Just some data points for slashdot posterity. When I first saw a functioning corporate computing department as a high school intern, back in the late 1970's, it looked like this:
Women worked in the basement computer room in operations and keypunch/data entry.
Men worked upstairs as systems analysts, and used ADM 3A's to enter their programs and (even back then in CORPORATE AMERICA, they wore suits) play Battleship, Hangman and Star Trek. They also taught interns how to play Battleship, Hangman and Star Trek.
To be honest, I did rarely lack for offers of assistance, even (as the parent points out) when I knew what I was doing.;-)
That was what my comment about life getting more complicated was referring to.
On the flip side, I was also the target of a few jokes among some of the guys until they recognized that I really did "get" computers and was more than just decoration in the computer room.
I lasted on that for about 7 days of a 4.5 week summer class before realizing that the 2-3 really smart kids in the class were never in the keypunch room and set about solving that mystery.
It turns out that the smart kids were hunched over these odd, pale blue, rounded wedge-shaped TV thingies whose screens glowed blue (ADM3A's, for the uninitiated). I eventually learned that if one was willing to sign an oath of non-annoyance(1), one could get access to the HP 3000 system attached to those terminals, which could do RJE (remote job entry) to the IBM mainframe used to run our class' programs.
I signed the oath. I wrote my user ID and password in the inside front of my PL/1 book (yes, I still have it) back in the days where it was nearly unthinkable that anyone would try to log in to an account that wasn't theirs, because it just "wasn't done". I learned HP edit. And my life got much easier in terms of the class, and much more complicated in terms of life, because I became one of those rare geek girls who hung out in the computer room for fun.
And yes, FORTRAN (totally all upper case) is one of the languages I eventually professionally coded in (scientific analysis for a chem prof, using a vector processing unit), along with C, a half dozen assembly languages, SAS, PL/1, COBOL (yes, I really did it for 6 months), etc.
(1) The oath of non-annoyance (just my name for it) was a promise that you knew where the manuals were and would not bother the other computer room users with "how do I?" questions, in exchange for the privilege of being given an HP account. At least at my school, in those early days, you could either cut it on your own, or you couldn't cut it, and not much slack was given until you'd proven you had enough talent and work ethic to make it through the program.
I can absolutely relate! Once upon a time, I worked for a company that scheduled things very tightly, and had complex charts planning out the sequence of work that each resource would be doing, with no slack time built in to accommodate unancitipated slips that occur (this is one reason why space launches have "planned holds" periodically - not because people aren't doing their jobs, but because "stuff happens").
If you fell behind on a task (whether it was your fault or there was some issue with something/someone your work depended on, that could only be expected to occur on the 1% chance that the worst case scenario appeared, or maybe the CEO promised a new feature that he assured the project managers was "minor"), you'd throw the whole chart out of whack and cause lots of angst to the maintainers of said charts, and angst, like other things, rolls toward the guys and gals with their hands on the keyboard. People quickly learned that the best way to avoid being the latest one to have the red flag placed atop their cube (the official "recognition" of "you broke the schedule") was to double their most realistic estimate and convert to the next higher units. Two hours? Make that four days. 1 day? Two weeks. We found it disquietingly accurate in the worst and near-worst-case scenarios, although it overestimated the better and best case scenarios significantly.
This worked for a while because the client had what appeared to be(*) a bottomless budget.
* - The company was eventually replaced by an agile-methodology-before-agile-was-cool competitor who focused more on quality of software and less on quality of schedule charts, and got the job done for a lower price. (Hello Dave, Kevin and all if you're out there...)
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:
on
Unix Turns 40
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· Score: 2, Funny
Helen, Helen, Helen... if I've told you once, I've told you dozens of times... DO NOT post to slashdot when you've been up for 24 hours or more.
Uids are not up to 8 digits. Post id's are, and have been for ages.
Sigh. It's time for sleep.
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:
on
Unix Turns 40
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's the 40th anniversary of UNIX, and probably a day away from the 40th anniversary of the first time a more experienced user saw someone typing at the keyboard of a terminal connected to a UNIX box and thought with a knowing smile (as I did when I saw the find command above), "Oh, I'll bet that guy expects that command will do something different than what it will actually do." [ Optionally suffixed with the second thought, "This'll be fun to watch," or "ZOMG! NO!" in those cases where the mistakes are particularly awkward. ]
C'mon, you know you've thunk it when watching the less experienced and the preoccupied before. And if you're like most people, you've had the experience of wanting bash or ksh (or csh, so that the BSD guys feel loved) to be a DWIM shell (do-what-I-mean, as opposed to do-what-I-say).
