In 1987 or 88, when I was a teenager, my parents, noting my emerging passion for coding, tried to sign me up for a Explorer Scout "post" whose focus was programming.
This should have been good, but I came back from the first meeting not wanting to go back. I just didn't click with the group, and the language/environment they were using (Fortran on an IBM System/3x0 variant, I think) were of no interest to me.
This upset my father, in particular, because he was convinced that the programming I was doing in my bedroom (C, on a Commodore Amiga) was of no value. Programming a personal computer was fine for a kid, but making a career in software meant doing "serious" work, which to my (very non-tech) parents, meant programming IBM mainframes.
In retrospect, their career advice was about as bad as it could have been. I was learning exactly what I should have been learning. I was completely right to ignore them and continue doing what I was doing.
Except I could never shake the idea of "serious" vs. "not serious" software development. So while I continued to learn C, then learned C++, when I finished college in the mid-90s I went into a "serious" industry . Despite living within walking distance of Netscape's old headquarters, I completely missed out on the dot-com era, justifying it by telling myself that I was doing "serious" work. And while I've never been unemployed, until this year, I can't say I ever did anything remotely notable, or fun, either.
And worse of all: it became obvious within the last 3-4 years that my industry was a career dead-end. If I stuck with it, I'd eventually be one of those stereotypical unemployed, and unemployable, 40-something developers.
But there is a silver lining: over the last couple of years I started playing around with some new technologies and ended up reinventing myself. Earlier this year, I quit my old job and am now working for a startup that's doing stuff that's nowhere near my Dad's old idea of "serious". But I've treated my new job seriously, working harder than at any time in my career. And I'm happier now than I've been in nearly a decade.
As far as I can tell, the report doesn’t say 50% of founders are foreign-born. Rather, it says (middle of page six) that 50% of tech companies have at least one foreign-born founder. That’s very different. To use a very simple example, if you had 100 startups, each with three founders, 50 of which had 3 native-born founders and 50 of which had 1 foreign-born and 2 native-born founders, you’d have 50% of companies with a foreign-born founder, but only 17% of the founders would be foreign-born.
The question that needs to be answered is: do immigrant technology workers found technology startups at a higher or lower rate than native-born technology workers? Surprisingly, I’ve never seen that question addressed. I’ve seen articles that imply an answer, but once I dig a bit it always seems that the data doesn’t actually justify the implied conclusion.
This should have been good, but I came back from the first meeting not wanting to go back. I just didn't click with the group, and the language/environment they were using (Fortran on an IBM System/3x0 variant, I think) were of no interest to me.
This upset my father, in particular, because he was convinced that the programming I was doing in my bedroom (C, on a Commodore Amiga) was of no value. Programming a personal computer was fine for a kid, but making a career in software meant doing "serious" work, which to my (very non-tech) parents, meant programming IBM mainframes.
In retrospect, their career advice was about as bad as it could have been. I was learning exactly what I should have been learning. I was completely right to ignore them and continue doing what I was doing.
Except I could never shake the idea of "serious" vs. "not serious" software development. So while I continued to learn C, then learned C++, when I finished college in the mid-90s I went into a "serious" industry . Despite living within walking distance of Netscape's old headquarters, I completely missed out on the dot-com era, justifying it by telling myself that I was doing "serious" work. And while I've never been unemployed, until this year, I can't say I ever did anything remotely notable, or fun, either.
And worse of all: it became obvious within the last 3-4 years that my industry was a career dead-end. If I stuck with it, I'd eventually be one of those stereotypical unemployed, and unemployable, 40-something developers.
But there is a silver lining: over the last couple of years I started playing around with some new technologies and ended up reinventing myself. Earlier this year, I quit my old job and am now working for a startup that's doing stuff that's nowhere near my Dad's old idea of "serious". But I've treated my new job seriously, working harder than at any time in my career. And I'm happier now than I've been in nearly a decade.