Upper Hand. Sherrell Dorsey
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think about my grandfather saying yes to the opportunity to attend a trade program and taking the risk to leave his family behind to seek out an unknown opportunity in a land unfamiliar to him. I think about how my mother trusted that saying yes to a training opportunity for me would help me navigate a world she was uncertain about but knew that I needed to understand.
We've made getting into the technology space extremely complex. But it doesn't have to be. And although historically we've been far too often on the receiving end of exclusion, we can include ourselves in the rooms and tables that will carry us into opportunities that enable higher salaries, strategies for navigating an education that won't leave us in insurmountable debt, and career prospects that allow us to be pillars within our families and communities.
The increasing problems we face in society today, like threats to our privacy online, climate change, inaccessible banking tools, and other socially inextricable challenges, won't be solved by white guys in hoodies alone.
For too long, many of us have felt stuck without a guide. In the next few chapters, we'll take a look at the tools, researchers, entrepreneurs, language, and programs that are providing new forms of access and opportunity to what it means to be included in the future of work. The guides, exercises, and activities provided will help you with a framework for shaping your own journey in the changing and growing world of technology.
2 Rainier Beach to Redmond: Internship Required
14 Going on CEO
My name was etched into a wood plaque, mounted on the door to my office. My badge, displaying a photo of my round baby face, strategically plaited box braids, and my full name, was fastened to the loop of my belt with authority. I'd inherited an 8×10 office space of beige walls and brown carpet that housed a black desktop computer, an ergonomically correct chair and keyboard, and a filing cabinet. At just 14 years old, I was receiving my first real paycheck from one of the most successful technology companies in the world.
It was the summer of 2002 and I had stepped into my very first internship on the Microsoft campus, feeling like a bigshot.
Never mind that it was a shared office with a college intern who probably handled much harder assignments and had more to prove. I felt like a grown‐up, with real responsibilities, working with real adults, and making real money. I was no longer just the resident tech support for my family or one of several students who had gone through an extensive training period at TAF. This was the real deal. I had my name on the door of an office in a company that had defined the world of technology for the everyday person and was building what would come next.
While friends had landed camp counselor jobs or part‐time retail work, I was given the privilege of learning software, marketing, and how to navigate the awkward series of conversations with adults on “what I want to be when I grow up.” I attended meetings. I learned how to test and build software. I sat in the dark against the glow of computer screens with test engineers, identifying and logging bugs in programs.
Work, albeit a serious endeavor, was also a playground for me and my peer interns. We rode the company shuttles across the campus, overindulging in the bin of candy the elderly drivers put on display in the front seat. We stacked free soda cans from the surrounding refrigerators in our book bags for extra hydration for the bus rides home. We dared each other to use the company directory to email Bill Gates. We racked up Xbox games at $20 a pop at the company store and purchased software upgrades for our family computers at steep discounts. We put our $12 an hour in wages to work over our eight‐week employment experience. We gathered in cafeterias for cheap or free lunches, trading stories about the top‐secret programs that we were working on, attempting to one‐up each other on who landed the coolest internship in the company.
For all the freedom we were afforded, and the ongoing access to every device we needed to do our job, it was the Microsoft home prototype that stamped my internship experience with the surrealness of seeing into the future. The smart home was varnished with the type of voice‐activated devices we use today at least 15 years prior to the technology becoming available in the mass market. After unlocking the front door via a palm scan, you stepped into the front entrance, commanding the lights to turn on with a quick chant. The blinds followed suit, and welcoming music instantly filled the air. Before video calling was even a notion, the family room television in the Microsoft smart home was equipped with multi‐sided calling for phoning friends and family. Upon setting a bag of flour or a carton of eggs on the kitchen counter, an image would display with recommended recipes. The refrigerator compiled a list of items that needed restocking once it noticed that groceries were running low. Choosing an outfit to wear for the day prompted the closet mirror to share visual recommendations based on the weather and a scan of one's schedule.
It was an integrated world where technology served as an assistant to everyday living in the context of a single‐family home. It gave us a glimpse of the future we're experiencing today. The excitement of that moment cemented a world for me beyond the physical one where everything could be changed and challenged and improved through technology, and where possibility could govern how we thought about where our work might lead us next.
The smart home experience helped my imagination run wild. I brought ideas back to everyone who would listen, researching better software trends or possibilities to make operations more efficient at my respective after‐school workspaces. Those early experiences unlocked a world for me that felt accessible in the world and neighborhood I'd come from. I just had to figure out how to make it happen.
My time at Microsoft stretched into three additional summer internships. However, one particular summer, I thought it would all come crashing down. I joined a team assisting a senior lab manager who supported several engineers and IT managers in our building. I'd fallen in love with setting up and managing servers following the two semesters of my curriculum track on network management at TAF. I was overly confident, feeling like a pro at the ripe age of 16, and much too excited to handle the weight of holding Microsoft together.
Helping the lab manager was an easy enough feat until, just a few weeks into my internship experience, he informed me that he would be taking off to the mountains for a long weekend. I'd be responsible for making sure everything stayed online. Easy enough. I watched the blinking lights connected to a host of Ethernet cables and various cords lit up in the server room. On the first day of my manager's absence, I received an email from a team member that a server had gone down and they needed me to quickly help get it back up.
Without assistance and someone looking over my shoulder, I immediately froze. Trying to run through my brain and analyze all the lessons I could recall from TAF, but feeling the gaps in the information, I worked through the panic to the best of my teenage ability.
“Oh crap, I broke Microsoft,” I said to myself as my palms moistened from nervous sweat. I was sure that Bill Gates himself would personally come to my office to fire me, take away my deeply discounted Xbox games, confiscate my employee badge, and ban me from the vicinity of the Microsoft campus forevermore. It would be the end of me before I could even begin.
In the midst of my melodramatic panic attack, a moment of clarity reminded me of what to do in a worst‐case scenario: ask for help. I called my manager, still with heavy and hurried breaths, explained to him what happened, what I'd managed to accomplish to mitigate the issues, and let him calmly walk me through the rest. The day was saved. I kept my job, and neither my manager nor my team made me feel incompetent. Bill Gates did not have to have me physically removed from my soda‐can‐laden office. Thank goodness!
Those early experiences at Microsoft were lessons beyond technical skill development. They lent me environments that required self‐awareness, vulnerability, perseverance, and team‐building. Throughout my journey I had the privilege of working across marketing departments, building gif tutorials for internal software programs, assistant‐managing a team lab, and I eventually wrapped up my last internship before heading off to college serving on the diversity, equity, and inclusion team, where I got to lead program experiences for employees, their families, and other