He seems like an awesome guy. Well-deserved success!
I do wonder whether the title of the article accidentally (and ironically) reveals a subtle racial bias. McDonald's is a typical shorthand for a lowly job, staffed by the nation's underclass. But tons of successful people in tech flipped burgers in high school (I did!) and it's never worth highlighting in press articles. Their public story usually starts at college or their first job or their first big break. But this article specifically highlights a traditionally menial position as his starting point.
> He began working at McDonald's, earning $4.15 an hour working nearly 40 hours a week, mostly on the weekends. He was quickly promoted to shift manager at the age of 16,
> He enrolled in certification classes sponsored by CompTIA to get his A+ certification, which led to a job as a DSL installation technician for Bell South at the age of 19.
So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
McDonald's was my starting point. It's where I developed much of my work ethic and my first taste of leadership in a professional setting. I was a shift manager for most of that time and remember learning about the restaurant business, food cost, working with customers, and managing people.
A lot of stuff did not make the article but who I am today was greatly influenced by that job. I chipped in on the bills, bought my own school clothes, and my first car (1987 Jeep Cherokee), thanks to that job, so for me it was very foundational.
Oh wow that saying brings back memories. All this time I thought my store manager had invented it.
McDonalds for me was pretty fun. At the time I could well see how the ease of promotion trapped some people. If you had any motivation at all you'd soon find yourself running a night shift.
Even now, a decade later, I get nightmeres where I'm back working there. Nothing feels longer than an 8 hour shift at McDonalds.
I know so many successful peers, including myself, who have worked at fast food and other menial jobs, during late teen years. If anything, this is actually a positive signal that someone cares about their future and is willing to put in the work.
Alternatively it highly depresses you and you drop out never to re-enter the job market, or to enter very late only once it becomes a necessity for survival.
> So he worked at McDonalds for 3 years in high school, what does that have to do with anything.
I'm confused, you started by agreeing that highlighting the McDonald's experience is a good thing, then asked 'what does that have to do with anything'. I don't know what position you hold, here.
As for me, I never worked at McDonald's or any other fast food, but I did spend some time working at a local pizza joint, where I started as a busboy, and eventually assumed cook and delivery driver duties. I'd already taken programming classes and knew Java and Python, but had never considered software as a professional option. My time in the service industry was still super valuable to me as a software professional - I learned about time management, prioritization (working as a busboy and dishwasher who also makes some minor food items is an implementation of a priority queue where the priority values can change very quickly), and how to identify repeatable business processes. These are all highly valuable skills for someone who writes code, and pretty much any service industry job, taken seriously, requires understanding them. They apply equally in SaaS.
So my answer to your (possibly rhetorical?) question is: working at McDonald's for 3 years in high school has quite a lot to do with the rest of the career, as valuable fundamental business skills are there to be learned even in the lowest wage jobs.
It's the "American Dream". They need to reiterate again and again how every dishwasher can become something if they just work hard enough lol. It's these things that make me pity Americans, but other stuff offsets it as well, so there we go.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
> But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
I'm happy you ended up with a great job that pays well. Congrats to you!
But I think you underrate what and how much you may have or could have learned from working at UPS. UPS is a fantastic logistics operation, and while being a package sorter is obviously not the same as being a VP, the job still exposes you to a system that's highly optimized for profiting from being good at logistics, and that reaches every job in the system. Maybe you didn't learn anything at the job, but that doesn't mean there was nothing there to learn for someone observing and trying to learn.
I could not fit the entire title "From McDonald's to Google: How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing" when submitting the post.
No, it's just a manifestation of the rags to riches-trope. Please don't bring this "aggressively looking for things to crucify people with"-culture onto HN.
Wow, that's a huge stretch. I read the reference to McDonald's only as a job where significant numbers of teenagers first learn about team management and cost/quality optimization. It's not merely "flipping burgers" but more generally the McDonald's program and a strong corporate work ethic.
Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds.
I worked from 12 up, from a farm to a bakery/barista to a salesman. Basically, I was the oldest of 5, there just wasn’t time/$ for the paid activities that a lot of suburban kids do.
Work as a teen is similar to sports in terms of life lessons and leadership development. It’s so lame when people pity people out of ignorance. The dozen people from the barista gig I kept up with mostly did pretty darn well in life this far, 20 years later!
>Bringing this stuff up is a tell for writers who parents are from higher income backgrounds
It sounds soooooo weird to us normal "working class" folk. I assume literally everyone, no matter their current career/job/education level, worked a menial job as a teenager. That's because where I am from ALL teenagers were expected to participate in paid employment (and some were expected to help with the family's bills) and where else are you going to work as a teenager? I wouldn't ever consider bringing it up - I consider it very bizarre to bring it up like that, it would be like bragging about how you graduated college even though you went to public school growing up.
Yeah same. Not on a farm but as a busboy when I was 14. I had to convince the owner to hire me but I knew my parents didn’t have extra cash to give me a guitar so I worked for it. And it was cool being around adults in that environment. Being treated like anyone else and earning the respect from the immigrants who were busting their ass and the other young people from working class backgrounds.
In some ways I regret I wasn’t just taking in my youth at that age (and I recall some customers, in good nature, commenting to me I was too young to be working) but at the same time it helped in giving my the work ethic and drive to make retiring very early an option if I want it.
I guess I just saw the chance to work as an opportunity. An opportunity to build myself.
I've been involved in hiring engineers, and see previous employment 'flipping burgers' as a massive plus. It shows someone is willing to work hard when they need to.
I'm not sure if that says more about the workers or your requirements. By 'work hard' you can only mean 'performing hours of tedious unthinking labour' if you're saying 'flipping burgers' is relevant and necessary to 'working hard'. The qualities just don't seem to match up for a job that requires real, rigorous, logical thinking, except for selecting out anyone incapable of the bare minimum effort to sort of just survive in the workplace. That's fair, but doesn't really map to what I commonly see which is a lot of wasted potential being consumed by menial labour because 'just doing it' is seen as more important than developing genuinely useful new approaches.
This comment reflects a pretentious disdain that is exactly what I dislike. I have worked menial and frustrating jobs, and you learn a lot by working through tough situations. I’ve also absorbed similar lessons from sailing offshore in difficult conditions.
Sailing offshore in difficult conditions sounds much more interesting and skillful than any amount of entry-level hospitality. Anyway, of course I have no 'disdain' for working menial jobs - I have worked in them too, I just don't really view them as anything particularly positive, and certainly for me they were formative only insofar as they provided major motivations for completing my degree so I could escape them.
I think you probably learned a lot more from those menial jobs than you realize. People who never did that kind of job often lack empathy for blue-collar workers; I used to work with one engineer who didn’t care whether production staff got laid off because our project was late (whereas others believed we had a duty to our co-workers). You also either demonstrated or developed an ability to cope with working on tasks that were tough, uninteresting and monotonous; many white-collar workers expect work to always be fun, with constant positive reinforcement, variety, and no failure (like school).
You learn the second lesson from sailing, but not the first.
I do wonder whether the title of the article accidentally (and ironically) reveals a subtle racial bias. McDonald's is a typical shorthand for a lowly job, staffed by the nation's underclass. But tons of successful people in tech flipped burgers in high school (I did!) and it's never worth highlighting in press articles. Their public story usually starts at college or their first job or their first big break. But this article specifically highlights a traditionally menial position as his starting point.
Unconscious bias?