Me, the disabled employee

[thefuturemesozoic]

For various reasons, finding gainful employment as a disabled person tends to be difficult for most people, so I wanted to write down my experiences. In one sense, I have been fortunate in a lot of ways and benefited at times from having met the right people at the right time. My path has been unique to me, and no two people will have exactly the same journey. I want to say, up front, that this is not meant to be a "I did it, so anyone can do it" kind of post, nor is it intended to negate the impact of the various systemic factors that make it difficult for us to find employment. At the same time, there are often patterns in life, and, although I have no concrete piece of advice that I can guarantee will lead directly towards people finding what they are looking for, I do feel that I have some generic advice to offer, and I will get to that later in my post.

I started using computers from a young age. Although I learned Braille and strongly feel that the availability of computers and speech do not eliminate the need for Braille to be taught, my TVI (Teacher of the Visually Impaired) felt that I should also learn to use computers. Typing became faster for me than using a Braille writer, and, additionally, I could print out my work and hand it to my classroom teacher directly, rather than my TVI needing to reverse transcribe it. Then, over the summer, after I finished second grade, I attended a camp for disabled children. The camp was run by another Teacher of the Visually Impaired named Karyn Stranberg. I believe that Karyn new my grandfather through his work with the Lions Club and initially met me through him. Karyn decided to pair me up with one of her students and have him teach me what he knew about programming in BASIC. I enjoyed programming since now I could write games. If someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would have said that I wanted to be a computer programmer. It was not inevitable that I would become one--at various points, I was also considering studying law, finance, or accounting--but, in the end, after graduating from high school, I wound up going to WPI and studying computer science.

When I was a sophomore in high school, Karyn Stranberg re-entered my life and became my mobility instructor. At one point, she wound up introducing me to Lyla O'Connor. Lyla was another TVI who Karyn worked with in Boston, and my almost accidentally meeting her became important. Shortly after I started at WPI, Lyla went to a trade show and met Joe Sullivan, President of Duxbury Systems, and she thought of me and asked Joe if I might be able to work for him over the summer as an intern, which is what I ended up doing. I returned there the next two summers and eventually took a permanent position there. Working for Duxbury (or working in the accessibility field in general) wasn't something that I was necessarily set on doing, but it was the path open to me, since I did not have other job offers that I could consider. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have gone if Lyla had not made that connection for me. Would someone else have similarly made a connection that would have led me to finding employment? Or would I have kept applying for things and eventually had a successful interview that led to an offer? Or would I have been one of the blind people who hasn't been able to find gainful employment? There is no way for me to be able to answer these questions.

Duxbury was a good place for me to work, and I will always feel grateful toward them for taking me on. I worked there full-time from June, 2001 until February, 2008. But working with Linux was where my heart was. I started using Linux back when I was in college, and I joined WPI's linux association. In part, I think that I liked being able to work from the command line; I grew up using DOS, and Linux was like DOS but better. But I also liked the idea of software being freely available, both in terms of being available regardless of someone's ability to pay and being "open source" in that anyone could inspect and modify the software as they wish. At some point, I became interested in the One Laptop Per Child project. It seemed like an interesting piece of technology. I wondered what would be needed to make it accessible to a blind person. I decided that I would start by taking a look at Abiword, on which their word processor was based. Abiword was not making the text for its documents visible to the Linux screen reader. In my spare time, I started to look into what would be required and to write the missing code. Unfortunately, my code never ended up making it into Abiword. Its developers were interested, but they never ended up reviewing and actually checking in my patch. Still, the project became another pivotal episode in my life. I was in a chat room used for Abiword development, and someone mentioned there that Novell was putting together a team for a Linux-related accessibility project. By that point, I was on some mailing lists related to Linux accessibility where the Novell team was also mentioned. I applied for the position, and, at that point, I had no relevant paid work experience working on anything Linux-related, but there were few people who did, and, in the end, I believe I was the only person hired for the team who came in knowing anything about Linux accessibility at all. I started working at Novell in March of 2008, originally as part of a team to write a bridge between a couple of accessibility interfaces. In one sense, I still have the same job, although Novell no longer exists, and I now work for SUSE. My original team no longer exists, and I no longer spend all of my time doing accessibility-related work, but I am still able to spend some of my time handling accessibility issues that come up.

