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Tune into Techtual Chatter with host Henri and special guest Clyde, a former financial analyst turned tech maven, as they dissect the myths and hustle of the tech industry, especially in cybersecurity and software engineering sectors.
In Breaking into Tech: From Finance to Six-Figure Software Engineer Episode 118, uncover the unspoken truths of tech jobs, the significance of technical certifications, and the resilience required to carve out a successful tech career. Clyde shares eye-opening experiences from his own career shift and rise to a senior software engineer, offering an honest take on the industry's ups and downs.
Discover life as an iOS developer, understand tech compensation structures, and learn how to navigate the challenges of the tech Twitter landscape. Join Henri and Clyde for a potent mix of career advice, personal growth strategies, and frank discussions on the complexity of tech professionalism.
Don't miss this essential listen for anyone interested in the realities behind tech's allure. Subscribe and get ready for a session packed with industry insights and empowering narratives.
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Welcome back to the textual talk podcast.
I'm your host, unri, and boy do we have a great episode for you guys today, this episode 118, and we got an awesome guest. His name is Clive Freeman. He's dishing out the real deal about getting into tech. This isn't your typical tech talk. We're getting into the nitty gritty of what's real and what's just hype, and cybersecurity and how to sniff out those scams. Plus, clive is going to share some wisdom on how to stand out in the tech crowd with legit skills and certs. But wait until you hear about his wild ride from crunching numbers at Fidelity to coding his way up to the tech ladder, talking about a plot to his huh and yep. We're going to talk about life at the layoffs making bold moves, like Clive heading to the big old state of Texas, moving to Dallas. We're not stopping there. We got stories about social media showdowns, mysterious Twitter fuses and all the drama you didn't even know existed in the tech industry. Clive's been through some stuff and he's landed out all in the open. He's also going to give us his two cents on why tech spaces are looking more like lifestyle blocks and how we can bring the tech back into the conversation. Plus, he spills the beans on what it really means to be in the tech job and why diversity in tech is about more than just the trend. Expect some laughs, a bit of ranting and a whole lot of truth bombs. Oh, and, if you're dreaming about becoming a software engineer, clive's got the roadmap you've been searching for, so kick back, plug in and get ready to be entertained and enlightened by this episode of the Tech Talk. Now enjoy the show.
All right, welcome back to the Tech Talk podcast. I'm your host, hd. It's episode 118. And we have with us today, guys, twitter's favorite tech. I'm going to call him the tech troll, because I could tell when he's trolling, but others can't, because they just don't want to like him. But we got Mr Clive Freeman in the building everybody, so if you have him right now, give us a round of applause for making this happen. We've been trying to do this since he went viral, and I'm really mad, though, because he went viral but some people didn't follow him Like that's weird, wow, but he walking with us here today, on a Saturday, if y'all listen to a patron. We didn't have some like in depth discussions that actually could have been the whole pie, but I had to really back in. We can, we can do our cat. We have stuff just yet. We're going to let them. We're going to let them unravel. But, man Clive, how are you? How's it going today?
Man doing good. You know you can't keep playing this. You know living life out here. You know what I'm saying.
Yeah, what I?
normally do, mm hmm.
So before I mess with you and you introduce yourself to the audience, man, let me tell you I don't know if I just said it, but remember subscribe, thumbs up, hit on everything. If you're listening right now Apple podcasts or Spotify you know what to do Leave, review, share it out for the podcast. But real quick, could you introduce yourself to the audience and kind of let me know what your background is right now?
Yeah, sure. So obviously you introduced me before. My name is Claid Freeman, so you know I don't have a traditional tech background. So I started my career in finance. I went to school for finance, business admin. What's kind of doing that for about? You know about seven, seven, eight years working at various financial firms doing financial planning and forecasting at various companies, both private equity I worked in private equity utility companies and my last company before I left was actually a financial services firm.
It was there that I actually caught the coding bug, if you will, because you know I was a spreadsheet jockey, excel, excel sheet jockey and kind of like let me automate my workflow. So that's when I kind of got into using Excel macros. I got into kind of automating the data and migrating the data to a PowerPoint spreadsheet. And then, you know, doing all this kind of gave me a lot of free time to think about what I wanted to do, since a lot of the work load and a lot of the TDAs work was kind of automated and I kind of found myself liking the technical piece of financial analysis. So I was like maybe I tried my hand at doing this full time like my full time job. So that's when I kind of like started, you know, on going on YouTube, going on Google, just researching how to break into tech, because at this time, this is when tech is starting to bubble up, it's starting to get to the place where people think they can get into it Obviously people who know that it's a big money in there. So I'm like I can do this.
I kind of always been technical my entire life and I decided to make that leap and I say it's a leap because I was making great money. I had a great job, great company, great benefits, and I was like, if I don't do it now, at this time I think I was around 28, 29. And I was telling my friends, I was telling my family about it. They were like, are you sure about this? And I was like, yeah, because I know if I stay here any longer, I get a promotion, I'm going to have golden handcuffs and I'm not going to want to make that leap and you know so from there, you know I joined the bootcamp and the rest of this history. I've been doing this ever since. So it's been great and I'm really glad I took, you know, that leap of faith and really invested in myself, because if I didn't, I'll probably still be living a good life, but I definitely wouldn't be as happy as I am now.
Appreciate that man. I didn't even know you had a finance background. You care the name that finance company. I work for Fidele. Okay, hey, Fidele is a good company, it is. Because, even if, like for example, for I'm in cybersecurity, specifically the blue team. They pay them well and good bonuses and stuff too. It's a great company.
Trust me, I didn't leave because you know I would have stayed. To be honest with you, the bonus was great, the company culture, my team was great and they operated more like a tech company. People don't know that they do.
We have a thing called.
they had a thing, at least on Confidality Lives where they were experimenting with a whole bunch of you know this automated technology AI. They have, like this little small startup incubator within the company, so they were doing some great stuff. Yeah, I think what a lot of people don't know is in finance.
A lot of those finance companies are snatching up the software engineers and everybody else. Data what machine learning, ai, data software, ai, data scientists, data analytics they're getting more technical, I think what was that Was that JP Morgan Chase. I used to work at Chase but I think I saw an article was saying they had more engineers than, like, some of the fan companies and I believe them because Chase is pretty huge.
Yeah, because if you ever notice by now like a lot of the companies are realizing that the machine can do with these start brokers, these start traders can do in a fraction of a second all day without getting tired and they can make more decisions than obviously based off empirical data rather than emotion. So the machine is all logic right, so there's benefits to that, so that they're realizing that and then obviously the speed and the efficiency game with that is can go back, so they're leveraging that early. You know, I know AI is big now, but these companies been doing this for a while now.
So you are the way from. What is the nickname for Boston, like? What do black people call Boston?
I don't know like we call Boston, what we call the bean field, called bean town. The bean I usually call it. I don't even call it the bean town or bean town, I call it Boston, right.
I'm going to crack a corny dad joke. Do you like Boston baked beans?
No, I don't, I don't think I really even eat them like that. I like Boston baked beans. People said all the time like they're good. I've had them, but it's not like oh yeah, that's like a. I think being back at Boston is more like seafood, right, so you get the new England clam chowder or the lobster Y'all real big on what Old Bay and stuff like that.
You use an old Bay, or is that a?
Baltimore thing, then it's a Baltimore thing. I'm not. I'm not a cook, so I'm bad on that, but no, I think this is a Baltimore thing, I think it's more so. So, seafood, where is your?
Boston accent.
You don't have Boston accents, by the way. Let me give you some background from Boston. But I'm particularly from neighborhood called Roxbury, right? So Roxbury is like, ain't that where new addition them from? Yeah, so it's a black neighborhood, right? So that's why people say are you from Boston? I know, I know black people live in Boston. I'm like my whole life, I'm like I like group around his black people, so it's a black neighborhood. But I would say this A lot of you know people who say that because you know, you know, you think of Boston, you think of, like, you know what's his name? Ben Affleck. You think of you from the born supremacy. What's his name? Matt Damon. Matt Damon, you think of that. You think the Wahlbergs, right, they don't only show Roxbury. So when people would say oh, oh, black people because they don't see that, yeah, that part of Boston, but is there like Boston's one of the few minority majority cities in the nation, people don't know that.
Yeah, funny thing is so. A show I used to watch was called a survivor's remorse, and they were supposed to be a family from Boston. It was Tashina Arnold, oh, whatever my guy was that. Do you watch the Boys on Prime? Oh yeah, the dude, that's the fast dude. So Jesse T Usher or something.
Yeah, I'm going to tell you where.
Him A train, yeah, a train, the dude who played. He played what's my boy name. He played a lot of stuff, but, like most people probably will remember him from playing one of the sisters boyfriends on Sister Sister, not the dark skin dude, the other one, I can't think of his real name, but him and the other chick Her name was like MCAT on the show, but anyway, they're supposed to be based out of Boston and they try to make them have like talk like they're from Boston. I only reason. I say that, though, because the first two years of my tech career, yeah, I worked helped us for TSA, so I've talked to people at the Boston airports before Logan, so I was able to know, okay, you for Boston, oh, this person, because it's like it's similar to people that's in New York, but it's. Yeah, but it's a little bit different. Like when I was like talking to somebody at Logan or then somebody coming in from LaGuardia, I could tell it's very subtle, but I can tell the difference.
