- Fear is the chief export of Compton.
It's what everybody knows Compton for,
the fear of drugs, the fear of gang violence,
fear of being cut down in the streets,
fear of black people, fear of black men.
These are all things that are associated with Compton.
When you live a life where you're fearing walking
down the street to school,
or fearing a drive by happening in at night,
sort of sleeping in your bed,
worrying about bullets coming through the window,
I think that fear pushes everybody.
I experienced that in a lot of different ways,
that really impacted how I saw myself
and what it is that I strove for
and what I fought for growing up.
My name is Anthony D. Mays,
I'm a software engineer at Google.
I was not born in Compton,
no I was born in Omaha, Nebraska,
which is sort of weird for somebody
that's straight outta Compton,
then came to Compton when I was four years old.
When I arrived in 1988, NWA's Straight Outta Compton album
had just been released, Compton was put on the map.
♪ Straight Outta Compton ♪
♪ Crazy (bleep) named Ice Cube ♪
♪ From the gang called (bleep) With Attitudes ♪
I began to learn that if you're gonna live in Compton,
you sort of have to endure this baptism
of adversity and challenge.
So I grew up on Mayo Avenue,
between Green Leaf and Alondra.
I had been amazed by the people that I was seeing,
that sort of quintessential image
of these old style cars, booming hip hop music,
mothers pushing their babies in strollers down the street,
dudes just hanging out on the corner.
And I found this fascinating,
it was confusing, it was loud, but it was amazing.
I grew up on a great street,
but still I had this fear as a young person of being shot.
Police helicopters, the ghetto birds, as we call them,
were always hovering over our neighborhood,
and so everybody was aware of what was going on in the city,
and if even if you didn't know the details,
you knew there was something to be afraid of.
Compton to me is a rose bush of beauty and pain.
You see people who deal with despair,
that deal with struggle,
and they're just trying to get by
from day to day, but you see this resiliency.
You see the strength, and you see this courage
to just keep on persevering.
I've met some very beautiful people in Compton
and I've also had some of the toughest experiences
of my life in that city.
I first entered foster care
after I went to elementary school,
my kindergarten teacher questioned me about some marks
that I had on my neck and on my back,
and at first I told them that it was a bully,
I told them it was a bully 'cause
that's what I was told to say.
My teacher didn't believe me
and when they asked me again,
I said, yeah well my dad had beat me
'cause I was being a bad boy.
And they called the police,
police came and picked me up,
took me to Martin Luther King Hospital
where a doctor confirmed that I had been physically abused.
So I was put into foster care.
I went and bounced around to a couple of homes,
all the while, my would-be foster parents
had gone to night court to petition for custody
for me and for my two brothers
who had also gone to different foster homes.
They had been our babysitters.
And so they stood up and took us all into their home
out of the kindness and love of their own heart
they went in and snatched up three new boys,
three new black boys, and brought them under their roof.
From day one, as soon as we arrived there,
they said, you don't have to call us Mr. and Mrs. Croons
anymore, you can call us mom and dad.
And I'll never forget that because it was at that moment
that we fused as a family.
And not a lot of kids get that opportunity,
they've bounced from foster home
to foster home to foster home,
eventually end up homeless.
I was really fortunate and glad
by the grace of God that that wasn't my story.
A lot of people that I grew up with,
you felt like you only had three options.
It was either sports, rap music, or drugs.
I knew that I wasn't good for those things,
and again I didn't wanna go to jail,
I knew that doin' drugs got you in jail, or in the grave.
But fortunately at my elementary school
we also had a computer lab,
and I remember using a computer for the first time
and getting to engage with this technology,
and it wasn't just something that was static,
I could do things and it would react to me,
like it was a conversation.
And that conversation was something
that I couldn't let go of.
And so for me that was my first experience
with technology and with computers, and I loved it.
So I paid attention in class
and did well with grades
and I just felt like education
was gonna be a better option for me.
I actually experienced bullying as a result.
