bdougie sits with Lawerence Lockahrt Jr to hear how he persevered his way into tech at the young age of 46. Now a boot camp grad and full-time Software Engineer, he shares some encouraging words of wisdom to all looking to break into tech.
https://twitter.com/LDLockhartJr
Episode 86 of this developing story.
all right. What's up. Y'all it's b Dougie. And we got ourselves a cadence, twitter.com/b dougieYO. Yo. That's where these Twitter space has happened. I'm actually really enjoyable. Leveraging that platform. Um, I think Twitter's got something magical there and, uh, I think y'all need to be a part of that. So check it out, check out the new features over there, but not here to promote Twitter.
I'm here to actually promote my guests who is Lawrence, Lockhart, Lawrence, an engineer at FedEx, uh, doing a lot of backend services and stuff like that and maintain. Uh, we get into that, but what I wanted to get into, and I mentioned as well, we didn't get actually a lot of time to talk about this in the interview is I originally found Lawrence on Tik TOK, where he shared a story of how he was an MIT dropout to eventually get into food services, literally ran kitchens and, uh, eventually found that he didn't wanna do that anymore and joined the bootcamp, which we get.
Uh, joining a bootcamp when you're 40 plus and what that's like. So if you are a career switcher, if you're looking to get into programming, um, or if you know, people who are looking to get into programming, share the story, because I think this is going to be a story that folks were really resonate with, especially if you're trying to break in.
But, uh, without further ado, I'm going to stop talking about Lawrence at Lawrence. Talk about himself.
Um, who I am is a family man and a church going guy and a person who just wants to see how I can do the best by my family possible in every way. Um, career wise, I have gone through a number of iterations, um, from restaurant management to supply chain management. Um, and now. Uh, but who I am is always been a people person as well, in the sense of what I learned.
I want to see who I can teach or who I can share with. And I don't have to be an expert in it to share what I know now more than likely what I have already is enough to be beneficial to someone. Um, and so my tech career, or my tech journey, which has been a whopping three years, uh, has been largely about, yes, how can I advance myself, but also who else can I.
So my first intro, I think one of the first tech talks I saw you share was, um, um, and I was like, I was weeks late to the, to your channel, but, um, You shared a video where you kind of go from, start to finish of your career. Um, so let's start with the start, uh, which your college experience, which I find like completely fascinating.
I know you go into this, like a lot of details and maybe you've shared this you've overshared. This. But from my understanding, you went to MIT for a bit. I did. So we rewind back to high school. Yeah. Um, yeah. Math guy, science, a guy of the nerdy, somewhat takey guy, all those things. Um, I went to a tiny little country, high school in Mississippi, but clearly was the standout in every way that you could be the standard.
Including being the band nerd, because, you know, if you're the math man or those kinds of pair up together. And I interviewed with a MIT alum who was an engineer at our army Corps of engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And, um, that went really well. I think it was like fall 88 and I actually got early admission to MIT.
So I was admitted at 16 and began there at the tender age of 17, 19 89. Um, I went in with absolutely zero study skills, none like I had no, all of the fantastic planning and organization you see? So from people these days on their Instagrams and I had none of that, I was a person who would just go pay attention and then regurgitate what I paid attention to on the tests.
Well, surprise that doesn't work in class. Like it doesn't work at all. And if you're talking about a rigorous program, like any sort of engineering, and I think I was making a, which is course to an MIT mechanical engineering, absolutely doesn't work. And then you take a rigorous program and you look at a rigorous institution that's designed to test you even more than maybe you would find in other curriculums, all that was a recipe for.
Um, compounding on top of that was the fact that personality wise and my mindset, I was really used to being the big fish in the little pond, which totally did not certainly will in college because I went and found out you're not the smartest kid on the block. You're probably not even close. Um, so I went from a big fish in the small pond to a tiny fish in an impossible ocean.
Um, and that messes with you particularly at a young age, if you haven't matured in a way to be able to handle that properly. And be able to place yourself amongst peers of a variety of diverse backgrounds and say, Hey, I'm here and I can contribute and I can be valuable. I didn't have any of that at the time.
So the long story short was yes. I had an opportunity at a tech career in the late eighties, early nineties. And blew it literally blew it. I mean, just so many F's, there's no other way to say it so much. So, um, uh, so much so that I actually went into a depression that I did not recognize until later in my adult years.