It's funny because people say that I went to a HBCU for the first two years of college. I went to Hampton and everyone was like, oh yeah, you got a Boston. I said, and I'm like I do Cause I say I say I say Boston, I feel like, I feel like like everyone else has a. I think that comes with. I'm going to say this cause no one I know has the Boston accent, cause I know that lives in Boston.
The people who have Boston accident are white people who live in certain areas, right. So, especially if you have like an Irish background, yeah. So if you live like in South Boston, they call it Southie, yeah. Or you live in like a West Rocksbury or some parts of Cambridge. If you have one of my ex-girlfriends it's like she she was Irish and her family's from Southie, but she lived in Cambridge. Cambridge is like where Harvard is, like right across the bridge from Boston. It's a city called Cambridge where actually Harvard is Um, and she had that. So she's like you know she says I'm from Boston, you know she had that accent to the T and that those people had it really.
But if you're a black usually or you're a minority, not really. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's cool man. So yeah, briefly. So I would say so you got into like want to move pivot into tech around what 2018,?
2019? Yeah, I'll say um officially 2019. Okay, I was doing it in my first professional career was in 2019, but I wasn't doing it since two 2018.
Okay, and so I heard you say one of the magic words. You said Bootcamp. So well, actually, I wanna ask you this, though first right, and this is why I wanna ask you this, cause you're a person that I would presume cause we talked before this that you were making really good money already in finance. I have people sometimes where they're making good money in their crib and they wanna pivot and sub-secure or something like that. However, sometimes the jump isn't what they're looking for and I as far as they are increasing salary or, yeah, it's like similar sometimes and sometimes they're not willing to say well, I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna defend and do nothing laterally and, you know, lose some of my benefits that I have.
And which I understand cause. Sometimes there are extremely many circumstances you can't really much like make a move for. But however well, most people sometimes aren't getting the same salary. But then some people may be making more but realize they may have to take two steps back to go.
They get three steps forward eventually. Yeah, and that's what I always say. People think that, you know, career progression is always linear, right, it's always the linear arrow straight up, right? That's not the case. And I'll do a brief story about my in finance.
When I was in finance right, so I was working at a utility company before I went to Fidelity and again crazy company my mother worked there at your director, so I had a little bit of cloud there. You know, it was comfortable, but I wasn't happy at all. So I wanted to go to Fidelity or any financial services company, cause I feel like it challenged me more. So when I got Fidelity, it was actually a pay decrease of about 5,000. We sound like we're transparent here, right, so I don't care about my salary. I'll tell you what I mean. So it was about a 5K decrease. Listen to that man and the. But the bonus was better. So all in all, it was more money in the short term because I got a sign on bonus when I came in. The bonus was generally better, but it was initially a pay decrease. I decided to go with it because I know that it was going to set me up in the future, right? So that's the same way I would suggest people look at if you want to change this into tech. It's going to be a short term. It may not this is not even the case 100% of the time but it may be a short term back, you know, you might. You might have to see yourself downgrading or taking a step backwards in your career as far as your salary expectations go. But you have to see that for vision. You have to say like, okay, I did my research so I knew longterm that, being in tech and being in the role I want to be, over the longterm I would be making more money than if I went to traditional financial route that I was currently taking. So when I was at Fidelity, I did the research. My case was a little bit different because I actually would be making more money when I transitioned to tech. Right, but in the short term, and we can probably get into this a little bit later too.
About the exact bootcamp I went to yeah, I was going to actually do that eventually, yeah, so the bootcamp I went to was a beautiful program. So I'm going to shout this program out. It's called the Prenti and it's national program. Basically, what they do, they you know a lot of labor unions are people who work in like plumbing, electrical. To have unions in the way they kind of like onboard their employees is they do an apprenticeship program, so you work under a journeyman and you pretty much learn underneath them until you're ready to take that position as well. So what they do is they apply that kind of same model to the tech industry.
So I went further, obviously, the software engineering path. So part of that was obviously I had to quit my job, so that meant that I would be out of work, for I think the bootcamp they put you in is four months, so I would be legit unemployed for four months. The thing that I lucked out with is that the company that was sponsoring me was a company that was generous, so I got a stipend. So during the bootcamp I got a $2,000 stipend, so it alleviated the bloke. At this time I had a condo, you know, so I had to support myself at a car, blah blah. So that helped a lot. But most people don't have that kind of background, some people don't have that stipend. So what I would suggest in that case would be for people to kind of like brace for it and just know that there's light at the end of the tunnel. That's what that's all I can say. I know a lot of people wouldn't have made that sacrifice, but it worked out for me in the end.
But back to Apprentice. So basically they're a national program that, like I said before, they kind of like use that apprenticeship model for tech and basically they do. They put you in a bootcamp for four months, three months depending on the track. You're going to have multiple tracks for cybersecurity, I think they have like UX design, now software engineering. You can go on the website, they'll tell you and basically what they do is the beauty of the program. I think this is the number one reason why it went to the program, because they guarantee you a job after the training's done right. So you go from the bootcamp and then you go to on the job training after the bootcamp for at least a year. So when I was done with the bootcamp I immediately had a job. I already knew who I was going to be working for and now with the beauty of it. So I had the job for a year being getting to. You know the actual job later on.
But after the year I was let go.
And you know that started my unemployed or my fun employment journey and actually it was a blessing in the skies because I was actually able to connect with some people that I met from the job and we started a new company. And you know, we can get that later. We can get that later.
Okay, that's a lot. First of all, you said it's called Printy. A Printy, yeah, a Printy. I'm going to cut this section of the video I'm sending to y'all. That way, if y'all want a sponsorship, we put it right here so y'all can go ahead and send me some of my ad dollars that y'all getting team people jobs with. But what made you and this is kind of funny because I'm laughing in my head, actually this kind of stuff, though, out of all things what made you want to be a software engineer?
Um, to be honest with you, because I looked at the salary, so money was a big one. I was like I can make some big money doing this, right. You know what I'm saying. For the last time, I wanted, obviously, you know, grew up one in a nice house, I wanted a nice car. So I knew that, becoming a software engineer, the salary expectations were there for me and I always been a techie, I always been a geek, I always been a nerd. So I've always been into, like you know, science fiction, I was been an anime, I've been into the video games, hardcore superheroes, comics, all that so kind of like it was kind of in my realm to be kind of techie and hands on with gadgets, period. And I felt that, you know, just being a software engineer, you know, put me in the forefront, put me right in the weeds of technology and, like I said before, when I was working on Fidelity I found myself that I actually had a technical expertise and an aptitude for it as well. So those three factors basically put me in.
Did you ever think about trying to be a software engineer for Fidelity?
Yeah, I did actually. I actually visited. I actually talked to some of the engineers there. The only thing that made me hesitant about it was that I knew that there was, like some, you know, I felt like the transitional process would have been longer Instead of me just leaving right, so when I left, I could just be one, instead of, you know, going through the red team and transferring and getting permission from managers and then doing training with a printy. I would have the guarantees. So I was like I got it, I'm just gonna leave.
Yeah, cool. Now I mean I'm glad you told that story, you know, because we talk about investing in yourself and money and we have people all the time like quick story. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you're watching this video right now, so you already know it's sponsored by Level Open Tech. Shout out to my guys over there. They have like the most testimonials that they post for getting people into tech, especially they deal with getting people in cloud computing, and I post a pretty much an advertising form on my LinkedIn and I have two negative Nancy's on there who don't normally interact with me. So I did.
I think I made a story the other day on my Instagram. I told people like hey, keep it cute on LinkedIn, just keep it cute, because they have some type of thing that I guess they got with the actual program and they just felt the need that they had to come on there and say I'm so like, oh, what's the price? And do you get VA tuition and all that other stuff? Like bro, like, if they do what they don't, why do you care? Like all this different? I tell everybody it's more than one way to skin a cat. Everybody can't get in for free. Some people need a strict curriculum and some they need to invest in to keep them accountable, to get to that goal. I agree, because it was somebody the other day I think it was the guy Kenyon. He was talking about how all the people who booked his free spots for consoles didn't show up and I was like that's the reason I've always charged You're gonna respect what you pay for.
Yes, totally agree with that, because when it's free there's an expectation, there's like a valuation on it, because free people don't value it as much, because if it's free it can be too valuable. But you get a price on it people. Unfortunately, they assign a higher value to it because I had to pay for it. So I'm gonna go through this. I can get my money's worth. That's what it is. It sucks, but that's what it is Right.
Yeah. And then in this case, this same person we got acquainted with each other because one time they were saying something about I don't know whatever somebody was charging for a resume or something. But I was just under assumption like, hey, whatever the price is, it don't matter, because if they pay that $1,500, whatever they paying for the resume, but it gets them a job that they get like a 20,000, 50,000, $30,000 increase, they got their return on investment back. And so everybody's just always trying to tell somebody that they shouldn't charge or this is too much. And then they wanna say, oh well, I'm gonna do it for free. And the same person tried to do it for free and it was like I wouldn't prepare to take out these cars, so I'm shutting down the cars for now, Exactly Like everybody always trying to like be a superhero and then realize like you're gonna burn yourself out, You're given, you're taking too much time for yourself.