And probably about one day and 5 minutes from the 40th anniversary of the first time two UNIX users discussed the finer points of quoting in shell commands.;-)
I want to be able to work in a room full of other engineers whom I can talk to
Definitely.
The campus computer lab gave me an environment in which I could be social *and* learn from others, which seems to me to be a good combination at a university. Frat parties and club nights weren't my thing. But project all-nighters in the computer lab WERE. Getting some odd Dijkstra pseudocode translated into functioning Pascal (or in later days, C), resulting in screams of glee and dancing around the printer, then needing to explain to the rest of the room WTF the commotion was all about, is the kind of thing I remember about my college experience. And in puzzling things out with whomever happened to be in the room at the time, I learned more. Plus, I got JOBS in the computer room. Potential employers would wander in, and watch to see who the "go to" people were, and then approach us with opportunities for gigs!
Although it was occasionally inconvenient to be known as the school's leading hacker (in both positive and negative ways), and I remember how difficult it sometimes was to finish projects with so many students coming up to me with "I know you're not on duty but...", this was the first time IN MY LIFE that I was legitimately POPULAR within any group. Random people brought me birthday cards and Christmas cards, and treated me to lunch. I started college as a shy kid. I left it as a woman with self-confidence, capable of leading her peers, directly as a result of interaction in the school computer labs.
Without a campus computer lab, my experience as a geek at school would have been far less healthy, because there simply would have been fewer group social activities I could enjoy, and less practice I would have gotten working in group situations.
"Why do people get hung up on stories having to have this amazing storyline to them. I love how vague parts of the story are AND how simple they are."
I wish to heck that I still had my copy of the paperback that filled in some of the details. There was more to it than ended up in the movie. Folks, I don't know who the author of that book knew in the industry, but he definitely knew at least one person who would qualify as "one of us."
The back story in the paperback, which was definitely G-rated but also definitely not targeted to 10-year-olds, described a life that many of us who've ever done corporate software development know (both the good and the bad sides). I was just getting my start in the industry, in school, at the time, but even then I could tell that this movie told a story about my still-nascent subculture. It did so in a manner that was more "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder) than it was "Office Space". It was the stuff of geek fantasy for a workaday programmer to end up in a video game -- and have his/her real life relationship interest in there, too. To fight good vs. evil, in an even more straighforward manner than we did in those all-day, all-night Saturday D&D sessions in college.
As improbable as it was, in a society where geekdom was still this thing hidden behind combination-lock doors, someone in Hollywood made a decent attempt at telling our story. And they did it in a way that even those who were not yet in the industry, but who felt the pull of technology, "got it".
Tron rocks. I had the book. I had the CALENDAR. I still know the question-mark-shaped pattern for one of the light cycle levels on the original arcade game, and could probably still blast gridbugs with the best of them. (Anyone know where to find a Tron game in the Seattle / Eastside area so that I can test that theory?)
Why not BLKSIZE=8000 or something greater? Or have mainframes changed enough in the past 20 years that BLKSIZE being some small number isn't the hit that it used to be?
I, too, recognized that utility name and grok the BAL with which it is associated. That was two platforms ago for me, but wow, I loved both 370 assembler and the fun I could have with JCL - a fact that was sorely lamented by the college computer center folks who were forever worrying about what I might do next.
This article is more or less obvious. A lot of programs for mobile devices aren't designed with security in mind. For some - like the handful of FTP clients listed - the password is insecure anyway, so it doesn't make sense to encrypt it. For many others, like the SSH client on my phone, even if you did encrypt the data, anyone who stole my phone would be able to log in to my account - after all, that's the point of saving the password.
