Welcome back.
Now today we have a very critical issue to talk about.
It's been on my mind for years, really.
And I think a lot of us have been aware of it,
but nobody really wants to talk about it.
And it is about, how software engineering
has changed over the years.
It is no longer what it used to be.
You know, ever since I was fired from Facebook last year
as an ex-Google tech lead, by the way,
I had asked myself if I want to reapply
to get a job in tech.
I asked myself if I want my kid to get into tech as well,
if I recommend the profession for my nephews.
And the answer to that is not really,
because software engineering is just not what it used to be.
So let's put it this way.
The path to get into a top tier tech company
like Google or Facebook
usually requires, or it really helps
if you get into a very good school,
like say, Harvard, Stamford.
However, even to get into these schools,
a lot of them will reject you simply based on your race,
your appearance, even if you're the smartest kid out there.
Even if your programming skills are top notch,
you could get rejected
simply because they've reached their quota
for the type of people that you are.
Simply because of the way that you are born.
And there could be so many political reasons for this.
Maybe diversity issues.
And they may even be very well reasoned about.
But at the end of the day, you could be rejected
simply because of the way you were born.
So that's the first gatekeeper in this process.
And I can tell you that, at least for myself,
when I first got into software engineering, into programing,
what really drew me into it was that
there would be no gate keepers.
You see, for me,
the reason I got into coding was back in high school.
I used to have one of these cool english teachers
and he liked to align himself with all the other cool kids.
He wanted to be seen as one of the hip teachers,
and I wasn't one of these cool kids
so we didn't get along very well.
And as a result, he gave me poor grades.
It didn't really matter how good my english essays were,
he would just be mentally biased against me,
unconscious bias.
And then he would just give me these bias grades,
meanwhile he'd be chatting it up
with all the other cool kids.
So for the nerdy, unpopular kids
with pale and crusted skin.
Well, we had the few refuges like math, coding, physics
because these were areas that were purely objective.
Didn't matter how much a teacher hated you,
if you got the answer right,
you would get a good grade
and nobody could take that away from you.
It was a pure meritocracy, a battle of skills.
And that's why I fell in love with coding.
We were outcasts.
We wouldn't win many friends necessarily
by our appearances or by our charisma.
And that's where a lot of hacker
and programmer stereotypes may come from.
Where you see these people, they're not very attractive.
But at the end of the day,
they would deliver a beautiful product
like a website or an app,
or a beautifully engineered system
and their work would show for itself.
However, these days,
programming is just no longer objective.
You can be the best programmer in the world,
apply to Harvard and still get rejected
and that has nothing to do with your perfect SAT scores
or how many open source projects you've been building.
They simply will reject you on your appearances.
It's a perfectly valid reason to reject you,
simply based on, say, diversity reasons.
You just weren't the right ethnicity or gender.
Now that may not necessarily be a complete deal breaker
because these days information is largely self-served.
College is not the only vendor of information out there.
There's so much information and knowledge on the internet.
You can go to boot camps
or enroll in my course techinterviewpro.com
where I'll teach you to land the coding interviews.
Check that out, by the way.
But the frustrating thing is
even after you've obtained the necessary programming skills,
there can still be so many other gate keepers further ahead.
For example, if you wanna apply to job fairs,
go to a company, activities, events.
You know, there are so many activities
that will explicitly ban you,
based simply on the way you were born.
For example, builtbygirls.com
they will only allow women or non-binary genders
into their conferences.
And these are job fairs
sponsored by large top tier tech companies.
Opportunities will exclude you
simply based on the way you were born,
your ethnicity, your gender.
And so to me, tech is no longer about objectivity.
It's not a place where you can just say,
don't look at me,
and let's just take a look at this body of work
and judge that work objectively for what it is
and let the results stand for itself.
Because the problem with tech is
it is now evaluated based on equality of outcome.
So it's not about equality of opportunity
because certain groups will just have more access
to private events and functions than other groups.
And back when I was working at Facebook and Google,
they would say,
well, if two candidates interviewed equally well,
then they would prioritize the candidate
who is more diverse.
Which means that you could be rejected
simply based on your appearances, the way you were born.
And I wanted to be clear here
that I am not, by any means, rejecting diversity.
I think diversity efforts have been great.
And we should, by all means,
support as many different types of people
to get into tech as possible.
I just hope that we can be inclusive
and welcoming to everybody,
and not get to the point of reverse discrimination
where certain groups of people will not feel welcome.
For example, at the BUILT BY GIRLS conference,
I actually kinda wanted to go there and support the movement
to bring more women into tech.