This same person, too, gets on my nerves because I don't like people like this. They always try to flex how long they mean, oh, I've been, cause I think he does suffer engineering for like the MBA or something, I don't care. Hopefully he listening. I've been here 24 years and doing this and I was like, bro, don't, nobody care how long you been in the game, but they got to do with me. I've been in 10. Like you can't. Just I don't care how long you been there, Everybody got how long they been in there. That's not like okay.
So this, like I don't need this. I do know for a fact this can help people. That's the reason why I'm advertising it. If you don't, you know, if you don't think it can help people, go on there, people who make more absurd claims, and I don't go on their posts and coming on it, Cause I'm like that's their posts. If I got something to say, I'll bring it here or whatever. But I was just like I don't like that. I've dealt with that on TikTok before. People just acting like oh, what people reported to I used to run socks and all this other stuff. I'm like so what's that have to do with anything that I'm saying? How's that negate when I'm saying to like, like, stop like you come off as a corn ball.
That's what happens when you're in social. Trust me, I learned. I learned my lesson. Yeah, we're gonna talk about it.
You're gonna talk about it, so initially you would say your journey from. So what was your like? Actual title again in finance, In finance.
I was. I think it was FAA3. So that's a final financial analyst three so. But I worked in FREC, right. So I worked in Fidelity Real Estate Corporation. It was like a side company, fidelity so I managed real estate portfolios across the US.
So you would say you went from financial analysts to software engineering about what? Like 15 months. So cause I know you said four months with a bootcamp in like a year for the apprenticeship.
Yeah, but I was doing it before that, like I had joined a bootcamp. Pride to that as well.
Oh, so you did a. Okay, so Prenti was an. What's the second thing you did?
Prenti was the second thing I did and I just happened. It gave you the job. I really, personally, I didn't need to go to the bootcamp cause I was kind of doing it on the side. Anyway, I was quoting on the side. I went to a bootcamp previously, like was Jay-, so which one you went to? I did both.
I did both. No, no which bootcamp.
I went to a bootcamp. I went to a bootcamp in Boston called co-squadorg Okay, Called co-squad. So I did that. So I kind of did that and then I was self teaching myself the whole time. So when I got into a Prenti it was like, okay, it was cause Prenti was mainly for people, fresh, no coding experience. I just happened to have the coding experience. So when I did go to the bootcamp I kind of like went through the bootcamp just for the heck of it. But I had kind of already knew my stuff. So that would maybe like kind of like talk of my class at the point that I did it already. I've been doing it for like that point maybe a year by myself and I was like basically self taught at that point. But it just reinforced some of the concepts. So that's why.
Okay, cool. Now. I was just saying, like you just got on YouTube university one day and say oh cool, I'm gonna do these projects and I'm gonna that's what it takes.
Like, I remember going on Craigslist, I got a Mac book, a desktop Mac, and I just started doing HTML, basically HTML CSS, just that, just HTML CSS. Doing basic form, having a title on the screen, doing a heart reload, practicing with the form fields and, you know, doing basic stuff. Like the first thing I did was ugly it was turning to feel red or something like that, so that's all. I didn't even get into JavaScript until later. I was just like, okay, this is cool. I didn't tell my girlfriend like, look what I did, look what this, this form field I built. You know what I'm saying? It was simple looking back onto it, but that's how I started, and from there I just obviously progressed.
I kept. I kept at it and for me, like I always say, I'm equivalent to like Goku from anime, like from Dragon Ball. I always want to improve. So like doing that wasn't enough for me. You know, all you have to do is just start yelling yeah, power enough, but yeah, that's basically what I was doing, though. But in the tech field, I was like, okay, this is nice, but I always want to get better. Obviously, I was seeing, you know well, people were doing online. I was seeing these crazy stories about oh, I learned the code, now I got a yacht. Now, like you know, something like that. I need to get in that level right now so that that will push me to keep on doing it Even on the weekends. You know, it helped that I was broke at this time Cause I was like house, I was house poor for my condo. So you know, staying in the house and in this code and research the phone line.
So did you? Do you see the meme sometimes like like you're a programmer now you, you program Hello World and they say about you program.
Yup, that was me, that was legit me. I was like where I can see it on the screen, that's, that's what's up.
Yeah, I'm at a little calculator, okay, cool.
So, I want to switch it into this, this thing, real quick. So now you are a, you are senior, I'm an SC three and I don't want you to say where. And I don't want you to say where only because to protect you, yeah, and so I don't waste my money, I have to take this down or something, cause that's happened to me in the past. People have said where they work and then someone like you said this wheel like you got to take it down. Yeah, even though technically I don't have to, cause I don't work for them. I don't want nothing to happen to you at work just cause I don't want to take something down.
So yeah, so let's say, let's say at mid level, depending on the company, yeah, Cause that's a.
That's funny enough that you said that that might be a topic or a solo episode one day. My friends and I, we all talking was like how you could be senior in one place but that's not senior somewhere else. Or like you may be principal somewhere but that's not staff somewhere else.
Exactly. So the levels get kind of kind of wonky. You can go to a company or company, so let's say at mid level.
Mm-hmm, but I mean, your title is senior though.
No, it's SE3.
Oh, okay, got it, got it. But I mean, I want you to talk about kind of what you do now. I guess, okay, let's briefly talk about, let's go back, let's talk about the company that y'all started, and then I guess that should lead to what you do now, right? Yeah, whenever you move to Dallas.
Yeah. So I moved to Dallas because I was laid off at the previous company I worked at. So I kind of always wanted to go to Texas but I was like this is the perfect time. I'm fund employed. You know what I'm saying. What's that term mean? Fund employed? Basically, I'm having fun because, if you notice, the broken people had the most fun.
So they did get you. I did have a lot of fun when I was laid off.
Exactly right. So I was like yeah.
Shouldn't have been having fun. Shouldn't have been in the house doing Uber or something.
Yeah, trust me. I see people. They may not be fund employed, but they're like, they're broke and they live the best life. They travel into Dubai right now. So they scamming.
I was like, okay, I'm a fund employee right now. You know, this is a perfect time for me to kind of like do what I want to do. I'm not kind of bounded by the golden handcuffs that I had and I always wanted to go to Houston. A lot of my friends lived in Houston at the time. I visited plenty of times out in good time. But then I was like, okay, I want to get a job, I want to be in tech Houston's. Maybe, you know, I had a girlfriend. So I'm like, maybe this is not the right place for us to be at the time. So then we decided to go to Austin. So Austin's a tech hub, right. Atlanta, right. I visited it the year before in 2019 for Fourth of July, had a blast. I'm like, okay, I can live here. Boom, we pack up, rent out my condo and then we drive, take the 30 hour drive down to Austin into our apartment, unseen, right. So we start doing that and I'm starting to apply. Boom, boom, boom Now. At first, you know I'm applying.
Then the application process was crazy Cause, you know, I was getting rejections on a regular basis. It was really, you know, at first I was like, whatever, I'm getting unemployment. I got the STEMI check. I'm actually getting paid more money than I did when I was working. So I wasn't stressing, I was going on the lake every day, I was living life. But towards the end of the six months I was like, okay, I haven't got a job yet. What's going on? I'm supposed to be in a tech hub. You know I work for a reputable company. My resume I got one year of experience at least. Like you know, I'm good to talk to, I can speak, I can sell myself an interview. What the hell's going on here?
And then at that point, one of my product managers from the last company I worked for you know we even called the purple company I worked he reached out to me and said, hey, I got a new venture with this startup that me and the other guy are trying to do right now. We would love to have you kind of help us, you know, build the V1 of the app. And I was like, perfect, cause, this is a way for me to kind of like fill in that gap that would be in my resume. I'm actually doing the actual development work and it helped me, cause at the time I only had a year, one year experience and you know working with a guy that I enjoy working with. You know another black guy who does excellent work, calvin. So I was like perfect, met the other co-founder, martell, and then we got to work. So we got to work. We built the V1.
How much they paid you Cause I know you had to get paid no money.
So it was like all back in, all back in and equity. So I didn't get paid anything. I was just doing this off the strength of, you know, believing in the vision and the company. Obviously I had the equity. And then eventually I built that up and then eventually, you know, we had a CTO at the time but then he had another venture, so then he kind of went to do that full time and then I kind of got, like you know, moved up to to acting CTO and where I was like managing operations and at that time we had, you know, obviously secures some funding.
We actually got into a program called Techstars which was at the number two accelerator in the country, so we got some additional funds and then we were able to kind of hire a team, get an offshore development team of about six engineers. We had two front end, one Android, one iOS, one web developer and a couple back in guys at PM. All right, so I my day to day became managing those guys. So that's how we got into that. So you was in tech, yeah, so that's what that was. So we by the way, the name of the company is called Soco or what's called Soco and basically we. The aim was to kind of like democratize the referral process. So right now we kind of noticed that the referral process is kind of monopolized. Referrals as into what? Employee referrals like any company.
Right now, I think most companies have an employee referral program where you get like a kickback.
You may get $5,000 that the person's successfully hired and what we found out is that most people get hired by referrals because, yeah, About 70% of jobs like come from like your network, or then sometimes they don't even get posted your network right, so they posted just because they got to, but the person who's supposed to already be there is gonna work there.