If the FTP server implements MS' NTLM authentication, then the password can be at least obfuscated on the network rather than sent in clear text; I wonder if any of those FTP clients handle that. Similarly regarding the above assertion that "anyone who stole my phone would be able to log in to my account," don't be so sure. My PPC 6700 Windows Mobile phone implements a PIN scheme in the OS where after some period of non-use, the phone goes to a lock screen, and I have to type in my PIN to bring the Today screen up again. After some number of failures, the phone will erase its contents to protect the owner's privacy. (No, I do not use an external flash memory card.)
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers.
I'm afraid I have never forgiven Borland for their circa 1992 UI bug (or would that be a deliberate feature in some jokester's eyes?) in which a certain keystroke sequence used to build one's app in the MS IDE caused the Borland IDE to crash without saving the files on which one was working. The deal was that the MS IDE accepted a keystroke sequence of {altdown}{key1}{key2}{altup}, whereas Borland required {altdown}{key1}{altup}{key2}. I think I wasted a few hours of dev time thanks to that (while porting BSD rlogin to a PC, precisely), and it was enough to make me conclude that I could dismiss Borland's products whenever I was working in a shop that did not require me to use them.
I so miss the peach. "Here comes the grocery store" was even a cool slogan. And in the Seattle area, Larry's Market (high-end) produce was what they delivered when you ordered produce.
I used them twice a month. Today, safeway.com delivers, but it just isn't the same.
Somewhere, I still have my Home Grocer mousepad and spreader knife.
I was excited to hear that the guy who started Home Grocer way back when was contemplating starting another similar service again, about a year ago. Silence since then. I guess it didn't work out.
Active Windows 95 beta testers were well-accustomed to the bi-weekly Airborne envelopes whose contents smelled like celery, back in the day. It was a running joke.
I admit it. My brain went immediately to "Get Perpendicular!"... AND THE HITACHI BRANDING... as soon as I saw the reference to perpendicular in the story. It's been months since I saw that animated short -- if not more than a year.
Someone needs to give the guys who thought that up, a bonus.
I'm a woman who's been in this industry for a couple decades.
In my experience, large companies have been not only willing but EAGER to contribute to my ongoing training, and small companies have expected me to walk in the door knowing how to do the job they hired me for, and to maintain on my own time the knowledge to do whatever the job becomes in the future.
A couple small companies even expected me to use my annual leave time when I went to technical conferences. (It should be no wonder that I hung out my own freelance shingle after that... as long as I have to work as if I'm an independent who has to maintain her own skill set, I felt that I might as well be paid like one.)
Today, at a larger company, a set percentage of my time is reserved for attending training -- and that training is actually relevant to what I do.
At my university, Virginia Commonwealth University, the telnet 25 thing was well known and over-done.
So, when I wanted to get a point across, I sent a message from God.
I styled a file that looked like the output of a UNIX "write" command, but from God@universe instead of from an ordinary user, and sent it to someone's/dev/ttyNN. The junior systems programmer was the lucky recipient of this message, as I knew it'd puzzle him (hi Tom).
He figured out I *had* to have been the originator of this message somehow, and wanted to know how I did it. I finally let him in on the trick, which he pronounced lame once he understood how simple it was (lame? well it fooled YOU, guy....;-).
If you never get enough respect and can get it elsewhere I would look to work elsewhere. Let someone else less qualified take your job if that is what your boss wants due to his undervaluing.
He's right. It's that straightforward. Employers that value and respect skill are out there. They're not necessarily easy to find, but it's possible. And let your former employer reap what he has sown. Darwin at work.
And some of us were lucky enough to always get double joy....
I had the many-small-needles TB test twice as a child. I reacted to it both times, and each time had to endure a second, different injection test, which both times came up negative.
I theorized at the time that it was because I did have respiratory problems constantly as a child (and still do, I was wrecked permanently) because of chainsmoking parents, and that somehow the first TB test disagreed with all the lousy tobacco in my system or one of the respiratory ailments prompted by it.
Re:As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the par
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
Yep, totally true. A friend and I were chatting just this week about the whole pointlessness of references beyond it being proof that the person has at least 3 semi-reputable-sounding friends.
Re:As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the par
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
I have certain views on what generally men and women are better at in IT, but I would always try to not apply my generalisations to an individual.
True. I think many people feel the way you do.
I think that a non-trivial percentage of those people still have unconscious ideas in the gender area that affect their decisions and perceptions, though. It's called a "blind spot" because the whole idea is that the person is completely unaware that they've got it. (I'm not saying YOU have this... I'm just making a statistical observation of a group.)
