There seems to be a rather large 10 year gap in this story that kinda glosses over the part where you went from installing internet to being a software engineer. It makes it sound like you just magically became a software engineer while road tripping around the country managing a friend's comedy tour. I mean, it goes from managing that tour to suddenly:
> Meanwhile, Hightower was starting to get noticed in the Atlanta open-source community thanks to a series of talks at Python meetups when he caught the attention of James
It's a bit much of a gap - as that seems to be around 2013 and you seem to have still been installing internet in 2003. I get there was a time of being an IT consultant, and then a store opening with a few people you hired. But - where's the software engineering happening that lead to giving talks and what not?
I ran my own computer store with a small IT consultancy attached to it for a few years. Then I chose to pivot and get a "real job". Things change once you're married with a child on the way.
Like many, I started out doing 3 months to perm contract jobs. The first contract was a Linux system administrator at Google in Atlanta automating the huge fleet of servers there. I learned enough shell scripting to be dangerous, but it was mostly racking and stacking servers, and provisioning top of rack switches -- hello minicom.
3 months later I was working in tech support, for more money, at a company called Vocalocity, who was early in the VoIP game. That's where I learned how to PXE boot and flash Cisco IP phones to work with our custom Asterisk based backends. I was there almost a year and then it was time to move on.
This would continue every three months or so. I held jobs at places like Cox Communications working in the NOC during the night shift so I could be home with my daughter. Three to six months later I quit.
I know what you're thinking, this guy jumped around a lot. I had to, money was tight, and it was the fastest way to get a raise, and it also accelerated my learning. Coming from being your own boss it's really hard to get excited about an entry level job and look forward to working your way up the corporate ladder.
My skills really leveled up when I landed a full time job at Peer 1 Web Hosting, where I started in Tech Support working tickets and taking calls helping people with Linux servers, Plesk, and MySQL. It's true, it's always a DNS problem.
Peer 1 is where I really learned how to write code, it started with bash, and eventually Python. I automated the SSL certificate provisioning system, and wrote some scripts that allowed me to close tickets faster than anyone else.
About 6 months later I was promoted to the engineering team and worked on our automated provisioning system for Server Beach, acquired from Rackspace, which was the part of Peer 1 that hosted YouTube before YouTube was bought by Google. Server Beach ran those "Latency Kills" ads to help sale dedicated gaming servers.
That provisioning system was responsible for allowing people to order a server back in the early 2000s from a web form and have it provisioned in less than an hour. We PXE booted servers, configured RAID controllers, and bootstrapped the OS, including Windows, and handed back an IP address and login creds to the larger system.
I was there for over a year before landing a job that would double my salary around 2008, 2009.
I joined the company mentioned in the article, TSYS, where I brought in a lot of automation, thanks Puppet, and learned enough Java to earn the respect of the broader organization and really help transform the place.
I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) from my days at Peer 1 and I leveraged that set of skills to package all the production applications into fat RPMs (Java, JBoss, and all the war files required to make it work) in the same way we use containers today. I also revamped the CI/CD system leveraging Bamboo with tight Jira integration. I also helped the company move on from CVS to SVN. Don't ask.
We had automated deployments and tight integration with our apps over the course of the 3 years I was leading the team. We automated everything from Oracle running on AIX, to provisioning SSH keys and access to production servers based on Jira tickets and Puppet.
On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments industry.
During my time at TSYS I really got exposed to open source and made some major contributions to Puppet and Cobbler -- I added a feature to Cobbler that enabled us to configure servers while leveraging Cobbler metadata and tools like Puppet.
I also started contributing to distutils and pip back in the day. I did some of the work that made pip and virtulenv play nice together. I also started public speaking at local meetup, PyATL, in Atlanta, and found my voice in the Python community.
It's my PuppetConf 2012 talk that landed me a job at Puppet Labs, the rest is history.
It's nice to see the resume listed out here. I did try to look you up on LinkedIn to maybe find out more (before writing my previous comment) - but found nothing.
For reference, I don't think you've jumped around a lot. I've had 5 different software engineering jobs in the 5 years I've been in the bay area. I moved to learn more, increase my pay, and hopefully find a rewarding environment. Still looking. Most everyone wants money, recognition, and control...