They would call me an oreo, which if you don't know
what that is, that's a black person
who is black on the outside but white on the inside.
I was getting called Steve Urkle,
because I wore these thick meta cal glasses.
Back then it hurt, I always felt like
there was a bit of a crabs in a barrel mentality
where I think some people knew that I was gonna go somewhere
with my education but in me doing that
it sort of judges them for not having
that same kind of motivation or not being able to
because their circumstance was different than mine.
My parents tried to find the best education
they possibly could for me in Compton.
My school district was being taken over by the state,
so I was in a really bad situation.
In middle school I went to NFL YET,
which is a school funded by the NFL.
And there was a computer lab there,
and the computer lab administrator was this black guy.
I wanted to go in and play games
and I wanted to go and print rap lyrics,
Bone Thugs N Harmony, see you at the crossroads
just came out and nobody knew what they were saying.
♪ Dead souls, this for Wally ♪
♪ Eazy, C's Uncle Charlie ♪
That was like my popularity card.
I was the guy that could print Bone Thugs N Harmony lyrics.
The administrator was like look,
if you wanna use these computers,
you need to know how the internet works.
You need to know what the WWW means.
And so I began to learn from him
about how to do these more advanced things with computers.
I had another mentor,
who was also a computer lab administrator,
he got me and a few other folks together into a class
and he just told us like straight up,
whatever I know, I'll teach you.
He taught me about how to build computers
and how to take 'em apart,
how to install operating systems
and manage servers, we were getting to play
with all this fancy tech that I couldn't afford.
By that time I knew that I was gonna go to college
and get a computer science degree,
but when I went to high school
at the California Academy of Math and Science,
things started to diverge.
I started going to school
with people who were really, really different from me.
Our mascot was a graphing calculator,
so, imagine how ridiculous it is
for a dude from Compton to go to a high school
where the mascot is a graphing calculator.
That's also the time when I started
to experience imposter syndrome.
I felt like, am I really smart enough
to hang with all of these really smart people?
I just wanted to keep up,
but I always felt like everyone else
was doing better than me,
like they were stronger and smarter than me,
and that fear started to come back,
of what if I'm not really able to do this,
what if I don't get into college?
What if I get into college and then I'm not able to finish?
I felt like I saw other kids
whose parents were engineers, doctors, lawyers.
My parents weren't those things.
I compared myself a lot to other people,
and just didn't feel like I was on that same level.
It took me a while to understand,
I was just different, not any necessarily better
or worse than my peers.
It took me a while to get used to just being in college.
I just really, really struggled,
and always felt like I was the only person in my class
that had been through what I had been through.
And certainly, I was usually the only black person
in my classes and so I had to deal
with the cognitive dissonance that comes with that.
I remember being approached by Google,
there was a recruiter on campus
that handed me a pamphlet and wanted me to apply
for an internship, and I remember looking at the pamphlet
like, y'all don't want me.
Y'all don't want no black man from Compton,
former foster kid working at Google,
and certainly I'd never seen black people
perceived as software engineers
in movies and in TV shows so I just didn't have the notion
of what it would look like for me
to work at a place like Google.
So I threw that application away,
graduated from UC Irvine on the five year plan,
bounced around to a couple of jobs,
Google caught me in 2011, thirteen years later or something,
I remember I was so excited I ran around my house
like three or four times,
tried as best as I could to study and prepare,
I had heard that Google tested candidates
based on brain teasers,
so I studied brain teasers for two weeks,
turns out that was a complete lie,
and I was totally unprepared.
The Google interview didn't go well,
and I really struggled with that,
because when people found out that I had applied,
they were like cheering me on,
they were like "oh Anthony if anybody can make it
"to Google, we know it's you".
I had people at church that were praying for me,
when I got the no from my recruiter,
I had to go back and tell those people,
no I didn't get in, and I felt like,
it wasn't just that I had let myself down,
but that I let down a whole community of people.
And so when Google called in 2012,
called me again to interview, I told them no.
Because I didn't wanna go through the embarrassment
of failing again.