I've worked with a number of people who've expressed dismay at the cluelessless of managers like the one who gave a new, less skilled, male coworker preference on the customer engineering tasks. But the funny thing about this is that one of these coworkers (whom I'd term a progressive guy, who had a history of proactively encouraging women to study IT) is actually the one who made the "honey, you don't really want to be lugging 50 pound servers around," comment regarding my aspirations in the network administration realm. Until I really pushed him on it, asking him what I'd ever specifically done or said that indicated to him that that was the case, he had been unaware that he had his own hidden assumptions about gender roles. I listed numerous things I'd said positively about my work in such a role previously, and a number of things I'd done on a volunteer basis after hours lately just to keep my hand in admin activities, and asked him if I'd ever said anything to indicate that there was even one facet of net admin work that I really disliked (as opposed to business apps development, about which I could readily list my frustrations). He finally said, "Wow. That's what I call an eye opener. I hope I haven't unwittingly transmitted that thinking to the students in my classes."
He agreed after thinking about this for a while that while he has always championed the idea of more women being in IT... that he had been making a few assumptions about where in IT women would want to be, and that that had affected the directions in which he steered women interested in IT careers. I just wonder how much more of that is out there in education.
The above is not to take away from this cohort's efforts to help women get into the IT field in general. He's actually put significant effort into it over the years, because he thinks more women should pursue the field than do. But it does show that even someone THAT open to women in IT, can unintentionally direct a woman away from the area of IT for which she might have the most aptitude (which is ultimately reflected in her achievement and satisfaction in that field).
Re:As another woman, be careful what you wish for
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
I was working three distinct jobs at once: software development for a legacy software program, tech support for the main client on the other coast and network/systems admin (all the wiring, servers, routers, dealing with the ISP, trying to get all the employees to update their own virus software (yeah right), etc etc etc). I was also the person all the other employees went to when they needed something researched online, giving me the nickname of the "company search engine".
Yes, that's eventually the way I felt as an independent with commitments to multiple regular clients (and a very similar mix of dev/sysadmin/support jobs, since I value variety in my professional activities). 70 hour weeks were pretty normal, and that doesn't work in the long-term. This led me back to a corporate environment in which I found the variety I crave, creative opportunities, technical challenge, etc.... all packaged nicely within a more reasonable work week, with management that values work/life balance. There are occasional weeks with 10+ hours of OT when deadlines loom, but not every week. I may end up back in academia myself at some point, but right now, I'm enjoying where I am.
Re:As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the par
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
I've been in IT since the mid 80s, and recall things we used to do for data, like playing around with packing multiple flags into a single byte as bits. That took people being more clever with the code. I haven't done things like that for years - storage is just so cheap.
For embedded systems where an extremely-low-cost part is the goal or to optimize a heavily-used network protocol, such techniques are still quite useful. In many cases though, you're right, it's better to have maintainable code that was written and shipped in a timely manner, than obscure code that took an extra few weeks to develop in order to produce a small performance improvement.
If I had mod points and hadn't already replied in this thread, I'd mod parent up as insightful.
It's discouraging to be stereotyped as less skilled than the typical male doing the same job, and you have to really have a passion for the field to keep at it and work to overcome the stereotypes (rather than going into a line of work in which you feel more welcome).
Slashdot Mirror
Just some data points for slashdot posterity. When I first saw a functioning corporate computing department as a high school intern, back in the late 1970's, it looked like this:
Women worked in the basement computer room in operations and keypunch/data entry.
Men worked upstairs as systems analysts, and used ADM 3A's to enter their programs and (even back then in CORPORATE AMERICA, they wore suits) play Battleship, Hangman and Star Trek. They also taught interns how to play Battleship, Hangman and Star Trek.
To be honest, I did rarely lack for offers of assistance, even (as the parent points out) when I knew what I was doing. ;-)
That was what my comment about life getting more complicated was referring to.
On the flip side, I was also the target of a few jokes among some of the guys until they recognized that I really did "get" computers and was more than just decoration in the computer room.
I hear ya on the IBM keypunch.
I lasted on that for about 7 days of a 4.5 week summer class before realizing that the 2-3 really smart kids in the class were never in the keypunch room and set about solving that mystery.