I grew up in Massachusetts, but I hated the weather there and really wanted to try living somewhere else, specifically Austin, for whatever reason, but relocating felt like a challenge. I was hesitant to move across the country without having a job to go to--even if I had savings, I worried that, particularly as a blind person, I might have trouble finding work and eventually just deplete my savings. But finding a job there felt difficult when I wasn't living there. I visited a couple of times, applied for jobs, and landed several interviews, but none of them led to a job offer, although I believe that I came close in one instance. When I worked for Duxbury, I likely would not have been able to continue working there if I moved out of the area. They are a small company, and, at the time, having an employee in a new state would have created extra work for their accountant. My supervisor had had some bad experiences in the past with developers working remotely. But Novell/SUSE was a different situation. When I started there, my team's technical lead was based in Provo, we had one team member who was working from his home in San Diego, and other members of the team were based in Beijing. My original manager felt that the ideal was to have people working together in an office every day, but he saw this as an ideal that would not always be met. My team was communicating primarily through on-line chat, so we already had procedures in place to so that we could function with our team being geographically spread out. I asked my manager if he would allow me to relocate to Austin, and he eventually decided to allow me to make the move. Nowadays, I am on a team of people who are completely spread out, and none of them are in Massachusetts, so being there would not make any difference.

So is any of this relevant to anyone, aside from me? I would say that there are a few lessons that people can take.

If you are reading this and are in a position to make a connection for a disabled person, or facilitate their finding employment in some way, then you could be making a big difference in their life. Sometimes, for a disabled person, the hardest part is to just get through the door. I think that a lot of us--myself included--tend to end up working in accessibility-related fields, or to start out that way, because we tend to have an easier time being hired for those kinds of positions. If you are interviewing a disabled person, then give them a fair chance. The recent backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has been unfortunate. It is appropriate to debate whether specific DEI efforts and policies are appropriate or are achieving their intended results. But DEI is not about hiring non-white or disabled people in place of more qualified white or non-disabled people. It is about setting a goal of not overlooking or discriminating against qualified candidates, regardless of their background.

If you are a disabled person looking to find a job, or looking to find a job more in line with your interests and values, then I would say a few things. There is no one universal path through which people find work. There are job boards online, and companies--particularly large companies and organizations--tend to post vacancies online. But searching for jobs online is only one way of finding work, and, although I would recommend an all-of-the-above strategy, it might not even be the most efficacious thing that someone can do. A small company might create a position if they find the right person to add to their team, even if they weren't explicitly looking to hire a new person at the time. When Duxbury hired me, they were not necessarily filling a position that they officially had open, but I had done some work for them over the summers, and they decided to offer a position to me. There are no hard and fast rules that apply universally. Around the time I graduated from college, I remember reading a paper that stated that, based on the author's research, programming jobs at large firms went to people who had a Grade Point Average of 3.5 or higher. People with GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5 were given roles that were reasonably well compensated but were not programming roles (quality assurance or technical support, for instance), and people with GPAs below 3.0 were generally locked out of the industry altogether. (For the record, this author was critical of these kinds of screens used by formalized HR departments.) I did not even graduate with a GPA of 3.0, so, based on this person's argument, I shouldn't have even been able to find a job in the industry, let alone a programming job. His statement may well have been correct as far as it goes, in terms of applying to human resources departments at large businesses, but I was hired by a small company that didn't even have a person who dealt with human resources full-time, so these kinds of rules didn't matter. More recently, I've seen someone describe fully remote positions as unicorns, but, in my niche, working with open source software, they are still fairly common. These kinds of observations may be correct in general, or in the context from which the observer is coming, but, in reality, they are sometimes not as limiting as they might seem at first glance.

I benefited immensely from someone making a connection for me, and, in general, other people could benefit from doing what they can to replicate the situation I was in where they might know someone who might be able to alert them to a job opening. Networking is an important strategy for job seekers, disabled or not, and I would say that it takes on even greater importance for a disabled person who might face barriers in various ways. It is a good idea to be out in the community and to join organizations through which you can develop personal networks. I am not suggesting joining things solely for that purpose, but it can be a good way to meet people with similar interests. I have made quite a few friends through church groups over the years (none of these relationships have made a large difference in my professional life, but they might have if things in my life had been a bit different.) If you are in college, then I would encourage you to find extracurricular groups that interest you and join them. Aside from being a good way to do things that you enjoy or that align with your values, they can be a good way to meet people, and it is always good to meet people.

More generally, I would say to figure out what you would like to be doing with your time, maybe setting aside the notion of paid work for this activity, and then think about what steps you can take to move in the direction of getting there. I am not generally suggesting foregoing paid work in favor of volunteering, but volunteering can be fulfilling in and of itself, and it can give you experience and lead to connections that can eventually lead to paid work. If I had not been working on Abiword in my spare time, as I discussed above, then I would not have known about the opening that led to my current position. I have seen this happen for other people as well, where, in the context of software, they were doing work as volunteers in their spare time, and this eventually led them to paid positions that aligned more closely with what they wanted to be doing. None of this constitutes a linear path towards finding your dream job, but the idea is to find the things that you can do to increase your chances of finding something that would be a good fit for you.