Exactly right. So we was like why, why just keep this in companies? Why would we not? That's not open source it basically so anyone could refer someone for a company. So the theory was that companies would post on our platform and that people who were on our platform as well can refer people that they knew for the job. So it's basically an externalized referral program for everybody and the premise was that a software engineer would be a better, would be a better vetter of another software engineer. You notice that a lot of our HR recruiters and I don't want to hate on the recruiters, but sometimes they don't know enough to accurately vet somebody. I think that's most.
I think that's most recruiters. I mean, some of them got the keywords to go through, but I think it's most because you just don't know what you don't know.
Yeah. So I had a recruiter say they didn't know what Swift was and they were recruiting for an Iowa's position. So it's things like that where they're, obviously they're on the sheet and you say you're Spill, you know they give you, you give you elevator pitch and then like okay, I heard Swift, check, I heard there was that X code. Okay, check. And he said variables and properties. Okay, I think he's good, that's what the process is.
So we was like a cybersecurity person is just nose to lingo. You can kind of feel it when someone's talking to you, even if they're saying all the good words. Right, since you're in that field, you kind of can call BS wherever recruiter couldn't call BS. So that was the premise of it. Unfortunately, obviously, you know, startup stuff ended up imploding or we went our separate ways. But that really gave me the experience of not only building a V1 product cause I was knee deep in the code but also the whole development lifecycle.
As far as you know what goes into crafting great software, as far as, like the marketing, what we need, product design, ux, how to all flows to create a great product, and obviously managing too. That's my passion too, managing, you know, especially managing an offshore development team, who's not in a time zone, who had different cultural differences. So I learned a lot about that as well, and it was a beautiful experience. Like I love my co-founders. We were four brothers, four black brothers doing great stuff, so it was a good experience and that, the thing, that's what actually helped me get my current job oh, not my current job. I had a job before that my current job, but that was part of the reason why I got my job. So at one point I was doing both. So I was doing so-called part-time and I had a full-time. I was development job with another company. Okay, that's cool.
And as you were talking, I was like man, I wonder if he know that I actually did an episode with a venture capitalist, a black venture capitalist as well, nice. So actually we got to do a part two because our video wasn't working that good in that remote episode. But it's a cool dude, but so what are you? So now all your roles have just been strictly software engineering.
Software engineering, strictly iOS development in particular. So that's your niche, yes.
Can you develop for?
Android. No, I can't, I can't. I could probably learn it. I've been like actually my day job now. I create tests in Kotlin, but I would not say I'm a Kotlin developer by any means.
What's that?
Kotlin is the language to develop for Android.
Okay, Listen, I don't know and I'm trying to educate, like you know, because it may be somebody out there that's watching and saying I want to be in software engineering and I don't know much about it. So it's you. And then I got another friend who used to work at Amazon from Do Something for Engineering, where I think he broke in to Fang like from a bootcamp too.
So like four years ago, so he's he's been again for a while now.
Yeah, well, he'll be. Eventually he's in Austin now. He moved. Well, he had to move to Seattle and then he moved back down to Austin. We're both from a street port, so that's what makes it pretty cool.
Oh, he's in now we hit the boys okay.
Yeah. But so I want to ask you this if somebody wants to be a software engineer, what's you kind of give them like a high level roadmap, right? Hmm, because my generic advice can still work for everybody, but I'm not a software engineer and I know what I tell people that come for me, come to me that want to know about software engineering, come like, well, I would do this, this and this. I was like see in this part right here, go talk to a software engineer.
Yeah, so what I would say, if you want to become a software engineer I definitely think it's so broad. It's so broad. First I would say, figure out what you want to niche in, right. So I'm a software engineer. That's a wide umbrella, right. The thing you have to dig down a little bit deeper on what you want to do. Do you want to do web, Do you want to do mobile and then, or do you want to like back in right? So that's like the three, kind of like other sub umbrellas under the software engineer umbrella, right?
I've always heard the term back in what is back in what's front in.
Front is what the user see and back in what the user doesn't see.
But that has all the business. Okay, so out of code and stuff is in the back in, but the front end, no, no, the data, the code's on the front end as well.
Okay, the back end usually holds all the data. So when you sign up for something, your name, all that data, that's what the back end holds.
Okay, so you're more so working with the databases and connecting all that stuff.
Yeah, like that stuff. So, but once you figure out the sub umbrellas you want to get into, then usually you have to say do you want to do front end, like if you're in web, you want to do front end. You want to do back end, if you're wanting to do mobile? That figure out. Do you want to do cross platform development, like you can do, like something like a Flutter, which you can develop in Flutter and then have it both, have your app on both platforms at the same time, or you want to go native? Do you want to develop specifically for mobile? I mean Android or iOS. So these are decisions that you have to make before you even dig down any deeper, right? So? But once you do that, then you have to decide okay, what are you comfortable with? Right, cause you got all of these things.
Take learning a language right, and everyone says, like you learn one language and it'll be easier to kind of learn other languages, which is very true. It's very true. My first language I learned was JavaScript, and I think that's what made it a little bit easier for me to learn Swift, because I already had the basics down. I knew about variables, I know about objects, I know about inheritance, so those are kind of the basis that translate regardless. And you also got to figure out what do you want to do as far as like, what do you want to build? A lot of people say they want to be engineers, but I always ask you, what do you want to build? And that usually will tell you a path to go down. Like, you want to build a web app and you want to be a web guy right, probably full stack. If you want to build mobile apps, then that's you want to.
Now the decision is, like you want to do iOS or Android? And then, once you get into that, you got to really figure out. You got to have the language syntax, you got to learn the language. That's going to be the first thing. So learn the language and dive deep and, like, immerse yourself in that ecosystem. So, for example, I'm an iOS developer, so I'm in tune with you. See, you got an Apple watch. On Apple watch, you know, I mean I had to be in tune with what's going on with Apple. So I, you know, I attend WWDC, which is World Wide Developer Conference.
He has the vision pros in his trunk. I wish I'm broke. I can't afford that I wish. I have interesting opinions on that as well. But I would just say you know, obviously, pick your niche. You want to go into, learn the syntax and then build. You have to build and that's what we're going to get into a little bit later. About how I feel about tech, I really put a high emphasis on builders and people who create in the space and I feel like that as a software engineer. That's another thing that actually attracted me to software engineering, because our work is already tangible. So we get a lot of, we get instant feedback, because when you're a software engineer, it's a verb almost You're doing something, you're building, you're creating. So when someone says they're a software engineer and they're not building, it's like almost like a oxymoron, how you a software engineer but you're not building anything.
So I would say Can you be one? And then you're not building anything.
No, I don't think so.
And so a couple of questions too, because you said something that I thought about, because I haven't taken a freaking database class or something a while, but I think I kind of might have understood, and what you went by inheritance Is that like something to Herodian properties or something to South Dakota?
It's basically about not in the code, it's how should I say this? It's more about classes. So you have objects, right, so you have objects. So let's say, let me put it in terms of a dog. Right, a dog is a generic thing, right? Right, there's plenty of dogs, right? But you can have a dog object, and every dog has four legs, every dog usually barks and they have fur. Those are the three objects in that, the three properties in the object. Right Now, when it comes to inheritance, you can have a different type of dog. So let's say we have a Chihuahua, the Taco Bell dog, right, that Taco Bell dog or the Chihuahua object will inherit from the dog object, because we know a Chihuahua has fur, has fur legs and barks A tail two years. So it's gonna inherit from the generic dog object. But then, at the same time, a Chihuahua can have certain special properties that only apply to the Chihuahua itself. That's more about inheritance, right?
Now that's a good analogy. That's kind of along the lines of what I was thinking, but I definitely want to be able to explain it. But I just knew I was like in here it's getting something from somewhere, but I forgot where it's coming from, so that's dope.
Then you said I believe you said full stack. I don't know if the audience knows where full stack is, because I think one of the boot camps out there is called full stack academy or something yeah, I think there is Full stack is basically doing the back and then the front end right.
So the back end obviously is the data logic, usually the data and the business logic and storage, whereas the front end is basically the user, what the user sees. So basically, like I said, ui, the UI logic and basically the user interface how that looks right. And being an iOS developer is heavy on front end because obviously you got to build the user interfaces right. So it's heavy front end and mainly what we do is we consume back end, so we get the data from a server, a server, a cloud, and then we just, when we get it, we just mutate it and we mutate it and transform it into a form that the user would like to see, like the UI component. So when we make a call, you want to see your timeline right, so the UI having your icon in the circle with the border around it and the text be bold and the subtext be gray. That's the kind of work we're doing when we're making a call for the service to kind of get that right?
Yeah, because I was going to ask. I was like you guys work a lot with the UI UX team.
Yeah, yeah, in my day job, yeah, we do a lot, so we talk to them, especially when it comes to any new features that we're doing and it requires a new type of component, so that we have, obviously, designers who design everything, but then you also have a development team that specializes in creating those components as well. Got it Might?
have to bring justice up here for a UI, ux, software engineering type of a role. So all right, man, real quick, high level. What's your day in the life of being an Iowa's engineer? Are you able to go get your coffee and walk the dog and stuff?
I actually have a beautiful schedule actually, because my company is based on Pacific, so I'm two hours ahead of them, right, and I have a son so I'm always up early. So I'm up at least seven o'clock this time, cst, while my team is like five o'clock Sleep. So usually my day in life is I get up, make him breakfast, change his diaper, get him dressed and then take him to our babysitters, aka his grandparents, and then I'm back probably by 8 30. So 8 30 is 6 30 at the time, so this party still sleep. Then I make myself breakfast and then I'm probably at the computer about 8 45, 9 o'clock and then I don't.
