, i realise i need to make that my main thing and eventually leave the bar behind. It's a tougher jump as there's not nearly as much work as in tech, but I'll have to make it. Knowing how to code is a big advantage though (mostly doing VR and animation in Unreal Engine these days) and when it's just one part of the job i actually find it enjoyable :D
Also, it's a thing you can always just sorta do so long as there's one other person around.
That said, I also don't drink hardly at all anymore. There are better ways to have a good time that come with less literal headache.
Any anecdotes of something you've learnt there that has helped you?
Funny enough, probably the most helpful thing I got out of my batch was seeing the folks with a lot less domain knowledge than me simply kill it and make awesome stuff. I had the thought - "If they can do it and they just figured out how to fizzbuzz, what the hell is my excuse?". I learned a lot about what kind of energy it takes to just get the job done from them.
Mostly, though, it's the ongoing support that makes it incredible. Once you're connected with that community, you're never wanting for advice or just someone to talk shop with. I highly recommend it to anyone of any skill level. I'm considering doing another batch when I have the time off work.
If the idea of a self-structured sabbatical appeals to you, Recurse is great. It's definitely (and deliberately) not a bootcamp of a traditional sort, so it attracts a certain type of person. I definitely learned stuff there that has helped me (I spent my batch going deep on WebAssembly and the WGSL shader language), but the bigger thing it gave me was a reset from working in industry nonstop for ~10 years and a chance to remember why I like programming in the first place.
When I think really attracted me at first was, I liked the idea of a job that would keep me intellectually engaged and allow me to work remote. This quickly evolved into a deeper love once I realized how code really works - the way that it allows you to think. It feels a little like I've rewritten my own mental source code after learning the stuff. I for sure think differently about the world than I used to.
I have always had a weird obsession with systems thinking; perhaps that helped.
If it were just about the money, Id've quit. Money's not interesting enough to do something I hate.
The survivor bias is one that I think on pretty frequently. A friend that I mentored is a lot better than I am in technical ways but struggles in some of those areas that have nothing to do with tech - emotional regulation and people skills - and it's made the journey very difficult. I wonder frequently how I could have better taught those skills.
Edit to add: Homeless to senior eng? Holy cow! I wanna hear that story!
My emails in my profile.
I am glad you are able to build yourself a more stable career though, seriously, kudos. I really do hope you enjoy it, unlike my dumb ass. Maybe anything you do for 20 years can make you sick. shrug
at the risk of sounding like a plug, there were a bunch of folks at recurse who were in your position and specifically went to 'get the magic back'. Something to consider; take a sabbatical, focus on some fun stuff. I'm sure your presence and experience would be appreciated.
So why don't you? Anyone can get a bar job.
I started in tech in the late 90's making websites, that lead into design and development, I ran a company for a bit doing consultancy from 2007 to 2013 and then took at job at a start up as the first technical and design person. I stayed there for nine years, moved into the CTO role, then the CIO role and then last year I quit the industry to go back to a local rural college and study arboriculture and forestry. I now spend my days learning about trees and doing chainsaw work. By the time summer comes around I'll have all the qualifications I need to actually work as a climber who can use a chainsaw up a a tree or as a forester to go into plantations and fell timber stock. I also got pretty interested in woodworking in 2018 and I've spent a few years slowly self renovating my (very small) garage into a workshop capable of small scale production of "craft" items. Between the tree work and the creative sales I'm hoping to get a modest income up and running by the end of the year. It'll never be a tech salary, but that's fine because I'm out in the woods and in nature and that's a price tech could never pay. Even when the weather is cold, wet and grey there's still something to being outside and working (though I'm sure that will wear off after a few years)
People often congratulate me on quitting to get "my dream job", or because I'm "following my passion" and neither of those things are true. My dream job is to work on whatever I want without having to worry about money. What I'm doing now is something I'm prepared to do for money because a) it is great fun and b) I'm doing something that at the end of the day leaves the planet in a slightly better state than it was at the start of the day.
My unsolicited advice to you is to turn some of that cynicism into harnessable energy. It's not easy for sure, but that's kind of the point. If you stay with that easy pay check everything will be hard because you don't want to be there. Turn that around and do the hard thing of finding or up-skilling into something else and then you'll find most things will be easy because the simple act of changing your life will give you some wind in your sails.
