In July of 2024, we interviewed our volunteer Antonio Gonzalez. Originally from Boston, he lives in Livingston, NJ, with his wife, two kids, and two cats (one cat is named Smokey, and the other Map Reduce!).
Antonio is fascinated with leadership and technology, especially when these two topics overlap. He started his career on the front end, then spent over a decade working on the back end before going into management.
Antonio has inspired many Fellows, and he takes inspiration in his management practice from Simon Sinek and Google’s research on high-performing teams. He has been a founding engineer of a fintech unicorn and also spent a little bit of time at Amazon, so he has had the privilege of seeing varied organizations and tech across different stages. Enjoy the interview!
How did you learn about Pursuit and in what ways do you volunteer with us?
A few years ago I was the VP of Engineering at a Series A startup already partnering with Pursuit. I started my volunteering journey back then and have tried to stay involved over the years. It’s amazing to see Pursuit make such a big impact on so many lives - it’s been an inspiration!
What inspired you to start volunteering with us?
This will be a lengthy response, so bear with me! Seeing firsthand the quality of the graduates combined with Pursuit’s mission to provide economic transformation with a new model for economic opportunity was an easy sell for me. I want to be a part of that - count me in! As a first-generation immigrant, I have seen how a tech career can be transformative and rewarding. I’ve tried to help others around me break into the field, but it’s not easy, especially when tech has a reputation for being complex. It’s easy to compare it to “brain surgery,” so many folks shy away from it, underestimating themselves. You'll eventually get there if you can overcome that fear and stick with it long enough. For example, if you think about learning to drive, it’s a fairly complex skill. You have to learn the rules (respect traffic signs and stop lights, don’t run people or pets over) and then the mechanics of how a car works (gas = go, brake = stop, how the shifter works, etc). Then you have to gain experience. If you’re lucky, you might end up in a parking lot with a beater, so you can make mistakes. If you wreck the car, it’s no big deal. It takes time and practice, and eventually, with dedication, you can learn. Learning how to code is no different - and Pursuit has worked out an effective set of experiences that help students learn rules for coding (with teachers in a classroom), the mechanics of coding (through coding assignments), and gain some experience in the “coding parking lot” (capstone projects). I especially appreciate how Pursuit thinks along the lines of a career, and not just the first job.
What’s been a highlight of your volunteering experience with us so far?
I did a behavioral mock interview with a Fellow who had a background in tech but had stepped away from their career to start a family. She was nervous throughout but still managed to provide solid answers. When I provided feedback at the end of the session, I offered as many actionable ways to improve and she was so thankful - it was personally, a real joy to be offered that support. I empathize immensely with the struggle and feel tremendous satisfaction from helping them learn.
What’s been your journey to becoming a Software Engineer?
I’m going to date myself here. I started fiddling with html and javascript back when 28.8k modems were considered “high speed”. Connecting to the internet was a noisy affair, and clogged the telephone line so no one could make calls while being online, if anyone called the house while we were connected, your downloads could break and you’d have to restart your download from the first byte. I started building websites on the NCSA Mosaic browser (circa 1994), which supported HTML, FTP, NNTP, and Gopher. I started playing with Javascript on Netscape 2 and once I saw how fun creating dynamic content was on the internet, I was hooked and never looked back. I hacked together rudimentary desktop apps in college using PPC/Codeweaver IDE, then moved on to learning Java and then taking on my first full-time role as a junior software engineer at the height of the Dotcom bubble. Luckily, that was a startup with enough funding to safely navigate past the certain death that reshaped the industry. I was fortunate to have skills in high demand, even though I was mostly autodidactic since the internet was not a subject taught in higher education - most of it was C/C++ programming for distributed client/server applications - a completely different beast than web-based applications. Twenty-something years later, here I am still at it!
Are there any key experiences or key mentors that impacted your career or shaped your approach to leadership?
At one point in my career, I worked for someone very difficult to work with. In response to this particular leadership style, within about 18 months most of the engineering team turned over, It felt like every month there was at least one Red Wedding (Game of Thrones) event where several folks would churn. From that experience, I decided to figure out what good leadership was, and it led me down a road where I’d stumble across Simon Sinek’s famous TED talk on “Start with Why”. That inspiration was like a compass that led me to ask myself - “what kind of leader do I want to be?”. The answer led me towards a servant leadership style, and to lead with empathy. The other major influence I’d credit for my approach to leadership and team building has been Google’s research into high-performing teams: Project Aristotle. The research resonates with my own experience from being part of different teams and organizations. I base the foundation of my leadership and management practice on the ideas that emerge from these two influences. In a way, I’m grateful for that experience, but I like to think I’d come to the same conclusions without having to deal with that trauma.