Fortunately Google called me again in 2013,
which was just ridiculous, 'cause who does that?
And when I got that phone call
I was like I gotta try this again.
While I was on the bus and while I was on the train,
I would have a little note pad and a pencil
to study programmer problems,
and I was studying that like every day,
like three hours a day, four hours a day,
I was studying at lunch,
I would study before work, I would study after work,
I would make my wife practice with me.
I knew exactly the day that the recruiter was gonna call me
and tell me whether I got an offer or not.
I was on pins and needles the whole day,
like I felt like I was just gonna die.
I remember when the phone rang,
I almost jumped out of my socks,
like I almost had a heart attack and fell over.
And the recruiter was like,
"hey I've got somebody on the phone,
"do you know who Laszlo Bock is?"
Who's the head of People Operations for Google at the time,
and I was like okay great, I failed,
and they've sent in the big guns to let me down easy.
A week before, I had sent a letter to my recruiters
thanking them and I was just expressing my gratitude
for having made it that far,
turns out that that letter ended up getting forwarded on
to the executive committee.
And Laszlo was like "yeah, so we got your letter,
"and I'm just proud to be able to tell you
"that we'd love to extend an offer to you at Google".
Everything that he said after that
pretty much turned into noise
'cause I couldn't understand anything,
like I just, I couldn't even feel my fingers
and it was a moment where I felt like
I had achieved what I was put on Earth to achieve.
And so I called my wife, my parents,
I told my kids and they sang me a little song,
they were like, "Happy Google to you".
People at my church were shedding tears,
I was just floored by it and humbled by the reaction.
I think about those moments all the time,
and I think about the people that I represent
and the community that I come from,
and about how important it is for me
to do a good job, to do good work,
to teach others what I've learned, to pay that back.
It's good to have that fire
and to keep moving that forward.
And it helps me sort of to deal with the fact
that I made it out, when a lot of other friends didn't.
I had a friend of mine, we were the same age,
and when he made it to 19 years old
he was shot and killed, and I always think
about like what was so different about him and me,
that I made it out and that he didn't?
And I don't think that there was anything
really different about us.
I believe that,
I believe that I didn't deserve to make it out
any more that he did, I could've died
just like he did, but I didn't.
I don't think that I'm the hero of my own story,
I think God is the hero of my story,
I'm just along for the ride,
but because I'm in this position
I have a responsibility to make the best of this.
I carry that burden with me,
because I know that if I don't do this, who else will?
As a software engineer at Google,
I help to maintain software systems,
particularly around data visualization,
which is a fancy way of saying
I help people make charts and graphs.
At Google we have tons of data,
and it's really important
that people be able to understand that.
And I love being able to build tools
that are used by people all over the world.
I remember for a time I felt uncomfortable in my seat,
like those first three or four months
and I couldn't figure it out.
The office at the time I would look out the window
and there was a basketball court.
And the basketball court would sort of put me at ease,
and I couldn't figure out why I just felt this uneasiness.
Until Google released their diversity numbers in 2014,
and had sort of admitted to the world,
that two percent of employees at Google are black,
and only one percent of employees at Google
are black and in a technical role.
All throughout my career,
I've known about something called the black tax.
And the black tax is this idea
that as a black person working in America,
you have to work twice or three times as hard
as someone who's not black
to get as far as they might.
So for me I'm always in that mode
of defending who I am as a professional and as a black man.
So at Google it was the same sort of deal.
Like, work extra hard and try to do as much as possible.
And that's when this light bulb went off in my head,
and I looked to my left and looked to my right
and realized like I'm one of only three black people
in my office of like 400 people.
From that moment onwards, I began to commit myself
to helping to do what I could
to improve diversity and inclusion in tech.
In helping to even more aggressively
pay forward everything that I had learned,
and gained in my own career in life.
If you're in Harlem, Chicago,
in Africa, if you're in India,
wherever you are, you can do this too,
if you're willing to put in the work and spend the time.
(mellow music)