Do you think what the article wrote about is more important to your success (managing a standup act, mcdonalds, joining puppet) than the years that were not really mentioned? I wonder if maybe the person you were managed by, if the people who mentored you (if any), and what not were influential to your success and desire to push yourself out into conferences and making talks. I guess - I just wonder if your formative years of becoming a more senior software engineer meant nothing. Was it all just your own internal desires and no one would've influenced anything regardless and you were bound for whatever an L8 gets compensated?
I wonder, what was it like being the people who helped YouTube before they were a Google company? Did you ever interact with them on a day-to-day basis?
And with your payments stuff - how did those changes help the business you worked for? Faster batch reconciliation / processing or something else?
> On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments industry.
Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.
> My skills really leveled up when I landed a full time job at Peer 1 Web Hosting, where I started in Tech Support working tickets and taking calls helping people with Linux servers, Plesk, and MySQL. It's true, it's always a DNS problem.
Tech support for a hosting company is a really sweet deal. It was my first real job in college (I’m aware of how incredibly lucky I was to have that opportunity) and you really do learn a lot in a short period of time.
I was at your awesome talk at GopherCon some years ago, and it was one of the major reasons why I wanted to work at Google rather than FB or other companies. I kept telling all my friends to watch your recorded talks if they need inspiration :)
Thank you so much for posting this! I found many things in your story that are similar to my experience and it gives me hope.
I have a few questions I hope you don't mind answering as I'm trying to change careers to work full-time on public cloud for a technology driven company.
A little backstory (feel free to skip):
I began my career working in a company that did structured cabling, PBX systems and rack and stacking data centers. I was rapidly taking on more responsibilities and was managing a team of 40 people within 2 years.
Things were steady but I felt like I was missing out on all the incredible things that were happening in tech (I spend a lot of time on HN). After discovering AWS I was blown away by the possibilities and decided Linux and cloud were what I wanted to focus on as a professional.
I resigned to start my own consultancy and got the pro level AWS SA certification (with mostly self practice and no real-world production experience) and approached many businesses to sell services as an 'AWS certified' consultant. I got a few small wins but the sales cycle was longer than I expected and many potential clients would engage in long technical discussions but then cancel once they saw the TCO calculations.
The unstable cash-flow made things like paying rent on time very stressful so after two years I got a job at a small consultancy that provides mostly on-prem IT infrastructure services. I've learned quite a lot over the past two years and realized there were many holes in my knowledge. Yet, most of the clients' work was still on premise and now because of the pandemic many of them put their projects on hold or outright canceled them to cut costs. I've been furloughed without any income and right now I'm trying to survive by installing internet in homes and taking support calls while looking for a new job.
Many of the cloud related jobs - either solution architecture or Devops, require experience working in an agile software development environment, which is something I don't have and I have a major case of imposter syndrome because of this.
Now for the questions:
1) Is it possible to learn enough about agile practices and development to be productive without real-world production experience?
2) When you were looking for a 'real job' after running your own IT business, did you face any objections during the recruitment process on why you were looking for a job despite running your own business?
3) I was thinking of applying for 'cloud support engineer' type of roles because I really want to work in this field, but would that be a negative signal to recruiters because I'm an experienced (albeit in other areas) candidate?
After all these years I started to question if it was possible to go from rack and stacking to cloud but since you've explained it in such detail I see a path now. Thanks!
I think part of it may be that, if he's the (good kind of) hustler his friends state he is, he probably did a million things over that decade period which is really hard to translate into a narrative acceptable for an article like this. I'm in no way equating our situations other than I have ~10 year "consulting" period on my resume that includes probably 20-30 contracts, projects, a few jobs, etc. and it's really hard to break it down into a simple timeline to answer "what did you do from ...". That's my take.
People can work dead-end jobs a long time before getting "called up". I work in "real tech" these days, have gotten to write a book on a trendy technology, have had a hand in multi-billion dollar projects.
Before that I was writing PL/SQL in a remote tropical town for peanuts.
Before which I spent about a decade working a parade of jobs that varied from shitty to crappy in the same town.
It is a normal state of being for many folks that their life doesn't run directly from a fancy highschool to a fancy university to a fancy job.
This is a fascinating and inspiring story! I'm also an African-American in tech working in Silicon Valley. I have a strong interest in systems, and I had the pleasure of interning for Google's cloud division twice: once to work on the Google Cloud SQL team, and another time to work on the Spanner team. It's great to hear of other African-Americans in Silicon Valley.
You should definitely encourage them to apply to FANGs and not be intimidated by the interview process.