Um, where I couldn't, I couldn't succeed in anything. I mean, I went to little, I got, so I left. I take it. I told you an Amtrak home. I still remember that because there was a taxi ride from the campus right there on mass out to, um, to the train station and it was snowing. And I was the first time, like I'd ever gone 360 in a car in the snow, and I'm just freaking out in the back seat.
Cause I'm already stressed about flunking out from MIT. Now this cab drivers doing donuts in the snow. And of course he's just completely calm cause he lives in Boston, but I dealt with them from de-load Mississippi. So that was weird, but yeah, it was a long train ride home. And then we enrolled in like a little community college just to kind of keep myself in school.
I think that was kind of around the beginning of the Gulf war is if I remember, right. My dad was like, you better get to school. They're going to draft your blankety blank. So I enrolled in a, um, community college. And then I went to one state you, and then like I flunked out there and then changed my major.
And I was going to be, I went from Emmy to didn't go to CS. I think I went to see us and then like math. It was a five-year journey of just trying, just knocking my head against the wall, trying to succeed at something that I thought I was supposed to do. Like that was the Trek. That was the. But I wasn't set up for that at the moment.
And it took me literally five years to come to a point. And the next day my dad helped me come to the point of, Hey, you know, this college thing isn't working for. You don't know why you can't seem to come up with any answers, but even if you don't do college, you have to grow and mature as a man. So it's time to get a job.
It's time to start supporting yourself. We've done what we can do. We've offered the guidance and they were most, they are, and we're the most fantastic parents. Um, and make an amazing example and, um, I'll get more to that later. And so that's how I kind of slipped into the restaurant business. So we're now we're talking 93 94 when I should have been graduating.
Uh, working at a little fast food joint in a tiny town, other tiny town. So much of my life is a story of tiny towns, but anyway, another tiny town called McGee. Mississippi started working in a little ice cream place called dairy queen down here because that's the kind of thing that happens a lot of times when you don't have marketable skills, um, you just kind of slide into hospitality, retail, or.
Uh, logistics, uh, quite often driving forklifts, packing, that kind of thing. And those are completely honest, honorable good jobs. There's nothing wrong with it. Um, but when you're capable of more, but you haven't developed the skills, those tend to be the places you go. And I don't know if it's just, you know, a series of not wanting to be in too much cognitive dissonance or not, but after you stay for awhile, you convince yourself, you love it until you.
And, uh, and that came later for me, but yeah, it says I'm brought my parents definitely have to shout out both of them because my dad is mechanical engineer. He was actually a civil engineer with the state of Mississippi, their first licensed engineer. He's black history, literally black history, Lawrence Lockhart, senior was Zippy.
Um, but his story is a story of kind of figuring it out later. He graduated from San Francisco state. Oh gosh. Right before we moved to Mississippi. So that would have been like 79. And he was in his adult years with two kids and working two jobs and driving back and forth from, from, uh, Suisun city, California to San Francisco, and just all kinds of craziness.
And I literally replicated a story in way too many ways. Now he didn't have the opportunity I had. He was like in the air force when he graduated from. But in many ways, like our stories are very, very close, like later on in life kind of figured it out. So that's, that's the tumultuous start. Yeah. And I appreciate you going through that too, cause I want to actually, uh, pitch everybody that actually click on your profile and follow you on Twitter, but also on Tik TOK.
Cause you actually have some pretty good tech talks of actually explaining all the in-between. The point you weren't how to code. Uh, so everybody who's here and listening, you can hear my voice, follow Lawrence on those platforms and catch the rest of the story. But I wanted to actually fast forward, because at the point where I was kind of like, I remember the one Tech-Talk I saw Danny Thompson and I'm like, oh, I see Danny.
I didn't realize, I didn't realize Danny did restaurants, but also. Learn how to code very recently as well. Um, so, um, I'm curious if at the point you, like what pointed you back in like brought you back to her to learn how to code basically? Sure. So let me hit on one thing and then I'll answer that. Um, because, uh, Danny Thompson is like my road dog.
