Dear Sylvia,
After reading your work and looking over your profile (which includes Linkedin, etc), I feel it is important to say that you did not go from zero to Google in one year. I feel you mischaracterized your background. If not mischaracterized possibly under-developed the aspects of privilege that you were afforded along many steps of the way. In your education section, you list you attended the U. of Chicago and London School of Economics Within your own story you say you had access to computers and programming at a young age, even learning Java. After teaching in public schools (k-12) for approx 10 years in the inner city this is not even remotely common. I am astonished by the lack of personal knowledge you have regarding your own history. I applaud your accomplishments but feel I must beg to differ on several points.
Reasonable criticism of my title, but I did acknowledge all of this several times in the article itself 😅 I didn't 'learn' Java - I took two days (total 2 hours) of a course that covered Java and I immediately dropped it because I was so confused. I'm not even 100% sure it was Java, lol that is how little I gained from that experience. My 'access to programming' - maybe you are not familiar with Neopets/MySpace, but all I learned from those as a kid was that you could type <b> on something to make it bold. It wasn't exactly 'programming' as a kid. Sure, it wasn't nothing, but it's also not like I was one of those kids building my own computer at age 8. You're definitely right that having access to computers is a privilege in and of itself. So the whole '0' thing is maybe just an extreme word choice. But I stand by saying I had basically no relevant programming experience going into all of this. My previous formal education - not disagreeing with you that these are privileges in general - but they did not help me at all on this specific journey in any meaningful way. I have degrees in philosophy and international relations - again, better than nothing, but almost entirely irrelevant to the tech industry as far as I've been able to tell. Please read what I've written thoroughly - I did not hide anything, lie, or imply that this process was easy or that I did not have privilege
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Dear Sylvia,
After reading your work and looking over your profile (which includes Linkedin, etc), I feel it is important to say that you did not go from zero to Google in one year. I feel you mischaracterized your background. If not mischaracterized possibly under-developed the aspects of privilege that you were afforded along many steps of the way. In your education section, you list you attended the U. of Chicago and London School of Economics Within your own story you say you had access to computers and programming at a young age, even learning Java. After teaching in public schools (k-12) for approx 10 years in the inner city this is not even remotely common. I am astonished by the lack of personal knowledge you have regarding your own history. I applaud your accomplishments but feel I must beg to differ on several points.
"Little knowledge is a dangerous thing"
And she overcame that my friend.
Cheers for making this article mate, you are great.
Reasonable criticism of my title, but I did acknowledge all of this several times in the article itself 😅 I didn't 'learn' Java - I took two days (total 2 hours) of a course that covered Java and I immediately dropped it because I was so confused. I'm not even 100% sure it was Java, lol that is how little I gained from that experience. My 'access to programming' - maybe you are not familiar with Neopets/MySpace, but all I learned from those as a kid was that you could type
<b>on something to make it bold. It wasn't exactly 'programming' as a kid. Sure, it wasn't nothing, but it's also not like I was one of those kids building my own computer at age 8. You're definitely right that having access to computers is a privilege in and of itself. So the whole '0' thing is maybe just an extreme word choice. But I stand by saying I had basically no relevant programming experience going into all of this. My previous formal education - not disagreeing with you that these are privileges in general - but they did not help me at all on this specific journey in any meaningful way. I have degrees in philosophy and international relations - again, better than nothing, but almost entirely irrelevant to the tech industry as far as I've been able to tell. Please read what I've written thoroughly - I did not hide anything, lie, or imply that this process was easy or that I did not have privilege