I miss my old SCUMM engine classics dearly -- but I've found that (other than Telltale's Sam & Max resurrection) the spirit of old-school adventure gaming seems best captured by Nintendo DS titles. Playing "Phoenix Wright" is like having a SCUMM-engine CSI at hand. So, the genre's not totally dead... it's just not on the PC (where it, in my mind, will always belong).
Of course I'd love to see LucasArts do something sensible like release legit DS ports of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, and Indiana Jones / Fate of Atlantis, but I think the likelihood of my shoes spontaneously metamorphosing into a giraffe is slightly higher than the possibility of them doing that. (And yes, I do know about the SCUMMVM DS project, but it's not quite the same thing.)
Because when you show up as female to discuss an IT matter, it doesn't matter how educated you are or how capable. Some men are still going to laugh you out of the room simply for BEING female, and those men still have a lot of the hiring power.
I suspect it'll be a few generations still before all of the girls and women who are actually interested in techie and IT things actually feel comfortable entering the field. It's like CHOOSING to walk into a minefield, and most women -- most people, come to that -- are going to opt for a path of lesser resistance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the field always skews male, and if that's through natural selection, so to speak, then it's fine. But there are still structures preventing girls and women from entering the field at all, even when they want to, and that needs to change.
The article itself is crap, really. It doesn't seem to address anything well or sensibly, as other commenters have noted. The real problem with being a woman in IT? Shows in the comment threads to this post.
I've worked IT jobs and I've worked education jobs and I've worked retail and that whole collection of jobs that someone works getting to where one needs to be, and even as recently as, oh, two weeks ago, showing up in response to something IT-related with the audacity of having been born and continuing to be an actual female gets raised eyebrows, snickers, and derisive comments. Now, I'm all for mocking mercilessly those who deserve it, but purely being female is not grounds for deserving it.
Very true. Years ago I had to be fingerprinted when I was doing temp work for Fidelity, because even though I was just filing and photocopying... I was in Ethics, and I had my hands all over every employee's financial statements as well as their spouses' financial statements. I wasn't surprised about the fingerprinting (though it was on-site, not at a police station or sheriff's office), since I had long hours of boredom at the copier to imagine just how much trouble I could cause if I wanted to.
(And now, indeed, I work for an educational non-profit and each and every one of us has been fingerprinted, against the possibility of someday visiting one of our schools.)
Ditto. Turns out that even though I discovered him through Spiff's Re: Your Brains video, my ex and I used to live about three blocks away from him in Brooklyn, and we've done the merch thing for him in New York a few times. He really is an outstanding guy and the shows are brilliant. After trying to convert all my friends (in a few cases, successfully), i'm glad to see him getting the attention he deserves, too. Now we just need more songs!;)
If you're moderately financially secure and don't expect a huge increase in financial demands in the short term (ie, you're not about to put a kid or two through college, and you have no immediate plans to buy a new house, retire, etc), have you considered education? Many states and local areas have programs for getting career-changing adults certified as classroom teachers (the NYC Teaching Fellowship is one such popular program) and schools can ALWAYS use more competent logically-oriented (math, science, tech -- anything not language) teachers.
The downside is the bureaucracy of education -- that's what's kept me out of classrooms and working for private organizations. But if you really want to do Something More, that'd be it.
I went to two of those 19 universities, one for my undergrad degree and one for grad school. And now I work on the campus of a third. It's not just a money issue -- yes, where I did my undergrad degree everyone was flat-ass broke, but in grad school most of the undergrads (not us Ramen-eating TA's) had plenty of daddy's money.
It comes down to all the other issues that copyright law keeps going back and forth over. Kids -- and that means most of us into our late 20s and early 30s, even -- share stuff. If you're 18 years old and you've just heard this great new song, what's the first thing you do with it? You play it for your roommate, and her friend, and her boyfriend, and a week later 3/4 of your whole dorm building is singing it in the shower (er, not at once). And anyway, what 19-year-old doesn't think sticking it to the man is a good idea? Next thing you'll be saying college kids drink, too! *gasp, shock*
In the meantime, Congress can keep their hands out of my alma mater(s). This is so far from being an appropriate congressional issue right now that it's laughable.