It turns out that the smart kids were hunched over these odd, pale blue, rounded wedge-shaped TV thingies whose screens glowed blue (ADM3A's, for the uninitiated). I eventually learned that if one was willing to sign an oath of non-annoyance(1), one could get access to the HP 3000 system attached to those terminals, which could do RJE (remote job entry) to the IBM mainframe used to run our class' programs.
I signed the oath. I wrote my user ID and password in the inside front of my PL/1 book (yes, I still have it) back in the days where it was nearly unthinkable that anyone would try to log in to an account that wasn't theirs, because it just "wasn't done". I learned HP edit. And my life got much easier in terms of the class, and much more complicated in terms of life, because I became one of those rare geek girls who hung out in the computer room for fun.
And yes, FORTRAN (totally all upper case) is one of the languages I eventually professionally coded in (scientific analysis for a chem prof, using a vector processing unit), along with C, a half dozen assembly languages, SAS, PL/1, COBOL (yes, I really did it for 6 months), etc.
(1) The oath of non-annoyance (just my name for it) was a promise that you knew where the manuals were and would not bother the other computer room users with "how do I?" questions, in exchange for the privilege of being given an HP account. At least at my school, in those early days, you could either cut it on your own, or you couldn't cut it, and not much slack was given until you'd proven you had enough talent and work ethic to make it through the program.
If you fell behind on a task (whether it was your fault or there was some issue with something/someone your work depended on, that could only be expected to occur on the 1% chance that the worst case scenario appeared, or maybe the CEO promised a new feature that he assured the project managers was "minor"), you'd throw the whole chart out of whack and cause lots of angst to the maintainers of said charts, and angst, like other things, rolls toward the guys and gals with their hands on the keyboard. People quickly learned that the best way to avoid being the latest one to have the red flag placed atop their cube (the official "recognition" of "you broke the schedule") was to double their most realistic estimate and convert to the next higher units. Two hours? Make that four days. 1 day? Two weeks. We found it disquietingly accurate in the worst and near-worst-case scenarios, although it overestimated the better and best case scenarios significantly.
This worked for a while because the client had what appeared to be(*) a bottomless budget.
* - The company was eventually replaced by an agile-methodology-before-agile-was-cool competitor who focused more on quality of software and less on quality of schedule charts, and got the job done for a lower price. (Hello Dave, Kevin and all if you're out there...)
Uids are not up to 8 digits. Post id's are, and have been for ages.
Sigh. It's time for sleep.
C'mon, you know you've thunk it when watching the less experienced and the preoccupied before. And if you're like most people, you've had the experience of wanting bash or ksh (or csh, so that the BSD guys feel loved) to be a DWIM shell (do-what-I-mean, as opposed to do-what-I-say).
And probably about one day and 5 minutes from the 40th anniversary of the first time two UNIX users discussed the finer points of quoting in shell commands. ;-)
LOL. +1 to the idea of the "techie discount". Nice of them, huh? ;-)
A place where Business Majors can go to find CompSci geeks of the opposite gender to do their Programming for Non-majors assignments for them...
There. Fixed that for you. As a female former teenage "microkid", I'd need a dozen hands to count the attempts.....
Definitely.
The campus computer lab gave me an environment in which I could be social *and* learn from others, which seems to me to be a good combination at a university. Frat parties and club nights weren't my thing. But project all-nighters in the computer lab WERE. Getting some odd Dijkstra pseudocode translated into functioning Pascal (or in later days, C), resulting in screams of glee and dancing around the printer, then needing to explain to the rest of the room WTF the commotion was all about, is the kind of thing I remember about my college experience. And in puzzling things out with whomever happened to be in the room at the time, I learned more. Plus, I got JOBS in the computer room. Potential employers would wander in, and watch to see who the "go to" people were, and then approach us with opportunities for gigs!
Although it was occasionally inconvenient to be known as the school's leading hacker (in both positive and negative ways), and I remember how difficult it sometimes was to finish projects with so many students coming up to me with "I know you're not on duty but...", this was the first time IN MY LIFE that I was legitimately POPULAR within any group. Random people brought me birthday cards and Christmas cards, and treated me to lunch. I started college as a shy kid. I left it as a woman with self-confidence, capable of leading her peers, directly as a result of interaction in the school computer labs.
