This is perfect timing! I got an issue forwarded from help desk today about a user unable to do pretty much anything in our portal. After investigating, turns out the problem is they are using IE8 and we don't advertise any 'minimum' requirements. I'm going to campaign tomorrow that we officially do not support this browser, and this will be good evidence to support my claim. Otherwise they'll have to pay for an extra week of dev work while I go through everything that isn't working the way it should and figure out a way to re-write it... (mostly CSS issues, but some terrible hidden/disabled field validation problems in there as well, and probably some other shit I haven't found yet...)
Logo did well in that some schools bought it I guess.
We used to use it in early primary school, along with playing Lemonade Stand in our weekly 'computer class' on the Microbee's. I enjoyed it because I loved anything computer related (we didn't have one at home) but I don't know if it was really 'fun'...
Fair enough. Next time I am the only woman in a meeting I'll make sure to tell my friends all about it. It may be actually fascinating to them. (not sarcasm)
...but the summary beat me to it. Dammit! I was going to say something like, 'but what are they doing to get girls into coding?' I was going to be so witty. Then I saw that it's actually a real thing. Now I don't know what to knit-pick. Are they doing enough to encourage black people? Maybe they need a kwanza-bot tracker?
High chance the only thing that is linked is the Microsoft Exchange server so people can chat to each other on Lync. The Windows XP version, because Defence have still not been upgraded.
At least if it's going to rain, the Chinese won't be left in the dark!
This was about being a woman in a mostly-male work environment.
It's not really that interesting a topic. I can sum it up for you in 3 sentences.
1. The ladies toilets are usually pretty clean because they get less use, I hear from the guys on the floor that theirs are usually below par, cleanliness wise.
2. I have a lot of people to talk video games with, as I find more men than women are into gaming and none of my girlfriends play games, so that's awesome.
3. Um... hmmm... nothing else significant comes to mind actually. I guess it's even less interesting than I originally thought.
I found it weird an interview about being the only woman in the workplace has anything to do with gamergate? I would have given pretty much the exact same answers for most questions but for that I would have been like, wtf does that have to do with my job and workplace?
I bet he was disappointed you didn't have any horror stories to tell.
Personally I like being one of the only women, the girls toilets are really clean, and only very rarely does someone bring their kid in.
There's a lot of good stuff here. I tried to say the same thing on another forum and got shot down for not agreeing that we must push for more women in tech and for companies to have quotes for hiring women, which would be so so bad for the reasons outlined here. Anyway...
I work in a large IT department, we probably have about 50/50 men/women overall, though the numbers vary per job. The hardware/networking/infrastructure is mostly male, the business side, project management office etc is mostly female. As such the team I work in on a day to day basis is pretty evenly split, with my manager, several BA's, UX, testers, developers etc.
When it comes to only the developers, I am the only women out of around 25 of us. This isn't counting some of the admin/config people, like SAP admin, Sharepoint etc. there's more of a mix there, and also the website team are about 50/50.
Does anyone give a crap? I don't think so. We all just do our work. I go to developer meetings, I'm the only women in the room, it doesn't make a difference to me, and I don't think to anyone else either. If we got another women in the team I don't think we'd be gaining more diversity, we'd just be getting another developer.
At yet people are telling us that we should care? And that we have a problem?
In my career I've only ever felt like a minority and outsider for one reason, my race, being white and also born here. No one wants to be the only person not speaking Hindi when everyone around them is. When looking for a new job I'd be more keen on it if it's not an entirely Indian team. How many women they have, don't care.
What do you mean by 'early programmers'? Do you mean the people who operated the early computing machines, which was considered menial work and suitable for women? Or was there an era more recently when programming was a popular womens job (I am not aware of one though statistics show enrollments for women in CS have gone down again in recent years, I seem to recall reading somewhere.) I imagine it would have been the kind of job that was repetitive and boring and easy for people to learn and do, while the men did the more important things. Like my grandmother was a book keeper, it was basically considered to be 'just punching number in' and updating records, while she probably worked for a man who was the accountant. I feel like early programming might have been like that? I think you are right, women were offered several jobs to choose from, you can be a typist, a receptionist, a switchboard worker etc.
So... now that programming is considered important, and difficult, I can see there would have been a swing back towards it being 'mens' work. I'm sure my mother was never offered it as a possible career choice.
These days though, there's really nothing stopping people from pursuing any career they want. My high school we all did cooking, sewing, computer studies, metalwork, woodwork, doesn't matter what gender you were. Then you could pursue whichever subjects you wanted in later years. I don't see how any system could squeeze anyone out. We all learned BASIC in year 8, pretty much everyone hated it. I liked it, so I was encouraged to do the harder of the two IT subjects in year 12 (we did programming in Pascal and VB while the other one they did excel and word). I was never given the impression it was a boys subject, though I was the only girl in the class.
Personally, I think that most women just aren't interested. The kind of people who make good programmers are those who like to understand how things work and learn how to build things. Women in general just like to learn how to use things. Plus it's a bit of a crappy job and I think most women are smart enough to see that. I love it though. There's something wrong with me. None of my female friends are interested in learning how to put a PC together, or learn much code beyond customising a wordpress site. I don't think it's because the opportunities aren't there. I think it's because they can do anything they want, and they have better things in mind.