But they actually would reject me
simply because of my gender.
In my opinion, it would be great
if these conferences and events
would be welcoming to everybody
to help support some common cause,
whether that be bringing more women into tech,
more black people into tech.
Or any other efforts for diversity
or whatever else that may be.
Okay now, for anyone who's been working in tech for a while
this should all come as no huge surprise.
The fact is being a software engineer
has just become way too popular.
Everybody wants to be doing it.
And it's kind of a shame that for certain classes of people,
it can be a totally uphill battle.
There will be gate keepers every step of the way
whereas in the past, there were no gate keepers.
If you wanted to be a programmer
nobody would be there to stop you.
They would just say, oh, you wanna do that?
Feel free, be my guest.
That's a nerdy profession.
They don't wanna do that.
People wanted to be lawyers, actors, accountants,
investment bankers, architects.
Not so much anymore these days.
Everyone's just piling in on the software engineering game.
So the way I see it,
it is an uphill climb all the way through.
And if you were to ask me, would I recommend this profession
to my kids or my nephew.
I would say, not really
because it is so difficult it is just uphill.
And why do you wanna go uphill,
find some path where you can go downhill
where you don't have to struggle
every single step of the way
where every time somebody is trying to deny you,
based on the way you were born.
Maybe you just weren't born for this type of career.
And what I find particularly destructive about this is that
a lot of these issues you cannot even talk about
on social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn,
because a lot of these companies
happen to also be the same gatekeepers.
So they're not going to necessarily support your rhetoric.
They could even limit your virality censor
you burn your account
or demonetize your channel.
If you happen to be supporting some political stance
that they don't really support as much.
You know, we do have freedom of speech in America,
but we don't have freedom of distribution of speech.
It still happens that speech is pretty much controlled
by the these tech companies.
And there's no distribution platform
for conversation of any other idealism.
The fact is social media networks and platforms.
They are not neutral.
They don't need to be neutral.
They're privately owned entities.
And there's a monopoly on conversation these days,
the way we talk our idealism, our beliefs
are limited to the type of information
that we are able to see.
I believe that one day in the future,
we may look back on this age
and view as the age of censorship
because there's so much that we cannot talk about.
If the topic is controversial,
or potentially not advertiser friendly
distribution of that content will be limited.
In fact, you may have seen the men's rights movement
has been censored and demonetized on YouTube and Reddit.
Zero Hedge which is a day trader blog,
they were banned on Twitter.
And you hear about the coronavirus also been censored
and while some of the censorship may be valid,
it seems to give tech companies incredible and unfair power
to allow them to decide what society is
and is not allowed to discuss.
So what do I recommend.
Well, I would recommend in this day and age
to look into self publishing,
because all of these gatekeepers, they may exist,
but you can still bypass all of them.
Because if you put out good work,
if you come up with the best website, project,
framework or system, then the work will speak for itself.
And overall, I would say that
software engineering programming is still probably
one of the only games in town.
Is still a great field to get into.
But you wanna be careful about
all these gatekeepers along the path.
And look for ways that you can do self publishing,
get into entrepreneurship, personal branding,
learn about marketing, such that
you don't have to go through all of these other people
just learned about what it takes to create a project,
an app or a website and launch it on your own.
Nobody is going to be able to stop you
from doing any of this stuff.
If you wanna write a book, for example,
then you can learn to do self publishing on Amazon
and just put out a Kindle book.
You can build an app or website,
maybe form a team with your friends.
And if you take a look at YouTube,
well, I'm sure that somebody like myself
in the past Hollywood executives
would have probably just blocked me right way,
but YouTube is essentially self publishing.
There are no gatekeepers.
And that is why in my opinion, entrepreneurship
is still such a great area to get into.
And something that I would recommend
young people to get into,
because in a sense, is one of the easier paths.
Because there are no gatekeepers here,
nobody blocking you based on the logical reasons.
If your work is good, it will stand out on this own.
And then as a backup plan, like a plan B,
look into computer science, software engineering, coding.
Because you can still make a great career out of it
and make some good money.
Although it's just going to be
a little bit tougher than it should be all the way through.
And of course, if you're looking into self publishing,
there are also a lot of other relevant skills here
like marketing, personal branding, writing, media,
networking, maybe even some social sciences
that can help you relate to people
and talk at a more charismatic level.
So that's all I've got for you today.
Good chat.
Good chat,
but let me know if you had the kid.
Would you recommend that kid
to get into computer science programming,
or would you recommend some other route.
Let me know in the comments below if you liked the video,
give a like and subscribe
and I'll see you next time.
Thanks bye