Without a campus computer lab, my experience as a geek at school would have been far less healthy, because there simply would have been fewer group social activities I could enjoy, and less practice I would have gotten working in group situations.
"Why do people get hung up on stories having to have this amazing storyline to them. I love how vague parts of the story are AND how simple they are."
I wish to heck that I still had my copy of the paperback that filled in some of the details. There was more to it than ended up in the movie. Folks, I don't know who the author of that book knew in the industry, but he definitely knew at least one person who would qualify as "one of us."
The back story in the paperback, which was definitely G-rated but also definitely not targeted to 10-year-olds, described a life that many of us who've ever done corporate software development know (both the good and the bad sides). I was just getting my start in the industry, in school, at the time, but even then I could tell that this movie told a story about my still-nascent subculture. It did so in a manner that was more "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder) than it was "Office Space". It was the stuff of geek fantasy for a workaday programmer to end up in a video game -- and have his/her real life relationship interest in there, too. To fight good vs. evil, in an even more straighforward manner than we did in those all-day, all-night Saturday D&D sessions in college.
As improbable as it was, in a society where geekdom was still this thing hidden behind combination-lock doors, someone in Hollywood made a decent attempt at telling our story. And they did it in a way that even those who were not yet in the industry, but who felt the pull of technology, "got it".
Tron rocks. I had the book. I had the CALENDAR. I still know the question-mark-shaped pattern for one of the light cycle levels on the original arcade game, and could probably still blast gridbugs with the best of them. (Anyone know where to find a Tron game in the Seattle / Eastside area so that I can test that theory?)
Why not BLKSIZE=8000 or something greater? Or have mainframes changed enough in the past 20 years that BLKSIZE being some small number isn't the hit that it used to be?
I, too, recognized that utility name and grok the BAL with which it is associated. That was two platforms ago for me, but wow, I loved both 370 assembler and the fun I could have with JCL - a fact that was sorely lamented by the college computer center folks who were forever worrying about what I might do next.
If the FTP server implements MS' NTLM authentication, then the password can be at least obfuscated on the network rather than sent in clear text; I wonder if any of those FTP clients handle that. Similarly regarding the above assertion that "anyone who stole my phone would be able to log in to my account," don't be so sure. My PPC 6700 Windows Mobile phone implements a PIN scheme in the OS where after some period of non-use, the phone goes to a lock screen, and I have to type in my PIN to bring the Today screen up again. After some number of failures, the phone will erase its contents to protect the owner's privacy. (No, I do not use an external flash memory card.)
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers.
I'm afraid I have never forgiven Borland for their circa 1992 UI bug (or would that be a deliberate feature in some jokester's eyes?) in which a certain keystroke sequence used to build one's app in the MS IDE caused the Borland IDE to crash without saving the files on which one was working. The deal was that the MS IDE accepted a keystroke sequence of {altdown}{key1}{key2}{altup}, whereas Borland required {altdown}{key1}{altup}{key2}. I think I wasted a few hours of dev time thanks to that (while porting BSD rlogin to a PC, precisely), and it was enough to make me conclude that I could dismiss Borland's products whenever I was working in a shop that did not require me to use them.
I so miss the peach. "Here comes the grocery store" was even a cool slogan. And in the Seattle area, Larry's Market (high-end) produce was what they delivered when you ordered produce.
I used them twice a month. Today, safeway.com delivers, but it just isn't the same.
Somewhere, I still have my Home Grocer mousepad and spreader knife.
I was excited to hear that the guy who started Home Grocer way back when was contemplating starting another similar service again, about a year ago. Silence since then. I guess it didn't work out.
Active Windows 95 beta testers were well-accustomed to the bi-weekly Airborne envelopes whose contents smelled like celery, back in the day. It was a running joke.
I admit it. My brain went immediately to "Get Perpendicular!" ... AND THE HITACHI BRANDING ... as soon as I saw the reference to perpendicular in the story. It's been months since I saw that animated short -- if not more than a year.
Someone needs to give the guys who thought that up, a bonus.
I'm a woman who's been in this industry for a couple decades.