I sign on but I don't say that I'm on Slack, so like my diet is still clear from there. I have a catch up on emails, which I'll just see what happened, see what my meetings are for today, and then I go in the Jura Boy and see what my tickets are and I just start trucking on whatever ticket I have at the same time. But I like my schedule because it gives me that free time unbothered, excuse me. It gives me that free time unbothered to kind of do heads down work without anyone slacking me, pinging me or emailing me. So I get like, at least, I'll say, an hour, hour and a half of that kind of free time that some of my coworkers don't get, because when they get on usually everyone else is on, so that's the end of life. Then I'm coding. Most of the time it's. I get a lot of heads down work time, but obviously there's meetings as well. This there's. Obviously we have stand up.
You got the daily stand up to the scrum meetings, so we have a way we do it is.
We have stand ups.
Not every day, it should be honestly, should be really no more than two a week maybe to me, in my opinion, unless it's like some of this and very important that you got to know about it every day.
Yeah, so we kind of have that kind of system because we have a zoom stand up Right, so we're a distributed team, so we have the zoom stand up two times a week. So we have it on Monday and Wednesday, we have the young camera and say your update, and then we have any impediments, any walkers Right, if you have walkers, man, I hate the words, that's how you say.
hey, the photo for the listeners and I watch you watching this right now. Let us know you're in corporate without saying you're in corporate.
Yeah, ok, rskp eyes, you know, you know the corporate angle. But so we have that. And then we have two slack stand ups. We just write what you're, what you're doing on the slack. So that's on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Fridays we don't have it. So that's pretty much what we do, which is, you know, this is like 10 minutes. If that 10, 15 minutes on the zoom stand up and obviously the slack stand, you just write what you write and then, once you do that, then we might have some meetings.
Obviously we do the scrum ceremony, so we do a retro at the end of our two week's experience. So I'm due to stand up, we do, and then after that, just meetings, depending on what product you're on, you might have, you know, you have my, you have my, have sync meetings with the PM to kind of line on the feature In case there's any updates or anything like that. And then you might have, you know, the co-workers just want to sync up, maybe they need some help. We do all. Obviously we have an automated testing suite that's on every, every sprint. So I'm dedicated to doing the automated regression testing. So we have like stuff like that. But I'll say that's the day in the life. But so it's a combination of you know going to meetings, keeping you know the stakeholders, the PM, up to date with your progress, obviously via stand up and via those sync meetings with the PM, the product owners and stuff like that. But yeah, I'll say Okay. And then this is the last question directly about work.
So what is like a ballpark range of, like you know, your your total comp, a ballpark range of my total current?
now One. Let me see 175. You think it's 175 is all in All in TC? Okay.
That's not bad going with. Only what? Year for Year for yeah, year for yeah, yeah For ish, yeah, and so, like is your, um, I don't know if it's like either you got. Either you got stock or you got um bonuses or something like that. Um, well, no, if it's like either you got, you got stock or you got bonuses on the circulation of base, um stock, um RSUs and and bonus.
Yeah, so technically that can kind of change from year to year based on how well the stock performs and in the bonuses like sometimes it can get paid out of different rates too, so depending on how good the company does.
Yeah, so that's definitely a factor as well.
So, yeah, All right, man. So the moment everybody's been waiting for this, let's. Let's get into some of the fun stuff. He said let me go to my book mart. Y'all I know y'all been waiting for it. Let's see where it is. Oh man, okay. So on January 10th 2024, mr Clyde Friedman the third said the leaders of black tech, twitter, are people who can't code. That's the problem with the space. When the majority of your leaders are tech adjacent and influencers, that's when you know you messed up in the game.
Oh, that's fine.
Hey look, we didn't even know each other at this time, but right on his comment you see me saying hey, come elaborate this on the pot with me. You can get it off your chest there, cause I think a lot of things people have assumed with this tweet. So that thing got like 10 K looks. That's crazy.
Yeah yeah, it went viral and it went viral and I didn't I didn't really expect it to. I was just going by my day, you know, tweeting how I normally tweet. This wasn't a special tweet to get engagement. This is what Clyde tweets on a normal day basis. Somehow it got picked up and in the algorithm this went off with it. Yeah, man.
So let's talk about it. What, like, what made I guess, like what prompted you, I guess, to to say that, or what are you seeing on your timelines that's maybe others aren't seeing?
and they felt also a way about yeah, so, you know, I and I've been seeing this for a while, so it wasn't like okay, that day I saw something that triggered me and something that I've been seeing for a while now, ever since I, you know, got in the space. And and when I say the space, I don't mean, you know, the, the, the tech space, I really mean the um, this, this space around Twitter, this black technical space around Twitter. I noticed that a lot of people really are like selling courses, they're, they're really promoting lifestyle content and they're in tech, right, they're, they're in tech. And I realized that a lot of these people, a lot of the major voices that I that I would see in my timeline your timeline may differ, but a lot of them weren't technical right. So I always say like, I found that the space was the most, not the most non-technical tech space I've seen in a while. And I mean me and a couple of friends, we, we, we discussed this you know this on the phone, um, behind the scenes, but then I saw a tweet and you know where everything was going on with, with the layoffs and anything like that, and and this, this me seeing these people just talk about tech, and I'm like you don't know what you're talking about because you're just an influencer. You don't only have that in the field experience. You're. You're not building, and that's fine.
Like I said before, I you know, I managed a company, I was a CTO. I know how the different parts need to come together to craft software, so that's fine. But I just felt that there was a misbalance as far as the people giving the message and exactly what. The message was right. So the space is skewed and I see it in my um, my personal life, a lot of time. When I go to these mixers, I I'm like the only engineer there If I'm not the only one there, it's usually one or two of us but everyone's like a recruiter or everyone's like a, a PM or a business analyst, like engine. If you're an engineer, you're the minority in the room. So I kind of noticed this and I'm like why is this the case? You know what I'm saying. So that's kind of what spurred that tweet. So what spurred that tweet is really not to denigrate, you know, people who aren't engineers, that's. I think that's what people kind of took from it. But what I think I really really trying to call it to I want more people in the space that are technical, and I think that goes into a way deeper than that tweet. I think it comes to upbringing. I think it comes to making tech sexy again. I think that's really really comes on making tech sexy again, um, and making it more accessible. I think that's the main thing. So, making it sexy and accessible. I think that would change the perception of people who want to get in the tech.
And another this in adult, from my personal life, people all the time come into me and say, hey, clyde, you know, they see, you know I'm doing well, you know I got the house, I got the. You know, they see the Tesla I'm going to get like you, bro. And I told them what I do. They're like oh word. And then, no, no, I might want. I said, tell them what they do. They're like, oh, you're an engineer man, that's, that's cool man.
I wish I could do that, but you know that's too much for me and in my head I'm like why do you think that you can't do it? Like I'm no tech savant, I'm no rock star code. I think I'm pretty mediocre, to be honest with you. But, um, I think that if I can do it, anyone can do it. And I'm not just saying that, like people who know me will tell you like, uh, no, like if I can do it, anyone can do it. And I feel like people think that they come into the game saying like I don't want to do engineering, so what they do is they say let me try to get into tech the most non-technical way I can. That's what I noticed. So they'll try to get in doing anything but technical stuff, and I think that needs to change.
So it's like a lot to unpack there, right? I think? Number one what's happened over the last four years is people have been conflating the tech industry with like tech jobs, because you could be in tech in a different industry because your job is, in fact, technical. So that's one thing. I think it also depends as well as, like I said, I think what people consider to be non-technical is subjective Cause, like my last episode with Terry, I would consider Terry a very much so technical, non-technical person. Like she probably is not the person doing the implementations, but she's very skilled at what it takes to do infrastructure projects in a tech space. Because she did it so long, she started rambling off different things. I said I know she knows her job, that's why she's a technical project manager. So I think it's different things.
I think some people did get offended because maybe some people have just built their hopes on about, oh, I'm in tech type stuff. I do know so and I'm with you. So there are two things. There are people who've been in for a while who they probably are doing their lifestyle thing. However, they have a track record of before that blew up, of showing, hey, I did this for X-Botter years, that's what I started, as there are. Those then are the people that just came and they are. They've just been deemed a leader because they got popular fast and they show the stuff that they have, which is not a hating thing, like I don't care about what nobody got About what nobody got going on, cause at the end of the day, I'm always do what I do, no matter what.
But I think, like when you say technical, you know it are different things, right, because like outside of you know a software engineer, you got security engineers who they do their technical part on there, Like I'm not a engineer right now they have something like in a blue team called detection engineering where you can pretty much work on detections, and that's something I'm going towards, just because it's just a better, another skill set to add to the utility belt. But even in my roles there are certain things you have to be very skilled at to understand what the problem like especially if you're dealing with something like incident response, like so I think is. I think a lot of people just felt the way about oh you not building nothing, you ain't bothered to build her, so you're not in tech, so you don't, I think. I think I don't say some people might have been insecure about it, but I think some people took a slide at you, saying they're not building in the gamers messed up and feeling like you know, hey, no, my contributions matter Cause, like at the end of the day, people want to feel like they are providing value, they're doing something.
