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We Hired a Blind Coder

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Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#71

Post by TriNetra »

SwellJoe wrote: post #8

One of my friends is a blind coder (and he sometimes comments here on HN), and he's had a very hard time getting regular work as a coder, even for things that seem obvious (like testing and fixing apps and sites for accessibility). He's bright and built his own screen reader for Android, among other things. But, I think that's a common experience for folks with disabilities; they begin to feel like they have to apolo…

Here's my personal anecdote: I'm a blind dev and building a company in India.

I had been having jobs in US-based companies for about 8 years and on the side I'd been creating products/taking freelancing projects to be independent of job (not that I lacked in any job rather I almost always quickly emerged to be the most technically competent go-to person to get solutions to programming problems.)

At the moment one of my sighted friends has joined me from my last company and together we're working on consultancy-backed product initiatives.

I’ve been frequenting HN for years and this is of course not my original account. Chiefly because from the outset in my freelancing career I’ve mostly made it a practice not to reveal my disability. I always thought that if I deliver well, there’s no reason that I should reveal about my blindness. In fact IMO that would rather put me at disadvantage as work relationships over the internet are largely driven by impression – showcasing your skills and abilities.

With grace, this has worked fine and I’ve worked with clients across the world currently being as security/solution architect consultant on a project for a multi-billion dollar financial company in US.

At present I’m personally earning $10k monthly which is quite good in India and setting me up for likely never needing to go back to job again.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#72

Post by CJefferson »

lucb1e wrote: post #70
alisson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery would last so much more, cool idea!

Not enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use. When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM. Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysq…

The big saving of no screen is no backlight for the screen, which happens no matter what low-tech rendering you are using.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#73

Post by StavrosK »

filleokus wrote: post #26

Nice story! One thing I have been thinking about, for completely blind (English isn't my native language, so sorry for not using the correct/polite terminology) users, (that have 0% vision on both eyes) it would be possible to use a laptop without a screen, I guess. Essentially simulating the screen for the screen reader to work with, but not rendering the output anywhere (or even having the screen hardware to render…

That's how a blind friend and coworker of mine works on a plane. Raspberry Pi + headphones + battery + keyboard. So you pretty much put your computer and battery in your pocket, and have the keyboard on your lap. Pretty fantastic.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#74

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #4
mcweaksauce wrote: post #2

I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially? Did he become blind later on after learning how to code?

I can't imagine what it would be like to use a computer in general, without sight. However, most programming resources are in text form, so I guess it wouldn't have been too difficult (in relative terms).

I've done a little commercial web dev so have used freely available audio-browsers. A very interesting experience.

YouTube has examples of people programming using audio output. That should help to imagine it.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#75

Post by huuu »

TriNetra wrote: post #71
SwellJoe wrote: post #8

One of my friends is a blind coder (and he sometimes comments here on HN), and he's had a very hard time getting regular work as a coder, even for things that seem obvious (like testing and fixing apps and sites for accessibility). He's bright and built his own screen reader for Android, among other things. But, I think that's a common experience for folks with disabilities; they begin to feel like they have to apolo…

Here's my personal anecdote: I'm a blind dev and building a company in India. I had been having jobs in US-based companies for about 8 years and on the side I'd been creating products/taking freelancing projects to be independent of job (not that I lacked in any job rather I almost always quickly emerged to be the most technically competent go-to person to get solutions to programming problems.) At the moment one of…

I think this is another reason why privacy is important. Sometimes you need to hide something. Not because you are doing something illigal but just for personal reasons.

$10k is quite good in the rest of the world by the way ;) Good luck!

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#76

Post by DanBC »

macspoofing wrote: post #39
dudul wrote: post #15

Nice post, but I was kind of shocked by this part: "A question going through your head is probably: Did we underpay him?" Seriously? What kind of human beings do you think your readers are? Did anyone here really think about that while reading the story?

Not just you. That jumped out to me immediately as well. The whole article felt too self-congratulatory as it was.

I started reading it from a UK perspective. I couldn't get past the "we didn't break the law!" self-congratulatory feel.

But then I realised that discrimination is common in the UK, and there are absolutely employers who pay people less because those people have disabilities; so I switched into enjoying reading about a company learning that employing someone with a disability isn't a big thing.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#77

Post by lucb1e »

CJefferson wrote: post #72
lucb1e wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use. When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM. Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysq…

The big saving of no screen is no backlight for the screen, which happens no matter what low-tech rendering you are using.

That saves some, I've tried it a few times in the past and it doesn't help as much as I had hoped (perhaps 30%). I am sure that when eliminating all visual processing we could achieve something like 200% without much effort.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#78

Post by fit2rule »

One of the most brilliant coders I've ever worked with was 90% blind. He had a gigantic monitor, and his term setup was such that the gigantic screen showed big chars, 3 at a time. He'd scroll through code like lightning, reading it 1 or 2 chars at a time, and despite this limitation was one of the best kernel hackers of my professional experience. (We bonded as the only vi users in the dev group..)

To this day, I doubt I'd have the temerity and courage to work in this field as he did, and I have to say that I have immense respect for the disabled who overcome these disabilities and nevertheless remain extremely productive. It says something of a persons resolve that they are willing and able to write and debug kernel code, 1 char at a time .. I really don't think I could do it.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#79

Post by tajen »

lucb1e wrote: post #70
alisson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery would last so much more, cool idea!

Not enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use. When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM. Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysq…

Aplications for blind people probably still need the rendering, or at least something close to it to read the text in order.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#80

Post by CJefferson »

lucb1e wrote: post #77
CJefferson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big saving of no screen is no backlight for the screen, which happens no matter what low-tech rendering you are using.

That saves some, I've tried it a few times in the past and it doesn't help as much as I had hoped (perhaps 30%). I am sure that when eliminating all visual processing we could achieve something like 200% without much effort.

That would mean my computer was spending 50% of it's battery life displaying on the screen, which I'm afraid is clearly untrue. If not running games it's less than 5%.
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