He's a fellow Memphian. I'm in north, Mississippi, just across the border from Memphis and he lives in Memphis and the two of us actually went to the exact same bootcamp. It's a bootcamp called lunch. And we were in a small circle of people. It was like four or five of us who encouraged each other sometime just got on each other's nerves, ready to punch each other in the head.
But at the end of the day, we were really brothers and we pushed each other to be go to the next level and go to the next level, then try this and work on that. And so out of that circle is really nice to see. And I remember saying, I wish I could find it. It was a slack message. Oh God. So long ago. I forgot what the circumstance was.
I was like, you know, as a young, as you guys are and hungry as you are, I'm looking for some of you guys to like go way past what I could achieve because out of the group of our cohort, the bootcamp, I was the first to get hired in a full-time developer position at FedEx. I actually got this job before we graduated.
I was like, you guys are gonna go way beyond, like in the next five years, one of y'all is going to be like at Google or something and low and low. And before. Yeah. And he ends up at Google, which is, which is just awesome. I love that for him. And then, you know, he's pretty well known on Twitter and everywhere else in the cyber world, but yeah, he's in my crew or I'm in his crew or we're in each other's groups.
We've broken bread together and played pool. And a lot of them play velour and I'm not too much of a gamer, but yet we, we hang out a lot virtually these days. But yeah, Memphis in the house and our teacher by the way of the boat camp is a guy named James. Who is also, I'm pretty big on Twitter and he does a ton of courses like you to me and YouTube and stuff like that.
Um, his platform is learn, build, teach. So let me shout out him as well. Cause he was my mentor and he still is. So James quick from Memphis, Memphis is in the house, man, telling you for a shout out James as well. Cause he's a super humble guy too, as well. Cause like. Uh, the, like the places he reaches, I'm going to kind of blown away.
He just had a a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and, um, his wife and I actually grew up in, uh, in the same area, in the same town as well in Florida. So we connected on that. And then my brother lives in Tennessee, uh, in Columbia, there's south of Nashville. He moved up there for music. We got some Tennessee connection.
Yeah. And he has, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of connection right now. Kind of like what blew me away because I didn't realize the connection of James. I met James actually earlier this year. Um, and then the connection with Danny and like just the launch codes. LaunchCode you did the program. Uh, I'm curious about, like, what was the, um, what was the experience during the program?
Like, uh, did you end up quitting your job, your job at the restaurants to do it? So, okay. So let's go back to your other question, cause I never, never answered that. And then I get this one too, if I keep them both in my head. Um, but yes, in the restaurant world, my last restaurant job, I was working at a restaurant called cookout, which is a burger joint out of north Caroline.
Uh, I was a general manager, right? So that's the person that quote unquote runs the store. Uh, nevertheless, the general manager in cookouts. It, particularly if you're in a college town, you're required to go in on every weekend, Friday night and Saturday night, like between four and five o'clock and you work the overnight shift we'll have, which will have you're getting off anywhere from four to 6:00 AM the next day.
Um, because that's what all the college kids come out to eat. Um, so, you know, 5:00 AM 3:00 AM Saturday, you know, Sunday morning after a college game, you're there, um, with all of the rowdiness and everything that you would expect, we've all been there. We've been those people. And I definitely found a point in my life where I was like, I can't physically do this anymore.
Like, I'm doing it. The money's actually, okay. I have a promise of district manager and X number of months. I'm going to have all these stores. But I can't physically do this also, do I really like this or not? And I, that was a lot of just self-inspection about the career choices I made and how they aligned with, you know, whatever talents, abilities proclivities that I had.
And there was just a huge missing. I've got to do something else. And so that began the course of, of self study. And even before that, I was just kind of tinkering with things, pulling up, um, information online. Um, when I left old miss, which I opened the athletic dining facility at Ole miss university of Mississippi, I, when I left there, I actually connected with a career counselor to see, Hey, what can I do besides food?
I'm getting kind of tired of food. I'm think I can do something else, but I don't know. And she like had me do every test under the sun, short of the real sharp test. And lo and behold, it said, Hey, you still have technical aptitude and logical reasoning skills and math aptitude. I'm like math. I haven't cracked a math book open in 20 years.
There's no way. But nevertheless, the test said you still have these skills in you somewhere. And so I'm like, all right, well, what's the conclusion? What are the job titles? So she gives me this list. Like here's some ones you should check out. And the first one was actuarial science. I didn't even know what actuarial science was at the moment, but I looked it up and it was deep into the insurance world.
