This is me at Uber 10 years ago. I was 1 of only 3 Black engineers in the office, a college dropout, and only 3 years older than the new grads, yet I had earned the title of Senior Software Engineer at a company that had occasionally down-leveled even Senior Google engineers and hired them at mid-level.

I had made it into the world’s most valuable tech startup, a company renowned for recruiting the world’s top engineering talent, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined.

I felt a persistent anxiety and pressure to prove that I deserved to be there, along with constant doubts that I did.

I’ve been on my own since I was 17, relying on the web development skills I’d been building since 14 to survive on consulting gigs. I had grown up in poverty, lived through two evictions, been beaten up by police and unexpectedly arrested due to racial profiling, lost my mother and watched my father go to prison.

Things kept getting better over the years, but now things were going good…too good. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

Six months into the job, I got called into a meeting with both my manager and his own manager. I thought this is it…they’ve realized they made a mistake hiring me…my time is up. They wanted to talk about my initial job offer.

It turned out that the offer I had accepted so excitedly and without hesitation was far below what other Senior Engineers at Uber were making. They told me there was approval to double the amount of Uber shares I was granted in my compensation package, effective immediately on a retroactive vesting schedule. I didn’t even have to sign anything.

That feeling of something’s going to go wrong disappeared.

Today I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb and run a non profit I founded called Algorythm that’s helped thousands of black software engineers prep for tech interviews. We’re running a free donation funded Datastructures & Algorithms bootcamp for 1,000 black software engineers in Q2 this year. Follow Algorythm to be notified when applications open