There is a big push and accompanying quota to get more black/latin/native american people into tech companies at all levels.
While I don't agree with this quota system for the inherent racism/unfairness and second order effects[0], possible beneficiaries should take notice and act on it and be a role model.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person here on merit or on quota?
I'm not sure why dang didn't break off this subthread with this post and did it with one of its children instead, but if you look at the GP and then your comment again, you'll notice they never ask for advice on jobs (seriously, who is the "them" you're referring to in your first sentence?) and the friendly tone is belied by the fact that you're responding to a statement that it's nice to have representative role models by making an association between role models and quota systems. Maybe consider the second order effects[0] of posts like this in the future before making them.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person posting based on actual relevance to the conversation at hand or wedging in their own biases just because they can?
Would the problem with that side effect lay on the shoulders of the person making the assumption that it's not possible for there to be multiple candidates of roughly equal merit (at which point a quota would then be applied) ?
Seems like it comes more from people making that assumption than the quota system itself, assuming that everyone's held to the same standard of competence (which I would imagine is the case for FAANG companies).
Was about to suggest adding Kelsey Hightower to the title, as he's someone in the community many may already know of...then I look at the username! :D
Always enjoy his videos whenever I come across them, even if I'm not working on anything remotely related to the content. Waiting for whatever random tech surprise he throws in sometimes.
Almost everyone you see who has a personal brand that is popular on the conference circuit is willing and able to do this kind of self promotion. It’s not for me, but I don’t see it as objectionable because I see it as part and parcel of the role, and I think the role is a valuable one that should continue to exist. Technologies benefit from having some well known and well liked “names” behind them, and it gives them the confidence to try something new instead of the old thing which moves the industry forward.
It may be a minor quibble, but but the irrelevant "From McDonald's" is pretty tiring clickbait. Many of us that now work in the tech industry, whether black, white, etc, have worked these shitty food service and retail jobs, but unless you worked your way up through McD's tech statk from the grill, it just doesn't matter. Of course Mr. Hightower here is just reusing the title of the article, so this isn't a slight against him, but journalist should try harder, even in this clickbait world we live in. I'd hate to think my time working at Hardee's, McDonald's and Walmart has any bearing on my current career.
Also, he had the job when you’re supposed to have a McDonalds job (before or around college).
Not taking away anything from him, just saying, there is a world of difference between being in your late 20s or 30s, at a dead end fast food joint and clawing your way up to Google vs once upon of time working part time in high school at typical blue collar job.
Not quite the underdog story I was looking for. Nice try at an origin story though.
He seems like an awesome guy. Well-deserved success!
I do wonder whether the title of the article accidentally (and ironically) reveals a subtle racial bias. McDonald's is a typical shorthand for a lowly job, staffed by the nation's underclass. But tons of successful people in tech flipped burgers in high school (I did!) and it's never worth highlighting in press articles. Their public story usually starts at college or their first job or their first big break. But this article specifically highlights a traditionally menial position as his starting point.
> He began working at McDonald's, earning $4.15 an hour working nearly 40 hours a week, mostly on the weekends. He was quickly promoted to shift manager at the age of 16,
> He enrolled in certification classes sponsored by CompTIA to get his A+ certification, which led to a job as a DSL installation technician for Bell South at the age of 19.
So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
McDonald's was my starting point. It's where I developed much of my work ethic and my first taste of leadership in a professional setting. I was a shift manager for most of that time and remember learning about the restaurant business, food cost, working with customers, and managing people.
A lot of stuff did not make the article but who I am today was greatly influenced by that job. I chipped in on the bills, bought my own school clothes, and my first car (1987 Jeep Cherokee), thanks to that job, so for me it was very foundational.
I know so many successful peers, including myself, who have worked at fast food and other menial jobs, during late teen years. If anything, this is actually a positive signal that someone cares about their future and is willing to put in the work.
> So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
I'm confused, you started by agreeing that highlighting the McDonald's experience is a good thing, then asked 'what does that have to do with anything'. I don't know what position you hold, here.
As for me, I never worked at McDonald's or any other fast food, but I did spend some time working at a local pizza joint, where I started as a busboy, and eventually assumed cook and delivery driver duties. I'd already taken programming classes and knew Java and Python, but had never considered software as a professional option. My time in the service industry was still super valuable to me as a software professional - I learned about time management, prioritization (working as a busboy and dishwasher who also makes some minor food items is an implementation of a priority queue where the priority values can change very quickly), and how to identify repeatable business processes. These are all highly valuable skills for someone who writes code, and pretty much any service industry job, taken seriously, requires understanding them. They apply equally in SaaS.