How do you define success, and what does that look like for you?
I’ll try to unpack this question in the context of what Pursuit means to me personally. We are here on this earth for only a short time. As soon as each one of us is born, the clock begins counting down, and the whisper of our mortality slowly grows louder and louder to remind us that our time here is precious. Time is our most valuable commodity. When you’re young, it may not seem like it, but as you grow older and the kinks in your back begin to remind you of this more often than before, you begin to reflect on your accomplishments and what you’ve done with this precious time we’ve given. At this level, I define my success by how I respond to the following three questions when my time here is up:
1. Have I left this place better than when I found it
2. Have I done enough to cultivate the best possible relationships with those around me?
3. Have I done my best with the limited time I’ve been given?
Now, let’s zoom into how Pursuit plays a role in this for me. If we hone in on the first question and then sprinkle a little bit of the second and third questions, then my time with Pursuit has offered a unique opportunity to offer a little bit of myself and my experience to the fellows I’ve had the privilege of working with, especially over the last few months (you know who you are). If I can meaningfully impact a few lives and “pay it forward,” I would define that as a success.
What tech trends are you following now? What are you excited about?
Brace yourself, I’m jumping on the AI hype bandwagon. Today, if there were a stealth, world-changing technology, AI is it. Back in the ’90s, when the internet started gaining traction, it seemed to have a slow start, but in hindsight, it gained traction quickly, all things considered (thank you, AOL, a/s/l, anyone?). AI is moving faster than most people realize, and for me, that’s very exciting. If you consider that OpenAI is actively researching Universal Basic Income, it’s for a very good reason: if and when the day comes that we do get to true Artificial General Intelligence, many people could end up unintentionally displaced. As a species, we have seen this, but on a much smaller scale. Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” There was a ton of fear from the incumbent industries back then about a world without horses - yet somehow, we prevailed as a civilization. I am equally optimistic that we will find our way and press forward once AGI arrives. If you haven’t already, try TALKING to Chat GPT on your phone. If you have 4o, give it a link and ask it to explain the double-slit experiment as if it’s talking to a 6th grader. Profit! Apply this approach to any topic that seems just a bit too complex (organic chemistry, I’m looking at you…).
Are you working on any personal projects you’d like to share about?
Sure! I’m working on an AI-augmented career mentorship platform to help engineers at all levels proactively manage their careers. There’s a bit about how to communicate, track your work effectively, integrate established role guidelines into their day-to-day, and most importantly, how to be strategic with their career instead of taking a back seat whatever comes their way. Over the years, I’ve found there’s a big difference between actively managing your career and letting the rest of the world manage it for you. The lucky ones get support from effective, managers who have a knack for growing their team, while the rest of us often end up as means to an end.
What advice do you often give Fellows or would you give to junior developers?
Set career goals. Work on finding a path to reach those goals. Ask for help along the way. Play it forward once you gain some experience and help the new grads on your team get better, strategically. Cultivate your character and integrity. It’s a relatively small community to protect your reputation. Keep a detailed work log, and use it to update your resume with the awesome things you do every 6 months. Jot down all your failures and reflect on them to learn how to avoid them in the future. Learn the game of how to interview effectively - it’s a skill that you can learn. You can beat this game with integrity if you know the rules and how to work with them.
What’s one thing — either work-related or not — you learned in the last month?
I recently learned that a $30k Dell precision workstation with 2 NVIDIA RTX 6000 can crank about 9 tokens/second running Meta’s Llama3:70B model, while my humble $4k M1 Max Mac can run Llama3:70B at a blistering 6.7 tokens/second. Thank you, Apple!
Is there a particular philosophy or guiding principle you live by that’s shaped your career and personal decisions
There are two ways of seeing the world - either from a frame of scarcity or a frame of abundance. Having been on both sides, I can say with certainty that coming to the world from a place of abundance bears more fruit when you consider the long run. There is opportunity out there - it’s up to us to pay attention and take advantage of it when it appears. Sometimes, attention is all you need.