And that bored me to death. I was like, okay, that's not good. Um, but I did kind of think about finance and ended up buying some courses and some books and finance and some books and management consulting and how to correct the PM consulting interview, which interestingly, I think came out before CTCI nevertheless, I thought about finance in that world, but that was like, no, that's not really me, but all the next jobs were web developer, software developers, software engineer, and my eyes just went, wow.
That's where I was supposed to be. 24 years ago, you're telling me it's still possible. And I just stumbled through. Every imaginable, free resource, lots of paid resources without a lot of direction, without a lot of guidance. She may have provided more resources that I needed needed at the time, because I was just bouncing around.
And that was a lesson that I came to learn that I teach people now, like, you know, when you get a poor. Whatever let's say it's a 10 week course. Um, do it from beginning to end, like don't do four weeks and then jump to another one because maybe you don't like the author or, you know, whatever little reasons that we come up with because very often has been the design in a way where you're going to get the maximum benefit.
When you finish the course, like some things will come together towards the end of the course. And I definitely didn't know that I was just buying you to me courses, which I still may take talks about that. And then I was on your Udacity then free code camp and a little bit of YouTube, like you name it.
Um, so did that for a while and finally came around to joining, uh, the coding phase community, Joseph toast, Garcia on YouTube. He put out some courses in front end development that were project. Everything he does is project-based and that meant a humongous difference for me enough, where I was able to get a semi decent portfolio together and finagle my way into my first non restaurant job.
Now, at the time I was proclaiming it like, Hey, I'm in web development. I'm in tech. Yeah. The stars have aligned. Happy me. Uh, once I got in the position, it turned out to be heavy on the marketing side, light on the tech side, like I was wearing all the hats. I was the tech. I was the tech guy in a small marketing department.
So today I might be working on a blog post. Yeah. Today I'm a bit in the blood. Well, they didn't have a blogger yet. Today I have in the WordPress site tomorrow, I'm taking pictures of products. Uh, they had me doing voiceover work for the commercials, like. And I was all over the place and it didn't take long for me to realize my skills are not going to advance here.
I need to get into something. And that's. So we're talking what we're talking summer 2017, somewhere around that area. Anyway, same time I'm having these thoughts and bootcamp came to town as a coding bootcamp and like, Hey you do this will prepare you in six, nine months, yada, yada, yada, you got to learn these skills, get your job ready.
And I'm like, yes. And I go to sign up and they had an age cut. I was like, no, you have to be 35. And despite my youthful appearance, I am not under 30. I'm not under 35 age cut off. Yeah. Well, they they've changed it since then. And I think just the way they're, they, they view their mission, you know, things change.
But at the inception, it was cut off of 35 and I am, I am greater than 35. Yeah. And I mean, for the bio, uh, this, this Twitter spice, I put getting your first job at tech at age 40. I do. Do you want to share what your age was when you got your first job? Oh, sure. I was 46, 46. I was 46. So 11 years past the.
Yeah, exactly. No hope for me. No hope for me. Um, I should put a pin on ages and because I have some things to say about that. Um, well we got so many pins, but yeah. So started that job realized I wasn't going to really advance my tech skills that much try to get into one bootcamp, um, was denied. But then a second bootcamp started advertising online that they were bringing a cohort to Memphis.
They're based in St. Louis. It's a nonprofit it's free. They're going to do a Java stack and we're going to do a Python. Sign up here and do these things for early admission. And I just did everything like everything under the sun and they're like, Hey, tweet it. I printed it twice. Put it on Facebook. I was like, I'm not on Facebook, but that's fine.
I did everything. They said that I got early admission to that. And that was. Um, I've said again, James Creek was our teacher and I already knew him because even in my first pseudo take job, part of what helped me get that was the networking I did at a local meetup called code connector. James was a leader in code connector.
So I already met James at the meeting. Back when I was in restaurants, I was literally driving from Oxford, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, just to connect with tech folks because the local meetups in my town were only for university students. They did have one, it was like a coffee Chet goat thing, but it was only for university students and alumni.