So my answer to your (possibly rhetorical?) question is: working at McDonald's for 3 years in high school has quite a lot to do with the rest of the career, as valuable fundamental business skills are there to be learned even in the lowest wage jobs.
It's the "American Dream". They need to reiterate again and again how every dishwasher can become something if they just work hard enough lol. It's these things that make me pity Americans, but other stuff offsets it as well, so there we go.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
I could not fit the entire title "From McDonald's to Google: How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing" when submitting the post.
No, it's just a manifestation of the rags to riches-trope. Please don't bring this "aggressively looking for things to crucify people with"-culture onto HN.
Wow, that's a huge stretch. I read the reference to McDonald's only as a job where significant numbers of teenagers first learn about team management and cost/quality optimization. It's not merely "flipping burgers" but more generally the McDonald's program and a strong corporate work ethic.
Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds.
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!
I've been involved in hiring engineers, and see previous employment 'flipping burgers' as a massive plus. It shows someone is willing to work hard when they need to.
I'm lucky enough to go to a decent university, but having looked up a few noses I find it each one makes me want to work harder. I've met people who I honestly believe have been born well (expensive schools etc.) to not have any zest for learning
Great over all story. Not sure what the McDonalds part has to do with it - a huge number of kids start there. I did - and in the next 40 years I've been Chief Architect of a startup, found my own startup (with a install base over 12 million), and am currently a Principal Architect at Microsoft (and was a lead in Microsoft Research a few years ago)
All good - and I look back at my McDonald days (somewhat) fondly, and it was good experience at doing fairly unpleasant work - but my nights hack and phone freaking and coding had 100x more to do with my success then that first job :)
I've had the opportunity to know Kelsey for a number of years, and we've worked together closely on occasion. He is the genuinely good human the article portrays him as, and unlike some who evangelize - Kelsey understands his technical area (k8s) deeply and is on the CLI daily. Top notch human, and I thought I'd add a POV from a regular HN reader.
Readit News
> Meanwhile, Hightower was starting to get noticed in the Atlanta open-source community thanks to a series of talks at Python meetups when he caught the attention of James
It's a bit much of a gap - as that seems to be around 2013 and you seem to have still been installing internet in 2003. I get there was a time of being an IT consultant, and then a store opening with a few people you hired. But - where's the software engineering happening that lead to giving talks and what not?
I ran my own computer store with a small IT consultancy attached to it for a few years. Then I chose to pivot and get a "real job". Things change once you're married with a child on the way.
Like many, I started out doing 3 months to perm contract jobs. The first contract was a Linux system administrator at Google in Atlanta automating the huge fleet of servers there. I learned enough shell scripting to be dangerous, but it was mostly racking and stacking servers, and provisioning top of rack switches -- hello minicom.
3 months later I was working in tech support, for more money, at a company called Vocalocity, who was early in the VoIP game. That's where I learned how to PXE boot and flash Cisco IP phones to work with our custom Asterisk based backends. I was there almost a year and then it was time to move on.
This would continue every three months or so. I held jobs at places like Cox Communications working in the NOC during the night shift so I could be home with my daughter. Three to six months later I quit.
I know what you're thinking, this guy jumped around a lot. I had to, money was tight, and it was the fastest way to get a raise, and it also accelerated my learning. Coming from being your own boss it's really hard to get excited about an entry level job and look forward to working your way up the corporate ladder.
My skills really leveled up when I landed a full time job at Peer 1 Web Hosting, where I started in Tech Support working tickets and taking calls helping people with Linux servers, Plesk, and MySQL. It's true, it's always a DNS problem.
Peer 1 is where I really learned how to write code, it started with bash, and eventually Python. I automated the SSL certificate provisioning system, and wrote some scripts that allowed me to close tickets faster than anyone else.
About 6 months later I was promoted to the engineering team and worked on our automated provisioning system for Server Beach, acquired from Rackspace, which was the part of Peer 1 that hosted YouTube before YouTube was bought by Google. Server Beach ran those "Latency Kills" ads to help sale dedicated gaming servers.