So even the non-technical program managers and all those other people. They want to feel like, hey, now, how are you to tell me that what I'm doing is not important? Who are you to tell the left guard on the football team that I didn't help have my home stay upright to throw the touchdown?
Yeah.
Understandable and totally understandable, and that's why I'm here to clear it out, right. So when I say technical, you know that's a, that's a, that software engineering isn't the end, all the offer. What's technical? Yeah, I just want to get that in the air right now. What I admit by technical is, like I consider anyone that has to have the specific technical knowledge on something technical right so that's the, the, the cloud engineers of cyber security, that I even include UX designers in that. Yeah, I always say that if I was an engineer, I'll be a UX designer, the UI UX designer, and it goes. This other one's off the top of my head. I can't quite rate rate thing about right now. Um, but yeah, I agree with you.
I think some people took offense because they took the tweet as okay, you don't code, you don't build, you ain't shit Basically, and that is not when I'm coming at, I'm coming at balance, right. So everything I say is balance, right. Yeah, I just said it's skewed, that's for, like, most of the people who have the biggest voices in the space aren't technical, and when I say aren't technical, I mean the ones who have never been technical. Now, like people who did. Like, let's say right now, let's say, if I stop coding right now and became a PM or something like that, I'm not talking about people like that. I'm talking about people who've never done anything in coding at all, don't want to necessarily and don't have it, don't have a passion for so. When they so, their perspective is valid, don't get me wrong but they're perspective. Their perspective is kind of skewed because they've never been in the field. You know what I'm saying.
Like to bring up an analogy, I would say it's like being a football team, like you mentioned before. Right, there's a lot of things that go to being a great football team. You have the players, the coaching staff you know. Then, beyond the coaching staff, you have ownership. You have the franchise people managing the franchise. You have the people on the sideline. You have the water boys right, they can all say they're part of that football team. Yeah, right, but you also have to acknowledge the differences in the role players on that football team. That's all I was saying. Like you wouldn't say that you know the football player if you had a discourse about football and then most of the people who are talking about football are like coaches and the coaching staff and the people who managed the players, and there's like one football player that you like. You need some balance here because he's actually in the field. He kind of his perspective is kind of important because he's actually doing the work.
Yeah, but I think it's different though, because we just saw the game just come down. The coaching the coaches is supposed to set you up to put you in good positions to see. So, like some of your non-technical parts that have to direct influence on whether resources or different things you need to make your apps or build stuff, they're set up to help you succeed. So it's just one of those things. Like everything kind of like that circle of life, like it has to, how everything moves will depend on how functional the other things go. Now sometimes I think we've seen in bad coaching where, hey, the person on the field is saying, hey, I see this. Why are you keep on trying to tell me this? And they run it covered too, and they are literally blanking in this golf here. Stop trying to tell me do this route. If I check into this post, it's going to be wide open. Stop telling me that I know what I'm seeing, so we got that option too, so I get what you're saying too. I think it just goes on both hands of.
But my thing is different too, because this is I bring it down to this Could you have football? Can you still play football without the coaches? Yes. Could you play football without the players? No. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day.
I think that's a good one, but I guess, in regards to what you mean, like play football without the coaches, if you play in the Super Bowl right now, right In the coaches drop dead with the game still going.
Yes, the reverse, it wouldn't go down.
But who gave the players the plays?
The coach is a player, but the quarterback can do it too. The bronze, the bronze. The player comes.
Yeah, but I see, if we're going to go on that straw man argument, then we got to say who's the person that started all the plays, just from the root of everything. So it's like how you can do that though, no, but I'm saying how today? No, because that's the thing too. Sometimes the players aren't making good decisions Because some of the coaches aren't. Let's just all right, bet you said you would have got that route. Let's talk about people playing football in the hood. Everybody too. Everybody running nines, like that's what it's going to turn into.
I disagree with that because I think, at this point, I think that the breakdown like, for example, like in my company, right, we don't have certain roles anymore because we've realized that the engineer can do those roles. For example, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about that last part. We have no scrum master. We're going to talk about that last part, because we can do that. We don't have any dedicated QA because we do the QA ourselves, right. And I think what people are fearful is that companies are getting leaner now and that they're realizing that, hey, some of these jobs are kind of fluff, where engineering can just do those jobs. Yes, it's a little more time on their plate, but the engineer can do these jobs as well. So that's what I think is the case, like, especially with someone like me. I could do the UX too, I could do UX design too, I could do the scrum. I can do all those jobs. I'm just an engineer. And I feel like that's what we're seeing with the layouts they're becoming lean and then, when companies come lean, what's the first to get chopped off, exactly. So that's what I'm saying and I'm not degrading that, I'm just saying that's what it is Like and this gets into the concept of flat techness I don't think anything's to be flat techness.
Yes, you're in tech. I'm not discriminating that. You're in tech. Yes, but it's a difference between being a technical worker and working in tech. Anywhere I go, anywhere you go, you're still going to be a tech worker. You can work for a farming company, you can work for a ballet production You're still going to be a technical worker because the nature of your job is ingrained in it. If I'm a salesperson, how I work for farming, I'm in farming, I do sales for farming. I'm not a technical worker. If you do sales for Google, because what I've noticed is that, because of this idea of flat techness, that the janitor now works at the Google building can say he works in tech. Now People at Best Buy are telling you they sell the TV, they work in tech. I think they have a better case of saying they work in tech than the janitor does.
But I feel like that's the point that we're coming to right now. I feel like that erases the unique journey and struggles that people who are more technical have to go through. There's a reason why salaries are different for people who are more technical because it's a higher learning curve. I feel like flat techness erases that. You're just the same as me. You didn't have to learn these data structures. You didn't have to learn these algorithms. You didn't have to learn to set up a server or database. It's different. There's levels to it. That's all I'm saying. There's levels.
You know what's funny? I'm going through some of your quotes of this. That's why I've been looking down. The people I've been looking down is like how is this gatekeeping? Do people actually know what gatekeeping means? Because gatekeeping means you're trying to prevent people from doing something. People use words so wrongly. He's not gatekeeping at all. He's not withholding information from you. He's not purposely not letting you get into the field, like they were doing some of us years ago when we first were trying to get in. That's not what he's doing. I've really been trying to find the quote where you and that person went back and forth and I guess why that they felt they wanted to get you fired. That's what I'm really trying to find.
Yeah, this will give some background on that. Do you have this whole Twitter fiasco or ex fiasco? I'm trying to get me fired from a job. This is a person that proposes to be for black tech and for the unity of black tech, but yet they try to get a black mayor fired from his job so that he couldn't feed his family anymore off of tweets. That maybe a disagreement among ideas, but definitely nothing that deep for you to one.
Look me up to find me on LinkedIn. I'm assuming she found me on LinkedIn. Find my job, find out the number to even report me on a job. I don't know how to even find that number. So you're doing some research to find this number and to report me and the only thing I could think about is like, obviously she's, this person's a coward. She's a coward because she blocked me One. We were a phone show from the beginning, but when I found out I'm on block two. So you're going to do some coward move, report me and then hide, trying to hide behind blocking me. It was pure cowardice and really just shows how people really aren't what they purport to be. Excuse me, and I really like that's not my first like really experience of someone that took it to heart like that. Yeah, yeah.
I had this course because they could have. The thing is, she could have just blocked you from the jump.
Blocked you from the jump and kept it. Kept it funky, but the thing is, this person was like. This person has no life.
Am I going to get a crush on?
you, yeah, that they got no life. I think?
I think this person has no life. What if that's not even the person? What if that's like a fake page and they're saying that what they impersonating the person they say they are?
It could be. It could be, but I think it's a real person that had no life. Clearly they got no man because they have enough time to do that. Clearly you ain't getting what you need.
So I'm looking at like some of your old tweets, like kind of like the journey he was talking about. So I have a bookmark, like in 10, 11, 12, he was saying breaking into tech right now super hard, the climate just getting harsher and harsher. Then he was talking about you just released your first app to the app store, put the lot, put in a lot of work, and then you're telling the title senior hours engineer. Oh yeah, a previous company, yeah. And then you're talking about you had an interview for the hours engineer job. Am I ready for this role? Who knows? But I ain't going to tell myself, no, that's their job If I'm just trying to climb. But this is another funny one that people got. Well, it was, I thought it was this one. But you say we're down to point where anybody can sell you a pair of AA batteries and claim they work in tech.
Yeah, that goes back to my flat tech. So I feel like you know, like no one and I and Mina, another person on X, was going back and forth with this as well is that no one else has the same issue? No one plays these games in medicine, right? No one plays these games in laws. Everyone knows the difference between medical professionals who like a nurse, nurse practitioner, doctor, versus the people who work at the front desk or people who like Is it different?
Oh, so I think you're saying I get what you're saying, though I do understand. It's like some might be like yo, I'm in medicine, but all you do is give me my. What's the thing called when you go to work and catch. You need it, or are you at the school? Was it anything? No, if you went to school, you had to have this thing to get to the office, so they can like say, hey, your absence is excused.
The note for the past.
I know you're talking about the official call, like you said my appointments up and you give me the doctors notes, doctors, excuses, and you said you're in medicine. No, you're not.
