I’ve been an engineer at heart since I was a little KID.
My favorite thing to do was to take apart my toys to see how they worked. If I had a toy with a light that came on or a part that moved, I had to know WHY, and — much to my parent’s dismay — I’d break the toy open to figure out what was causing it to do so.
For a while, my mom stopped buying me toys because I was always breaking them, and I had to explain to her that there was a method to my madness. She finally understood that I was learning and exploring, and thankfully, I had just as much fun putting my toys back together as I did breaking them apart!
I’m a first-generation American — my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti — and I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school. Even though I graduated early, I didn’t have the grades (or the money) to make heading off to college my logical next step.
I found a way, tho…
Being that I was born in the 80s, I knew that I had a passion for technology. So I enrolled in a two-year technical school, and I started to understand how computers worked. Soon… I was hooked, and I began to gather as much experience as I could, as well as acquire a wide range of certifications. This opened the door to a career in engineering — I took it and never looked back.
Since then (…2002) I’ve worked as a Help Desk Technician to a System Administrator before being DRAFTED in 2013 as a Systems Engineer to a BigTech company known as Twitter. Not only did I work at Twitter for nine years, but I also helped solve some of the world's largest computing infrastructure challenges.
Eample: …writing and designing software/systems that saved Twitter 100s of millions in cost savings and more…
While there, I enjoyed roles as a Senior Engineer to becoming one of only a few Black engineers to achieve the title: Staff Engineer.
Yet, despite my success and how fortunate I feel to have found a lucrative and successful career in tech, it’s difficult to look around the industry and see so few people who look like me.
And that’s the thing… there's no reason WHY they shouldn’t be there!
-holler at ya^boy it’s BobbyD! …
#teamdorlus #thetechhustle #blacktechtwitter #hbcu #blacksre #tichaiti #sre #stem #nsbe #uncf #codepath
Thanks for sharing a little of your story Bobby! Looking forward to hearing more insights.