If it's important - I'm in the UK. Northumberland to be precise.
You give hope to the underachievers that they can better themselves (related: my GPA was lower than yours :)).
You give great advice on mental illness (if I may editorialize: seek help if you think you may need it; it changed my life like I think it changed yours).
I see so many posts from FAANG employees... I don't think that I could pass the IQ test for being a janitor at those places. /shrug. So happy to see "regular?" people here.
My "Grass Is Greener" syndrome says that I almost wish I was still bartending...
Because I'm not dumb. I'd bet you aren't, either. But our social sorting hat is opinionated and we're not it's favorite.
Thank Cerf for the Internet, or I'd have been SOL. I don't do well in classrooms, but I've managed to learn every bit I might have needed and more. I think that we're about due for a competitor to the traditional school model.
Power to the regular folks.
I had this model of cronyism in my head, where you make the right friend and you get a job because they're rather work with someone they have a personal relationship with.
Maybe that's a real thing in some places, but my connections were all about making this huge difficult thing easier to manage (that is, learning how to do it and believing it could be done).
Most of the study was my own, and all of the job seeking was with no connection whatsoever to my network.
Did you do recurse in person or remotely?
That's the biggest problem for me. I spend so much time *reading* about tech stuff/programming but it rarely sticks until I force myself to write code/work on project, that's when the knowledge *incorporates*, else I am just a erudite bag of wind. It really helps to know what you are doing, but it's useless if you are doing nothing, or scrolling through HN comments :)
The most recent thing I'm hacking on is a gui to sort through and rank stable diffusion outputs. it's not technically complex or advanced but it'll solve a problem I have so I keep coming back to it.
The way I try to look at it is that it's all practice. Every scrap of code I write is a prototype of a better version.
I spent the first chunk of my working life (>10 years), working in bars, night clubs and restaurants. I was good at getting jobs and frequently quit them. All I cared about was taking drugs, chasing girls and playing with technology.
I ended up getting married and my wife supported me for 9 months whilst I learned Drupal and PHP. During that time I started a Drupal meetup and met lots of other developers.
One of those developers told me her company was looking for a contractor, so I applied for the job. The same girl took my resume from the bottom of the pile and put it at the top. I was invited to interview. Two of us passed the interview and were asked to do a test. The other guy was a very experienced contractor, but he refused to do tests on a matter of principle, leaving me as the only candidate.
I went from £6.50 an hour (minimum wage) to £300 / day. It was utterly life changing.
Still working as a developer 12 years later.
so much this. I read other folks around here talking about how low the pay is at a startup and just think how it's all relative. I'm not buying Porsches or anything but my life is leagues different. My first job in tech was ~75k and I was ecstatic.
In mid 2010s I was fresh college dropout with little perspective in life but had lots of self-thought skills in general IT field. Worked odd jobs as a student, labor jobs, fixing computers on a side, being jack of all trades but master at none. Then decided to emigrate from my southern European country into NW Europe. Within two weeks I got entry position in major cloud provider, a job I was dreaming to get in a span of 5-10 years, but there I was. 9 years later I am managing couple of said cloud provider facilities, have direct reports under me, and my current life is unimaginable compared to where I was ten years ago. Every single year since I emigrated was substantially better than previous one. There was a promo or at least solid salary increase every 12 months, did some side moves to different teams and eventually navigated to what I am and have at this moment. Imposter syndrome still kicks in from time to time and kicks hard, but that's something I need to live with. Lack of college degree doesn't help a single bit
it just feels natural to wake up every day with a totally different class of problem than yesterday.
I knew the tools, because in the course of learning I had to build projects end to end and managing stuff manually while also working on the code was just not on.
While knowing both of those definitely made a lot of interviewers perk up a bit, I think what really lubricated the process was that I had focused really wide - I had entry -level competency in a ton of stuff so it was easier to find a good fit.
I guess the takeaway is to learn a little bit of a lot rather than a lot of a few things. That will also be helpful after you specialize, because it's never a bad thing to know how your systems interconnect.
Graduated with a degree in computer Engineering at 33. During and after school I worked in web doing frontend, then full stack engineering. Now I'm senior at a cloud HPC company designing and implementing things beyond my imagination.
I can 100% testify the soft skills learned from the service industry give me a competitive advantage in tech.