Thanks. On the one hand, there are opportunities just like that; they don't appeal to me however-or perhaps more clearly, many of them exist in a different context of practicing law than the one I'm interested in (public defense and mitigation). As I said, I only ended up in tech when early in my career I almost lost a job with a great law firm after I finished my Politics degree.

I got complacent on the help desk because the position paid more than being a file clerk and just never really got back to the legal world. To be honest, I'm going-pure and simple because this is the track I wanted to be from the beginning. As time went on, my legal skills stagnated to the point where I couldn't even get call backs because it had been more than a few years since working in a legal services capacity and the only experience I had was a resume full of help desk work. At 23, I was chasing money and girls and not really thinking about building a career.

Ah. Youth. :)

Here I am now a lead DevOps engineer who is legitimately and thoroughly burned out on tech-although I love the company I'm with right now. They give me time to deal with school stuff, and I've been talking with our CEO who is more than interested in my career plans about changing roles to work under our legal council in a few months-who could really use a 2nd-hand.

I suppose I'm happy you aren't leaving because of discrimination (making the assumption your social group represents your heritage...)

Honestly, not terribly much or at least none of it overt; I did a reasonable job of learning to pick battles when 'those' sort of moments happened-but there honestly weren't enough of them for me to remark on as something that stands out in my career. There were definitely your obtuse, bloviating managers who thought they were God's gift to the workforce, but that's not unique to working in tech, and I've seen that type of attitude transcend race and ethnicity so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: I will mention this: I was VERY often the only black person at many of the companies I worked for, but Austin also has a crisis of African-Americans fleeing the city at astonishing rates.

Me too. I'm looking for ways I can apply my technology skills to further social progress.

Does your city have an open data initiative? That's a good start; Austin is working on turning a lot of paper forms into webforms to make it easier to request various city resources.