A quick story about why being out in tech matters
I’m a big, gay CTO, and I want you to know. This is why.
Back in July of 2000, I was 18 and working as a contractor at a startup in London at the very tail end of London’s version of the dot-com boom. I had arrived a few months earlier from Trinidad, where as a closeted teenager I had absorbed an enormous amount of internalized homophobia. I was very clear that I was lucky to have survived my intense depression, and equally clear that my new life was that of a second-class citizen. I was going to have to fight harder to stay afloat, and think carefully about whether to come out in the workplace, on a case-by-case basis.
My wonderful boss at the time was always interested in building my skills, so when I asked about interviewing he pointed me at the original, 1.0 version of Joel Spolsky’s Guerilla Guide to Interviewing. It was and remains one of the best things I’ve ever read about how to interview, though we’ll always disagree about how important understanding pointer math is.
From that site I clicked through to Joel’s personal site, which at the time looked like this (thanks, Wayback Machine!) which ended with this short sentence:
I’m a liberal, bicycling vegetarian Jewish computer geek. I have a boyfriend, Jared, (yeah, mom, he’s Jewish!) who makes me really happy (giant smile).
These words were very, very surprising and extremely important to me. Here was the CEO and founder of an important tech company, that people respected, and he was gay, and nobody gave a shit. My ambitions for myself and my career, my sense of how far I could get, my confidence that I could be open about myself in the workplace all changed in that moment and forever. There are few times your life can genuinely change from one moment to the next but this was one of them.
Fifteen years later, I am the CTO (temporarily, in fact, the CEO) and co-founder of my own tech startup. In the intervening time I’ve met Joel and Jared, who is now his husband, and spent time at their home. In a development that would have astonished 19-year-old me, I consider Joel a friend. But I don’t think I’ve ever really told him quite how important that single sentence on his website was to me.
All of which is to explain why, when Joel trolls me with yet another left-pad joke, he’s one of a very small group of people that I’ll let do that.
It’s also why, despite it being irrelevant to my actual job, I am open about and frequently mention my sexuality. It’s part of why I started the LGBTQ in Technology Slack. Because representation mattered to me, and it will matter to other people, and it’s the kind of gift you can only pay forward.
Sometimes, saying you exist is all you need to do. So I do.
