Kelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 1)

Kelsey Hightower recently announced his retirement. Prior to his retirement, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. He has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. He is a strong open source advocate with a focus on building great software as well as great communities around them. He is also an accomplished author and keynote speaker with a knack for demystifying complex topics, doing live demos and enabling others to succeed. When he is not writing code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.

In this first part of the conversation, we delve into pivotal moments in Kelsey’s career journey ranging from buying his first car by working at mcdonald’s after school, to starting his own computer store that turned into a music studio after 6pm, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers. Through these stories, we learned a ton about how Kelsey thinks about acquiring new skills - getting paid for it, breaking into the world of open source, navigating corporate politics, building trust within a team, and much more.

Segments:
[0:00:00] Humble beginnings

[0:05:52] Learning on the job: networking

[0:09:39] Building a small business

[0:19:33] Do you need to go to college to get into tech?

[0:25:14] Learning on the job: system engineering

[0:35:46] Getting into the open source world

[0:42:53] How to deal with friction on the team

[0:48:20] Collaborating in open source

[0:56:05] Work life balance?

Show Notes:
Kelsey’s retirement announcement on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/s...
Kelsey on GitHub: https://github.com/kelseyhightower

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Music Credits: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...