In my experience, large companies have been not only willing but EAGER to contribute to my ongoing training, and small companies have expected me to walk in the door knowing how to do the job they hired me for, and to maintain on my own time the knowledge to do whatever the job becomes in the future.
A couple small companies even expected me to use my annual leave time when I went to technical conferences. (It should be no wonder that I hung out my own freelance shingle after that... as long as I have to work as if I'm an independent who has to maintain her own skill set, I felt that I might as well be paid like one.)
Today, at a larger company, a set percentage of my time is reserved for attending training -- and that training is actually relevant to what I do.
At my university, Virginia Commonwealth University, the telnet 25 thing was well known and over-done.
/dev/ttyNN. The junior systems programmer was the lucky recipient of this message, as I knew it'd puzzle him (hi Tom).
;-).
So, when I wanted to get a point across, I sent a message from God.
I styled a file that looked like the output of a UNIX "write" command, but from God@universe instead of from an ordinary user, and sent it to someone's
He figured out I *had* to have been the originator of this message somehow, and wanted to know how I did it. I finally let him in on the trick, which he pronounced lame once he understood how simple it was (lame? well it fooled YOU, guy....
And some of us were lucky enough to always get double joy....
I had the many-small-needles TB test twice as a child. I reacted to it both times, and each time had to endure a second, different injection test, which both times came up negative.
I theorized at the time that it was because I did have respiratory problems constantly as a child (and still do, I was wrecked permanently) because of chainsmoking parents, and that somehow the first TB test disagreed with all the lousy tobacco in my system or one of the respiratory ailments prompted by it.
Yep, totally true. A friend and I were chatting just this week about the whole pointlessness of references beyond it being proof that the person has at least 3 semi-reputable-sounding friends.
True. I think many people feel the way you do.
I think that a non-trivial percentage of those people still have unconscious ideas in the gender area that affect their decisions and perceptions, though. It's called a "blind spot" because the whole idea is that the person is completely unaware that they've got it. (I'm not saying YOU have this... I'm just making a statistical observation of a group.)
I've worked with a number of people who've expressed dismay at the cluelessless of managers like the one who gave a new, less skilled, male coworker preference on the customer engineering tasks. But the funny thing about this is that one of these coworkers (whom I'd term a progressive guy, who had a history of proactively encouraging women to study IT) is actually the one who made the "honey, you don't really want to be lugging 50 pound servers around," comment regarding my aspirations in the network administration realm. Until I really pushed him on it, asking him what I'd ever specifically done or said that indicated to him that that was the case, he had been unaware that he had his own hidden assumptions about gender roles. I listed numerous things I'd said positively about my work in such a role previously, and a number of things I'd done on a volunteer basis after hours lately just to keep my hand in admin activities, and asked him if I'd ever said anything to indicate that there was even one facet of net admin work that I really disliked (as opposed to business apps development, about which I could readily list my frustrations). He finally said, "Wow. That's what I call an eye opener. I hope I haven't unwittingly transmitted that thinking to the students in my classes."
He agreed after thinking about this for a while that while he has always championed the idea of more women being in IT... that he had been making a few assumptions about where in IT women would want to be, and that that had affected the directions in which he steered women interested in IT careers. I just wonder how much more of that is out there in education.
The above is not to take away from this cohort's efforts to help women get into the IT field in general. He's actually put significant effort into it over the years, because he thinks more women should pursue the field than do. But it does show that even someone THAT open to women in IT, can unintentionally direct a woman away from the area of IT for which she might have the most aptitude (which is ultimately reflected in her achievement and satisfaction in that field).
Yes, that's eventually the way I felt as an independent with commitments to multiple regular clients (and a very similar mix of dev/sysadmin/support jobs, since I value variety in my professional activities). 70 hour weeks were pretty normal, and that doesn't work in the long-term. This led me back to a corporate environment in which I found the variety I crave, creative opportunities, technical challenge, etc. ... all packaged nicely within a more reasonable work week, with management that values work/life balance. There are occasional weeks with 10+ hours of OT when deadlines loom, but not every week. I may end up back in academia myself at some point, but right now, I'm enjoying where I am.
It's discouraging to be stereotyped as less skilled than the typical male doing the same job, and you have to really have a passion for the field to keep at it and work to overcome the stereotypes (rather than going into a line of work in which you feel more welcome).