That provisioning system was responsible for allowing people to order a server back in the early 2000s from a web form and have it provisioned in less than an hour. We PXE booted servers, configured RAID controllers, and bootstrapped the OS, including Windows, and handed back an IP address and login creds to the larger system.
I was there for over a year before landing a job that would double my salary around 2008, 2009.
I joined the company mentioned in the article, TSYS, where I brought in a lot of automation, thanks Puppet, and learned enough Java to earn the respect of the broader organization and really help transform the place.
I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) from my days at Peer 1 and I leveraged that set of skills to package all the production applications into fat RPMs (Java, JBoss, and all the war files required to make it work) in the same way we use containers today. I also revamped the CI/CD system leveraging Bamboo with tight Jira integration. I also helped the company move on from CVS to SVN. Don't ask.
We had automated deployments and tight integration with our apps over the course of the 3 years I was leading the team. We automated everything from Oracle running on AIX, to provisioning SSH keys and access to production servers based on Jira tickets and Puppet.
On the software development side I learned enough COBOL to port some of our mainframe jobs to Python. I wrote packed-decimal libraries and EBCDIC encoders so we could use Python going forward to process batch jobs. A big deal in the payments industry.
During my time at TSYS I really got exposed to open source and made some major contributions to Puppet and Cobbler -- I added a feature to Cobbler that enabled us to configure servers while leveraging Cobbler metadata and tools like Puppet.
I also started contributing to distutils and pip back in the day. I did some of the work that made pip and virtulenv play nice together. I also started public speaking at local meetup, PyATL, in Atlanta, and found my voice in the Python community.
It's my PuppetConf 2012 talk that landed me a job at Puppet Labs, the rest is history.
For reference, I don't think you've jumped around a lot. I've had 5 different software engineering jobs in the 5 years I've been in the bay area. I moved to learn more, increase my pay, and hopefully find a rewarding environment. Still looking. Most everyone wants money, recognition, and control...
Do you think what the article wrote about is more important to your success (managing a standup act, mcdonalds, joining puppet) than the years that were not really mentioned? I wonder if maybe the person you were managed by, if the people who mentored you (if any), and what not were influential to your success and desire to push yourself out into conferences and making talks. I guess - I just wonder if your formative years of becoming a more senior software engineer meant nothing. Was it all just your own internal desires and no one would've influenced anything regardless and you were bound for whatever an L8 gets compensated?
I wonder, what was it like being the people who helped YouTube before they were a Google company? Did you ever interact with them on a day-to-day basis?
And with your payments stuff - how did those changes help the business you worked for? Faster batch reconciliation / processing or something else?
Great read, but as someone else who has worked on mainframes and in Python I found this especially impressive.
Tech support for a hosting company is a really sweet deal. It was my first real job in college (I’m aware of how incredibly lucky I was to have that opportunity) and you really do learn a lot in a short period of time.
- Random Internet Stranger.
I have a few questions I hope you don't mind answering as I'm trying to change careers to work full-time on public cloud for a technology driven company.
A little backstory (feel free to skip):
I began my career working in a company that did structured cabling, PBX systems and rack and stacking data centers. I was rapidly taking on more responsibilities and was managing a team of 40 people within 2 years.
Things were steady but I felt like I was missing out on all the incredible things that were happening in tech (I spend a lot of time on HN). After discovering AWS I was blown away by the possibilities and decided Linux and cloud were what I wanted to focus on as a professional.
I resigned to start my own consultancy and got the pro level AWS SA certification (with mostly self practice and no real-world production experience) and approached many businesses to sell services as an 'AWS certified' consultant. I got a few small wins but the sales cycle was longer than I expected and many potential clients would engage in long technical discussions but then cancel once they saw the TCO calculations.
The unstable cash-flow made things like paying rent on time very stressful so after two years I got a job at a small consultancy that provides mostly on-prem IT infrastructure services. I've learned quite a lot over the past two years and realized there were many holes in my knowledge. Yet, most of the clients' work was still on premise and now because of the pandemic many of them put their projects on hold or outright canceled them to cut costs. I've been furloughed without any income and right now I'm trying to survive by installing internet in homes and taking support calls while looking for a new job.
Many of the cloud related jobs - either solution architecture or Devops, require experience working in an agile software development environment, which is something I don't have and I have a major case of imposter syndrome because of this.
Now for the questions:
1) Is it possible to learn enough about agile practices and development to be productive without real-world production experience?