Neither of which I was, I was just working at Ole miss. So I was driving 90 miles one way to come to code connecting meetups where I. Um, James and Danny, at the time, he was still in gas stations. To be honest, he wasn't in restaurants. He was in gas stations. He actually managed multiple gas stations to be honest, like a huge empire.
But anyway, I met both of them in the co in the code connector meetup. So coconut water was very influential for me. Coding phase was very influential to me. Uh, like I said, I met James there. He ended up becoming my teacher for a launch code, which was really cool. Like, Hey, I know this guy, so you have to ask him some questions.
We have a relationship already based on the work that I've done with my body, actually putting myself out there. And that was cool. And, um, Towards the end. Gosh, maybe two months, three months shy of the end of the bootcamp. Uh, the place where I was working, which was Fred's dollar store. Y'all all the south.
No Fred's they went bankrupt. Like they went totally bankrupt. It was just run into the ground. And so I'm now sitting in the land of unemployment, a midway through bootcamp. I know like some stuff, but I don't know everything cause we're not done yet. And I'm like, all right, crap. Now what my teacher, James, he was one of the people that I reached out to, from a number of people, about opportunities.
He said he spoke to his manager and she was open to bootcamp grads and future grads. I applied. He was literally across the table with a group of other people in my interview and actually was instrumental in me getting on at FedEx. So once again, the power of networking, one of those things that I always, always, always would mention.
Not networking like the slimy handshake business card. Hi, my name is Lawrence. Do you have a job? It's about what other humans can I meet and demonstrate mutual interest or value that that's it. And I don't think I've ever been in a, like a begging stage or phase with anyone it's about, Hey, you're into tech.
I'm going to take let's talk or let's talk Java script or Java or whatever, or my current thing, which we'll probably get to later developing other people. And you find people who have similar interests and values and you just connect and you just chat and at some points you'll be able to pour into them and help them out.
Other points they're able to help you out. Yeah. I mean, that is 100% on the money too, as well. Like the, your, your network, uh, is definitely what, where you could sort of step onto, especially when you, when Fred's went under and, uh, disappeared on you while you were still working. But I, I wanted to go back to the one note you wanted to talk about, which is age-ism.
So like we discovered your age and when you got your first tech job, like what sort of hurdles or what maybe, I mean, did you, did you even get hurdles? Um, when trying to, I really didn't and I don't have like a whole lot to share on that outside of the fact that I think ageism is a lot more connected to the willingness of you're bringing in your work.
To continue to evolve. And you know, all of us are going to reach a point wherever career you're in, whatever you're doing that you just not interested in anymore. You're not, you're not interested in learning the next thing or the newest thing or transitioning, you know, this no.net application to a Java spring with application, whatever it is, you reach that point.
Um, I haven't reached that point. Fortunately, I'm still hungry and, and still interested in doing all the things, but I, I, my personal experience outside of the Silicon valley bubble is. The ages and that hits people is often more tied to that willingness than a number. Um, so you can't tell any difference between me and the 23, no, 24 year old college grad who got hired the same day as I am, that I was in terms of our willingness to, to jump out into the land of unknown.
And Hey, I'll take on this task and I'll take on that task and, or we're going to start using this part of whatever technology or we're going to do this, but our Jenkins found that cool, let's do it. What do I learn? What do I do? Um, that willingness is it trumps your age a thousand times over that's been my experience and other, you know, hardcore tech, bubbles, maybe it's a little more intense.
In fact it probably is. But as I'm often a fan of saying the majority of tech jobs are not in those few cities of California defined by the district that is Silicon valley, they're everywhere. And so, you know, you find the area where you can see where you can succeed. Don't let the realities or perceived realities of that bubble.
Kill your process or kill you from even starting, which happens to some people on this? No, I'm 45 and 46. You know, I'll never make it here because age-ism. Find the place that will take you. There's plenty. Yeah. There's, there's, uh, uh, a notion that I learned pretty early on in my, my dev career, which is like work on problems that are interesting, but no one else wants to work on and back in like 2013, when I got into this, it was front end.
Like at that point it was like jQuery or nothing. Everybody wanted to do jQuery. No one wanted to learn how to do CSS properly. And I, I bend over backwards to learn it, like on Fridays and like early in the morning, I've learned like all the front end stuff, how to do all the JavaScript. And that became my end into getting like better projects to work on.