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I miss my old SCUMM engine classics dearly -- but I've found that (other than Telltale's Sam & Max resurrection) the spirit of old-school adventure gaming seems best captured by Nintendo DS titles. Playing "Phoenix Wright" is like having a SCUMM-engine CSI at hand. So, the genre's not totally dead... it's just not on the PC (where it, in my mind, will always belong).
Of course I'd love to see LucasArts do something sensible like release legit DS ports of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, and Indiana Jones / Fate of Atlantis, but I think the likelihood of my shoes spontaneously metamorphosing into a giraffe is slightly higher than the possibility of them doing that. (And yes, I do know about the SCUMMVM DS project, but it's not quite the same thing.)
Because when you show up as female to discuss an IT matter, it doesn't matter how educated you are or how capable. Some men are still going to laugh you out of the room simply for BEING female, and those men still have a lot of the hiring power.
I suspect it'll be a few generations still before all of the girls and women who are actually interested in techie and IT things actually feel comfortable entering the field. It's like CHOOSING to walk into a minefield, and most women -- most people, come to that -- are going to opt for a path of lesser resistance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the field always skews male, and if that's through natural selection, so to speak, then it's fine. But there are still structures preventing girls and women from entering the field at all, even when they want to, and that needs to change.
The article itself is crap, really. It doesn't seem to address anything well or sensibly, as other commenters have noted. The real problem with being a woman in IT? Shows in the comment threads to this post.
I've worked IT jobs and I've worked education jobs and I've worked retail and that whole collection of jobs that someone works getting to where one needs to be, and even as recently as, oh, two weeks ago, showing up in response to something IT-related with the audacity of having been born and continuing to be an actual female gets raised eyebrows, snickers, and derisive comments. Now, I'm all for mocking mercilessly those who deserve it, but purely being female is not grounds for deserving it.
Very true. Years ago I had to be fingerprinted when I was doing temp work for Fidelity, because even though I was just filing and photocopying... I was in Ethics, and I had my hands all over every employee's financial statements as well as their spouses' financial statements. I wasn't surprised about the fingerprinting (though it was on-site, not at a police station or sheriff's office), since I had long hours of boredom at the copier to imagine just how much trouble I could cause if I wanted to. (And now, indeed, I work for an educational non-profit and each and every one of us has been fingerprinted, against the possibility of someday visiting one of our schools.)
Ditto. Turns out that even though I discovered him through Spiff's Re: Your Brains video, my ex and I used to live about three blocks away from him in Brooklyn, and we've done the merch thing for him in New York a few times. He really is an outstanding guy and the shows are brilliant. After trying to convert all my friends (in a few cases, successfully), i'm glad to see him getting the attention he deserves, too. Now we just need more songs! ;)
If you're moderately financially secure and don't expect a huge increase in financial demands in the short term (ie, you're not about to put a kid or two through college, and you have no immediate plans to buy a new house, retire, etc), have you considered education? Many states and local areas have programs for getting career-changing adults certified as classroom teachers (the NYC Teaching Fellowship is one such popular program) and schools can ALWAYS use more competent logically-oriented (math, science, tech -- anything not language) teachers. The downside is the bureaucracy of education -- that's what's kept me out of classrooms and working for private organizations. But if you really want to do Something More, that'd be it.
I went to two of those 19 universities, one for my undergrad degree and one for grad school. And now I work on the campus of a third. It's not just a money issue -- yes, where I did my undergrad degree everyone was flat-ass broke, but in grad school most of the undergrads (not us Ramen-eating TA's) had plenty of daddy's money. It comes down to all the other issues that copyright law keeps going back and forth over. Kids -- and that means most of us into our late 20s and early 30s, even -- share stuff. If you're 18 years old and you've just heard this great new song, what's the first thing you do with it? You play it for your roommate, and her friend, and her boyfriend, and a week later 3/4 of your whole dorm building is singing it in the shower (er, not at once). And anyway, what 19-year-old doesn't think sticking it to the man is a good idea? Next thing you'll be saying college kids drink, too! *gasp, shock* In the meantime, Congress can keep their hands out of my alma mater(s). This is so far from being an appropriate congressional issue right now that it's laughable.