Exactly, You're in administrative work. Maybe that's like to a lesser extent, but that's kind of like the same vein that I think. This situation is, Like you said before. I think that people, people want to feel like they're contributing, which they are. They're contributing. I'm going to record right now they're contributing, but there's still a difference. Right, we can acknowledge the differences between the roles and tech and not degrading there's a difference, right? No one says, oh, the doctor is the same as the doctor who's doing your surgery is the same as the person at the front desk. We know they're different, right, and that's okay.
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, but I think now that he's just purposely do not want to take what you say like any mirror is like. I hear troll and I was like I see y'all can't tell this man trolling. Y'all know he being funny. He's talking about the double A batteries.
But I can find out a I couldn't find like out of so because like it blew up, like I seen I just looked at AP's part. She was just I think y'all actually had a little decent discourse about it and so at least some people was like y'all actually had conversations about it and the other thing I was really to say, man, put your head back down. No social awareness, but it's just like I know he's like bro, I'll be posted out of town when y'all came from.
Exactly, and I think that also it was weird too, because it was almost like a and you know they were talking.
They were talking about that tweet like the whole week, bro.
they were talking about a two for like a couple weeks, like I'll say two weeks here talking about that, Because my boys was like they're still talking about it. Because I said I said I said the word took adjacent right, so the word took adjacent. At first, the way they were acting, I thought I made the word up. I was about to make some shirts and put this on some shirts and sell it. That went online. I'm like this is this.
I didn't I didn't invent this word, this word. Maybe you should change the display name and not take adjacent.
Maybe I should, because the tech tech addition has been a word and it's not a derogatory term. It's a term that relates to what we described early in the show, like people who are in tech but maybe not necessarily technical workers, right? People who are close to the technical workers and that support the technical workers, right? So it's not an offensive term. So I'm like why are people acting like that's the boogeyman word, right? And why are people so hard up and trying to discredit me? They was going through like, oh, he's only been doing this for four years. He was unemployed for six months, even though I was working with Soko for those six months. But trying anything? Saying that my tweets were misogynistic, that came out the blue? I haven't, I've gotten it before. Yeah, like I haven't got it. And then the people that come at me. I'm like please point me to the misogynistic tweet Crickets, because they couldn't find it.
I'm like, point me to these two. Most of them people couldn't even tell you what misogynistic means.
Yeah, I'm like. And then it was so crazy that I was like okay, I'm just waiting for someone to say this is racist. I mean it was going to be misogynistic. Then somehow the blue was going to be like yeah, this is a racist tweet. And I'm like, I'm surprised I didn't get that, but I was surprised that was next in the line though.
Yeah, I'm just looking at something but like this is funny. I'd be laughing at some guys like yes, I got some content to talk about, because there's always some interesting, funny stuff like in here.
I think that's what it really came down to. I think the space needed a villain of the week and that just happened to match it. I was just having to be in the right place at the wrong time and it was like let me hop on this for a content engagement, because people were tweeting about it. Didn't at me, at least at me, I want some engagement too, but they would do that a lot of the time. And what I noticed is that people were harping on it day and day and night, because a lot of the people that's what they do. They profit off the drama. I'm like y'all guys are still talking about this. I'm trying to talk about some anime, what happened latest in Dragon Ball Super, and people are still at me talking about Tech Adjacent. And then, luckily, one of my boys. I haven't met a dude in person. The thing is that name is like a mega, something right, but he was really a soldier for me. Shout out to that brother Because he was really helping me and going back Because I was getting sworn.
Man, the minions I call them minions. The minions are coming for my neck and I'm like I'll be. Who are the minions? The minions are the people who. I think in the Black Tech Twitter space. I think there's a hierarchy, at least what I've seen, black Tech Twitter. There's a hierarchy right, and there's a certain bunch of followers that people are lackies to right. I call them people the minions. And the minions can be women, it can be dudes, it's not a gender thing, it's just that they adhere to that group thing and then anyone who goes against that group thing is enemy and they just swarm. So that's what I was the enemy. So they swarmed on me and that's pretty much what it was.
And he was backing me down and stuff like that happens. I'm like, if that happens to me that day, I get sworn. I'm going to post when Bane told Batman you adopted the dark. I was born in it.
Exactly, and I think a lot of the time is too. I'm like. It was almost like a kind of like a feeling that they wanted me to To bow down. I had to bow down to the hierarchy Like yo, she's testing the wrong. You know who you're talking to. Like, even when I responded to somebody, they was like do you know one person? Like do you know who you're talking to? I'm like the royalty.
I think I know who that person was. I think y'all's conversation did go a little sideways, Cause I don't think I don't think they had to understand what you were saying at first and they was like dang, he disrespected so and so and all this other stuff. But I would say too, you might have just been replying real fast and not knowing who people was.
To be honest, but the thing is, I didn't see any disrepair. I said who was this royalty?
I don't personally. Well, no, not that I don't remember. I know, in this specific instance of who they may be talking about. I just can't find I don't know their exact names or go back and see like what y'all was talking about, cause I've did it before. They actually probably been saying something good and I responded fast and not when, paying attention to what they said, and they didn't really say something that was ill-intentioned. So that happens a lot on social media.
But the thing with me and what I'm on social media, I don't. There's no hierarchy. I don't care who you are. Like we, can we talk as equals? Like there's no. Oh, this person is personal. I'm going to like, I'm going to say what I'm saying.
Yeah, I don't think they. I don't think they meant like hierarchy. I meant I think they probably meant like hey, do you know what this person does, like what they, what they have come to? It's not in a hierarchy part. It's like, let's say, you was trying to talk basketball and you didn't know the person you was really talking to was Kobe Well, michael Jordan, lebron, anybody right. So you just was talking about basketball. I'm like yo, that's LBJ, right there.
Maybe, maybe, maybe I didn't take it that way, but, like you said, maybe I was talking, talking fast, but I still felt that that aura of like. Do you know you're talking like you? You need to bow down, peasant.
This is a person like no, I don't care about that, because another thing to.
I live in a real life. I live in real life too. I mean, a lot of people live, live life on Twitter. I'm like, if I said you're a person, you wouldn't have that energy. We, we, we know you wouldn't have this energy, like I know. I saw so many people that I know who tweet that are like back at home and I see them to him. Like you, you not like that at all. So not that, god pal. It's funny. I'm like okay, but you exist in Twitter. Outside of Twitter, you are non-existent, okay. So that's what I felt.
Yeah and like, and the piggyback off his conversation. Him and I were talking about this. We were talking about how getting into tech now is pretty much akin to a MLM. They just changed the vehicle. They try to find the easiest way. Well, there are two different things. Like you say, non-technical roles, like like a tech, sales or something like that, are easier to get into because it just is. It doesn't require you to have a lot of tech, technical acumen and you can gain some skills you need quicker than the technical stuff. But when it comes to my realm, first of all, the red flag is like, if you're telling somebody I can get in the cyber, when it's so broad it's hard to just say somebody can get in the cyber. But like I'm going to show you this anytime, you may see a poster or a photo or somebody they got a, got a suit on. It's probably not tailored, but telling you you can get in cybersecurity real fast.
That's a red flag right there. It's baggy.
If they're saying how to, if you can land a job and stop the shooting 45 days with a police figure sadly being remote, tell them the job did. And I'm not gonna say what I wanna say, but I just show him the picture. But, like, this is a harder economy because people who don't have a lot of experience a lot of you do not get the chances to work remote, so nobody can promise you you finna find a remote job. It's got way harder that a lot of people are back in office. Some of you guys who are just starting off actually need to be in office because you're not gonna do that well being remote and you need to go learn to where now you can go somewhere else and improve yourself. But no, it's the MLM game. They'll.
If you're a typical, you think about your typical MLM person they will come up and talk to you. They'll show you a story. If you go to the meetups, somebody's sad and now they're this high earner. Or if they're doing stuff on social media, they're relaxing, they're in a private jet, they're working by the pool Like they may yacht too. So this is some of the stuff they go into. Now, that's not saying that you can't get some of these things. You just can't get them quickly. A lot of people don't say, hey, it took me years to do this and I had to start my own company to do this and do speaking engagements and this and that. A lot of people it's only a certain amount of people to say, hey, I get money, these other ways that affords me this lifestyle, versus the people that don't.
And that's because, hey, they are trying to sell you something and you gotta be honest with yourself too. It's like looking at it compared to what it's asking for isn't gonna be doable. Find the people who went through the program and see if they got real names. That's a big one. Cause this recent guy, it's another, not this dude. There's another dude on one of the bigger platforms who's talking about he can get people in cybersecurity in 45 days.
I went to his website. I was like these people whoever he paid to do these testimonies on lying they don't have last names. You can just tell they're not in cybersecurity Like they're reading the script. You look at what he's offering. I said it just does not add up. It's just too hard to go from knowing nothing. I don't care if you even get into one of the more non-technical spaces of governance, risk and compliance, the steal stuff you gotta know. Yeah, you have to ask yourself, without some intense projects and having to get the gab and just knowing somebody, what is gonna make somebody want to hire you, just cause you spent 45 days doing something.
And I think that speaks to something else in the space as well that I kind of touched on some of my tweets as well. I think a lot of people need to do the due diligence. I think a lot of people will just swap up by an attractive person who says who has to get the gab, possibly you can talk a talk and says a couple of technical words here and there. I think they get swept up by that and they don't want to do the due diligence. A lot of these scams can be debunked if you just go do a simple Google search, just do a 10 minutes of research.