2) When you were looking for a 'real job' after running your own IT business, did you face any objections during the recruitment process on why you were looking for a job despite running your own business?
3) I was thinking of applying for 'cloud support engineer' type of roles because I really want to work in this field, but would that be a negative signal to recruiters because I'm an experienced (albeit in other areas) candidate?
After all these years I started to question if it was possible to go from rack and stacking to cloud but since you've explained it in such detail I see a path now. Thanks!
Before that I was writing PL/SQL in a remote tropical town for peanuts.
Before which I spent about a decade working a parade of jobs that varied from shitty to crappy in the same town.
It is a normal state of being for many folks that their life doesn't run directly from a fancy highschool to a fancy university to a fancy job.
There is a big push and accompanying quota to get more black/latin/native american people into tech companies at all levels.
While I don't agree with this quota system for the inherent racism/unfairness and second order effects[0], possible beneficiaries should take notice and act on it and be a role model.
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person here on merit or on quota?
[0] resentment & hmm, is this person posting based on actual relevance to the conversation at hand or wedging in their own biases just because they can?
Seems like it comes more from people making that assumption than the quota system itself, assuming that everyone's held to the same standard of competence (which I would imagine is the case for FAANG companies).
Always enjoy his videos whenever I come across them, even if I'm not working on anything remotely related to the content. Waiting for whatever random tech surprise he throws in sometimes.
Not taking away anything from him, just saying, there is a world of difference between being in your late 20s or 30s, at a dead end fast food joint and clawing your way up to Google vs once upon of time working part time in high school at typical blue collar job.
Not quite the underdog story I was looking for. Nice try at an origin story though.
I do wonder whether the title of the article accidentally (and ironically) reveals a subtle racial bias. McDonald's is a typical shorthand for a lowly job, staffed by the nation's underclass. But tons of successful people in tech flipped burgers in high school (I did!) and it's never worth highlighting in press articles. Their public story usually starts at college or their first job or their first big break. But this article specifically highlights a traditionally menial position as his starting point.
Unconscious bias?
> He began working at McDonald's, earning $4.15 an hour working nearly 40 hours a week, mostly on the weekends. He was quickly promoted to shift manager at the age of 16,
> He enrolled in certification classes sponsored by CompTIA to get his A+ certification, which led to a job as a DSL installation technician for Bell South at the age of 19.
So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
A lot of stuff did not make the article but who I am today was greatly influenced by that job. I chipped in on the bills, bought my own school clothes, and my first car (1987 Jeep Cherokee), thanks to that job, so for me it was very foundational.
What's wrong with a bit of inspiration / hope?
I'm (possibly wrongly) assuming you've never had to work through that shit.
I know so many successful peers, including myself, who have worked at fast food and other menial jobs, during late teen years. If anything, this is actually a positive signal that someone cares about their future and is willing to put in the work.
I'm confused, you started by agreeing that highlighting the McDonald's experience is a good thing, then asked 'what does that have to do with anything'. I don't know what position you hold, here.
As for me, I never worked at McDonald's or any other fast food, but I did spend some time working at a local pizza joint, where I started as a busboy, and eventually assumed cook and delivery driver duties. I'd already taken programming classes and knew Java and Python, but had never considered software as a professional option. My time in the service industry was still super valuable to me as a software professional - I learned about time management, prioritization (working as a busboy and dishwasher who also makes some minor food items is an implementation of a priority queue where the priority values can change very quickly), and how to identify repeatable business processes. These are all highly valuable skills for someone who writes code, and pretty much any service industry job, taken seriously, requires understanding them. They apply equally in SaaS.
So my answer to your (possibly rhetorical?) question is: working at McDonald's for 3 years in high school has quite a lot to do with the rest of the career, as valuable fundamental business skills are there to be learned even in the lowest wage jobs.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
Dead Comment
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!
I'm impressed by the lack of an Ivy-League sheepskin.
My own education is basically self-taught. It served me well (I'm smarter than the average bear), but boy, oh boy, have I looked up a lot of noses.
It's given me a fairly irreverent attitude that does not always win me friends.
It has also given me a drive to help out others that have challenges breaking through obstinance and prejudice (see "not winning friends," above).
All good - and I look back at my McDonald days (somewhat) fondly, and it was good experience at doing fairly unpleasant work - but my nights hack and phone freaking and coding had 100x more to do with my success then that first job :)