Yeah. A couple of years later react came out and I got put on a react project and that completely changed the trajectory of my career. But would that being said too as well? I think going back to the ageism thing, um, it is about, about your, your energy too, as well. Cause you were coming in brand new, uh, with a lot of excitement.
Uh, and I think it probably shown through. As you were applying and you were sitting in like submitting those cover letters and stuff like that. I definitely think so. And even to what you were just saying in terms of the projects, no one else wants, so. All that I'm about at work, uh, for the extent of the two years in a few months that I've been there.
Um, particularly anything cause people, you know, devs don't like doing front and stuff. A lot of times they don't like doing anything configuration based like it, it's not this, you know, raw code. Like, no, I don't want to screw them out off the PCF. No, I don't. I raised my hand instantly and to the point where we actually lost a team member who was promoted, um, and had to leave our team before we were able to backfill it, he was a.
PM's bromance. He was something, he was a PM type of person. And we have some projects going on with our European partners that somebody needed to take on. In addition to their developer duties, nobody was interested in that, you know, whose hand was up. Like I got it, I got it. And that was gosh, like October-ish 2020.
And then yeah, February 20, 21, largely because of that and the overall energy, evergreen, the work, uh, that was a result of. Like, you'll just jump into anything like yeah. Kamikaze that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And like also, like, even speaking towards like your, your actual role at FedEx, like FedEx is not like the, uh, a lot of people, like hyper-focused on Fang companies when they get your first developer job.
When I think it's like, I don't think it's actually necessary. Like if you're coming out of college, looking for internships or getting your first job, like yeah, sure. If you're a Stanford grad, go ahead and like apply for Google. But there are there, like usually mentioned, there are tons of tech shops and the issue right now.
And it's always been an issue since I've been around, is everybody wants to work at the big companies. No one wants to work at the, the, the lesser known or non tech, uh, tech focused Ford company. But they're all trying to pay. So like I met somebody who's based in Kansas city, working for Cisco, making more than I was making like a couple of years ago.
And, uh, and it's because Cisco was, it's a, it's old tech basically, I guess, I don't know how to put it nicely. Um, and they have to compete with a Google. Um, so like, if you want to get a paycheck and you want to get a job. I would highly recommend folks. Don't just limit yourself to only like only regions in the silver, silver, um, an SFA.
Oh, for sure. And every, and you know, even in a big box, any type of place like FedEx, which is a logistics company, which is interesting because I actually did a brief five-year stint in supply chain in the midst of my restaurant work. Um, there was a humongous Nissan plant down in Kenton, Mississippi, and I worked for one of their suppliers and learned some combine and lean manufacturing in Git and things of this nature as a supply chain analyst and then a warehouse man.
Um, and so some of that, I actually transfer those skills to where I am now, which I had no idea then I would be here. So that was interesting, but yes, it's a place where you can get your feet wet and the technology, you can learn valuable skills. And if you're interested in still going to a Fang Fang level company, or even the tooling.
That serve them, which there's so many people sleep on the new relics and the Griffon has, and, oh my God. There's so many out there, um, that have great pay. You can literally still. You can literally still have a path to those places from where you are, but, but for, for the audience, let me say that everything you're doing now, whether it's intake or not, it counts
all right. Folks. That's Lawrence. And if you were inspired, but it's a conversation. Please, please, please tweet this out. Like subscribe. He mentioned to me, he doesn't use Twitter a lot, but give them a reason to use Twitter. At mentioned him, tell him how much you enjoyed this episode. If we could, as the TDS audience, please hit up every single one of these guests and this tell them how much we appreciate them sharing the stories, because honestly not everybody shares their story about how they got into tech and not everybody shares the story of how they sort of failed at it multiple times.
And I do appreciate his openness. And I'm up on Tik TOK. Hit him up on Twitter at one Syrian on Twitter. Take talk. I take LK Lockhart Jr. On Twitter. Uh, I'll leave that in the show notes that it would be easier for you to click and link, but, um, yeah. Do us a solid and say hello and thank you. Give us some insight.
These stories are powerful and useful for anybody who's listening. So with that said, I'll see you in the next one. Cool. Are you getting a ping some more for work? Yes. Multiple times.