And some of them won't even scan, some of them just really would be more so suited for you if you had some type of experience first Cause it's a different, like that's the reason why, like getting to be in a software engineer or going to cloud computing or something that's a little bit more engineering basis, not easier to do, but the path is a little bit more linear because you know on most of the jobs, cause you're gonna have to know this stuff when you have different jobs. It's not like that. It's a little harder and it's also harder too for certain things to get experience doing.
Yes, that's a huge one. That's a huge one. For example, a lot of the cloud stuff. Like you have certificates programs. Like people will tell you, the certificate programs aren't the beyond end up, but I think they give you at least a baseline, like it's like going to math class, right, if you take a certificate. That way they know you at least know what two plus two equals four is. You might not know that someone more intricate ways to get to that, but at least you know that that's a baseline and I feel like that's what the search give you. A lot of these other ones is the space of like faith. It's based off faith. Like he says it, he talked to talk, but it's like we'll gamble with them.
You know what I'm saying and it's kind of different for, like the more technical roles because you have to have, like you have to either show your work or you have to do a technical assessment, and anyone who's been through those technical assessments can tell you that those are no jokes.
Well, now certain companies do this, like similar to my class of jobs, are coming in at CrowdStrike and I told them, hey, you're gonna have to do the CTF before then and I was like CTF, capture the flag.
Oh, so it's just a set of questions and exercises you're doing Cause that's it. This is a way to protect your acumen of being on a blue team. And he did okay. He came short a little bit and I was like yo, we should have reached out sooner. Cause, like one of the things you got to do at work is like, hey, if you did something after like two, three minutes, you don't know, just ask somebody, it's okay if you don't know. I was like you kind of wasted a lot of time on your own when I could have helped you and maybe you could at least got your interview Still got nailed interview. But that's the thing too, like what some people are doing, like those technical assessments or giving you some real world scenarios.
And now so back when years ago, when I was setting people hey, you can't, why on your resume, you want to, you're going to find out in that interview they going back to ask some more scenarios, people have been burned these last three, four years cause people don't want to be honest. I'm telling you a person to take an honest person who don't know everything over you just making up something, wanting to lie. A lot of people don't get that cause some of these programs are telling them, hey, go lie on this. I say you know this and that. And now they are on LinkedIn saying, hey, I can't find work. It's been four or five months, I can't find work. What I'm doing, I did what they told me to do. It's not working. So those are those things. I asked this person about this one prominent program and she almost like cuss me out and I'm like I was actually trying to help you and try to see what your resume looked like or something, why you not getting interviews. But you blocked your blessings. I mean, I guess they made you sign an NDA, but you ain't got to take it out on me. When I fought you didn't have a job. I ain't tell you to sign up and pay that $15,000. Which is not the price. But the thing is like I said, you just got to be live school with yourself. If 90 days, I don't think 90 days should really necessary On rare occasions and I tell people to sign up. You got to have a lead skill set or no people.
I've had people in my network that they I've seen with Pat there I said you know what they're going to be good, like one of my friends who's he's killing the game now. He's like 21,. Maybe, yeah, 21,. Probably be 22 this year. Oh, a young guy, yeah, yeah, and he's out of fame right now and this is overspend since 2020. Oh, he's talking his thing. He's in the bag, yeah, but he knows his stuff, though, and I saw that in him.
He was one of the few that wanted to put in work. I said, hey, this first full-time blue team job he had. Was I underpaying him for a sock? I said, hey, take it, get this. I got you. I was letting her know, yo, I got a spot opener for my team. We're going to refer you, you'll be straight. Went there. He doubled his salary, left there, got some more salary. Now he's at a fan company. But it don't always happen like that, cause a lot of people are not willing to do what he did Like you said hey, I was down, I quit my job, I did the apprenticeship, I did this for you. I got laid off, I moved down here, I did this free for six months. A lot of people are not willing to do that.
No, like I said, it's a mix of people being comfortable in their current situation. And when I say comfortable, you don't I mean comfortable, I don't mean like all your living life, you don't live in luxury, you're complacent. You're complacent, you're more complacent and people don't want to take that. And people like I said, like I think it's a root cause we have to tell people like your journey is not going to be linear. Most people's journey is not linear. It's a mix of the value, the valley's in, in Hills, so it's up and down, ups and downs. So I'm maker to take two steps, but then you may take to sit back and then you may take five steps for it. And you just got to have that faith in yourself.
If I was like you know I can't, loans on employees and employment was running out, I has no job. I only technically worked in tech on paper for a year, cause before that I was doing freelance work Everyone on that as much as they could you run for a reputable company. So when I was like I was actually app chỉ applying jobs, I actually applied for fine, I don't apply for lime and I had a case study interview and I filed for the Japanese company and I was like it hurt because I'm like yo, I did all that work to get into it and I got to go back to finance and the thing is I'm glad and get the jobs, those jobs, because I showed up, I got those jobs. I would have fell back into my complacency and I probably wouldn't be in tech right now if I had those jobs.
There's a saying I had on one of my videos. It's a video I had when I was laid off but it was titled. Well, I made that the late off. Years later it was like a hundred jobs, told me no, and actually more jobs than that, told me no, I just had only a hundred. On that Excel spreadsheet that I showed in the video I said sometimes the job you want at the job you need. And then I had cut to a part of a diva and Douglas saying oh, my brother, test the fire.
But a lot of people need to hear that, because even in regular job you really want the job and stuff don't happen. I got, I have some stuff I'm going to talk about months on down a line, about similar situations that I don't want to talk about right now, but it's happened to me before. It just really mean it wasn't a job for you. So, without my job, such as my clients or whoever else, I always tell people hey, this is a process, some is short, some is fast. Got to keep going and try to keep on getting better. And that's the key to trying to get better every day at what you've been doing and don't stop.
I'm going to give you all some free game too. But I see like I'm going to just say a person like yourself who's trying to pivot. Let's say, for instance, I'm pretty sure you still like get better at your coding when you can, or whatever. Some people will do stuff in cybersecurity where they just learn the security scenario but then they stop. So if they stop so now when it comes to the interview, they can't explain the stuff because you stopped doing that. I say you got to do 30 minutes a day or hour. Keep on doing it every day.
And this goes back to the passion versus I'm just doing it for a paycheck conversation. I just had legit earlier today when my crew tried back at home. I'm like I tell people all the time like I have a personal project and the personal product does two things for me, like obviously, eventually, if it does blow up, I'm going to go with it, but it also keeps me fresh. It keeps me updated to the latest thing, right. So right now I'm integrating. It's a it's called Her Travel Lab and basically it's a social group itinerary planning app for trips. So I work on that on the side and I'm working with the latest technologies because I work for a legacy, a legacy company, so I'm not as working on the bleeding edge of technology anymore. So this keeps me fresh. I'm adding Gemini, I'm adding AI to it and it just keeps me fresh so that when people are talking about some of the things that I may not work on on a daily basis, I can still contribute, I can still talk, I can still sound knowledgeable about what they're talking about latest in the industry, because I'm actually building it.
That's all of my cousin and my little boy about this city. He's a US designer. He's actually doing it too, like he's working on some, some side projects and building websites, of designing some websites for his friends. And I say that all the time. It doesn't have to be like people when we say that people think, oh, I don't have time for that, I got a kid, he has a kid, he has a girlfriend's wife's. You don't have to do it all day, hour boom, you can do it for an hour, no excuse, even 30 minutes, that's to keep you fresh.
Like we're not saying be a recluse or be like you know the stereotypical idea of what a software engineer is being a neck beard, basement dweller. No, we're not saying that. But I think you know 30 minutes every other day, a couple of hours a week, goes a long way into one UB coming at SME a subject matter expert and it's going to pay dividends for you down the line because a lot of the jobs I have Past the technical interview have been discontentational. Just talking about the space of talking about the technology you use, what's the latest thing you did, what's how you feel about you know what's going on in Iowa. It's developing right now and if you don't have that relevant knowledge to have to be you know to talk about it, they can kind of tell you not into it.
It's like you being in sports, right, but you don't know what's going on with the Super Bowl, like clearly you're not really into sports like that If you don't know the Patrick Mahon Travis, like you're in this space. That's why I always say immersion matters, because a lot of these conversations, because when everyone's technical, what is going to fall back on is, I think it's going to fight back on your soft skills, the ability to connect and the ability to sell yourself. And having that immersion in your industry and in your craft allows you to speak knowledgeable knowledgeably about what you're trying to get the job for. But it also makes you come off as more of an expert than someone else who just can't really sell themselves as much as you. Can sell themselves as much but knows the technical, but they can't sell themselves as much.
No man. So where can our listeners? Where can they? Well, if they want to follow you, I'm going to tell you how. To you know?
see what caution but where can they follow you at? Yeah, I don't buy it, but you can follow me on X, or formerly known as Twitter. Handle name is C3 Freeman. You can follow me on Instagram if you want to as well. Handle is Turbo Trizzi. That's my villain name. Yeah, man.
But I appreciate y'all. We might have to do like a part two so I can really let him like unleash. I feel like he's trying to hold back and be PC, but I appreciate y'all for tuning into the episode. Like I always say, man, subscribe to the Patreon and by the ebook you need to help getting this obscure book of call. But until next time, like I always say, let's stay textual and we out Peace.
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