The company I'm a contractor for originally hired me as a customer support agent. 9 years later, I'm one of the lead developers. Keep up the good work!
Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
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Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#12I love this. Companies should develop great employees not hire them. It breads loyalty and honor.
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#13Renee you are such a badass, nice going!
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#14Awesome, Renee!!!!!!
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#15Congrats, that's a great move and I'd think a good decision for Twilio. My product manager came from our Customer Service team and is the best PM I've had. I think you nailed it when saying programmers don't need to be brilliant, but rather "it’s more important that you’re diligent and a methodical problem-solver."
Especially when you're working on an existing product. Maybe it took some brilliance to come up with the first version of Google, but once something grows into a bajillion lines of code with tens or hundreds of people all working on little parts of it, brilliance will only get you so far.
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#16Congrats, that's a great move and I'd think a good decision for Twilio. My product manager came from our Customer Service team and is the best PM I've had. I think you nailed it when saying programmers don't need to be brilliant, but rather "it’s more important that you’re diligent and a methodical problem-solver."
Especially when you're working on an existing product. Maybe it took some brilliance to come up with the first version of Google, but once something grows into a bajillion lines of code with tens or hundreds of people all working on little parts of it, brilliance will only get you so far.
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#17This makes me love Twilio even more :D I wish more companies would realize the benefit of cultivating talent from within instead of mining other companies for "rockstars"
My first job was at a company that did exactly this. Most of the developer staff came in the same way I did: part time college student software tester/tech support.
It was only after the company was purchased by a company with a very different mindset did I realize that this wasn't universal. This makes me just love Twilio a little bit more.
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#18Very cool. I think that stories like this one contradict the often quoted advice to hire only rock star hackers in a good way. People aren't born A,B, or, C players - they learn those skills over time.
Keep up the great work!
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#19Congrats! I remember seeing posts from you now and then about how you were learning programming. (IIRC, your first contact with programming was for the demo to get your track jacket?) It's great that you kept at it. My first task was to add a dismiss button on a Javascript popup. I thought the task would be easy, but each page actually has dozens of files of code fitting together to make a page work– style sheets, co…
I think the lecture is broader here. Frustration is really at the core of programming. And whenever you're frustrated, thats a wonderful lession ahead of you in understanding what makes the systems tick that you take for granted.
I've recently had the pleasure to drill down (from C) to single machine instructions in my quest to understand why a conditional branch was seemingly having no effect, on an architecture that I couldn't debug on. As it turns out, the compiler would sometimes use a memory addressing scheme that wasn't supported on this particular architecture. I had to work around this bug by writing assembly that correctly accesses the memory.
It's incredibly frustrating when you end up at a point where the only abstraction (and seemingly faulty) layer below you is nanometer-sized transistors. And all the more rewarding when you reveal the actual problem and get to extend your knowledge.
(Of course, this doesn't really apply to all the ridiculous pain points that annoy us by design. Things like browser compatibility come to mind.)
Re: Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
#20Congrats! I remember seeing posts from you now and then about how you were learning programming. (IIRC, your first contact with programming was for the demo to get your track jacket?) It's great that you kept at it. My first task was to add a dismiss button on a Javascript popup. I thought the task would be easy, but each page actually has dozens of files of code fitting together to make a page work– style sheets, co…
I think the lecture is broader here. Frustration is really at the core of programming. And whenever you're frustrated, thats a wonderful lession ahead of you in understanding what makes the systems tick that you take for granted. I've recently had the pleasure to drill down (from C) to single machine instructions in my quest to understand why a conditional branch was seemingly having no effect, on an architecture tha…
I can certainly enjoy figuring out what's wrong sometimes (and unravel the whole string of events: "oh now that makes sense: this was happening which made this and that behave that way") and I the satisfaction you're referring to; but other times, it's just so far removed from the real task at hand that it's not even funny.
A recent example would be when I was trying to set up my local environment with virtualenv, whose whole purpose is to make that easy. Everything seems fine but pip (Python package manager) was throwing errors. The culprit was that virtualenv creates Python scripts in the local directory with a hashbang for a local version of Python. The thing, it turned out, is that hashbangs don't work when there's a space in the path. And there was a space in my path because I wanted to use Box's sync folder which (stupidly I must say) is called "Box Documents". Now I know.
Long story short, the point is that I wasn't trying to debug virtualenv but had to dig deeper than I wanted into it just to get started on the problems I created. :)
Though you're right: just recalling this, I have a feeling of victory over the problem.