There are several surgeries but their effectiveness isn't that great. An acquaintance went to South Korea for hers and she doesn't sound much different.
But I'm sure plenty of trans women would pay top dollar for something that actually works.
If I interviewed and got the vibe they were just keen on my because they wanted a women, I'd not be very so willing to take the job.
Who wants to work in a team that are thinking at the back of their minds, 'well the boss only hired her because she's a women, she probably wouldn't have gotten an interview otherwise' even if you did have the skills. Or worse, did not have the skills and got hired anyway!
I landed a pretty competitive position a couple years ago and someone from university had to nerve to say to me they probably just liked that I was a woman. No buddy, I'm actually just better than you and very talented and personable. I was later involved in intern recruitment for the same company and we didn't even take any women this year, none of them were good enough. I am a developer, for context. Also a women if that was unclear. lol;)
In world war 2 the Australian army recruitment targeted women by mentioning how snazzy the uniform was to appeal to their love of fashion and whatnot as a way to make them want to join. https://www.awm.gov.au/images/...
Well I never said they were any good! They seem to be able to get jobs somehow though.
I spent most of my time as a graduate 'junior' developer debugging and re-writing garbage code that was churned out by our 'specialist' contractors who got paid more than me. Oh wait, I'm still having to do that...
Because university graduates need on the job training, but an imported worker comes to you custom picked for their experience?
Why train a grad to be your next SAP developer when you can get one from India who already knows how to do it?
With access to steel wool from the kitchen and some copper wire and a battery from a smoke detector, I think I could fashion some kind of phone detonated exploding hacksaw bomb. Then take the drugs.
Daycare often costs so much at the end of the week you're not even gaining a lot of extra money by working.
Some people work because they LIKE getting out of the house and enjoy their chosen careers!
I enjoy my job and can't imagine being at home all the time. You'd go crazy! The prospect is extremely unappealing to me. A couple of guys I work with only do 4 days a week and spend the extras time with their young families. That seems reasonable. If I met a guy and we decided to have kids and he wanted to stay home, and we could afford it, fine. Not for me though.
I can honestly say I learned very little. Like many others I learned by myself in high school so by the time I got to University I already knew most of the subject matter. I went to one of the first programming lectures and they first slide said, "What is a pointer?" I got up and walked out. There were plenty of others who knew nothing though, so hey they have to learn somewhere! I only went and paid the money for the paper to prove that I could do what I could already do, and learned some interesting but mostly useless stuff alongside, like networking protocols and what UML diagrams are (yuck!).
We're all aware that getting your 'qualification' only qualifies you to start learning on the job though, right? So if you are ready to learn on the job in two years instead of four, sure why not?
However I think money would be better spent on in-house training programs, get the big companies to take more unqualified people like apprentices and train them in the real workplace along with some of the theory. You'd be a better programmer after a year of that than after graduating university. I had a couple of good coding 'mentors' early on that installed their ideas of best practices into me (subjective) and that was more valuable than any lecture.
I'll concede that there may be girls out there who are not encouraged in particular to learn how things work or try technical things, but I think if you are keen, you will find a way. I am a strong person who does what she wants not what society says, so maybe I can't speak for all girls. There may be some who want to take advanced IT at school but are put off by being the only girl in the class. It never bothered me.
While my father was a telecommunications technician and therefore had the answers to 'how does electricity work' we never had a computer at home and I learned how to build them when I was old enough to have my own money to buy parts and seek out people who could show me how. My brother still has no idea how to build a PC or anything like that. Mum also taught me how to sew:)
Everyone learns a little bit of coding in school though (at least in Australia where I am) so I'd be surprised if teachers are aiming those classes at the boys only. My high school teacher loved that I was interested (I made a pretty kick-arse address book in Pascal for my final assignment) and in electronics I was known as the teachers favourite being the only girl, and encouraged a lot! So if there are girls being told they can't have a technical career if they want one, I'm sorry but I've never seen any evidence of it. I graduated high school in 1998.
Cheers;) I'm not a newbie I just took a 5 year break and can't seem to find my old account. Used to be my home page but I left IT to work as a snowboard instructor and stopped visiting. Thought I'd see what old Slashdot was up to, it's still good!
I've got three male cousins who are in hot demand because they were smart enough to take these jobs. One's a nurse, one's a primary school teacher and the other works in child care. Though they did what they wanted to do because they wanted to do it, not because they knew they'd be sought after to 'balance' the genders at work.
'Society' never encouraged me to code. My entire high school class learned QBASIC in Info Tech class. Pretty much everyone hated it, I found it fascinating. I always wanted to know how things worked, I got my Dad to explain to me how the TV made pictures, how sounds went down the phone, how a microwave made things warm..I was born like this. There are the kinds of people that want to buy things, and there are the kinds of people who wants to understand what things are made of, and how to make them themselves. The second kind of people become programmers. More men than women are that kind of person, they are not taught to be that way, they just are. My female high school friends had the exact same opportunities to learn to code in high school, and to take electronics as an elective subject, but chose not to. I doubt they came from families where their Dad said, "you can't learn to do that it's a boys job".
Slashdot Mirror
This is perfect timing! I got an issue forwarded from help desk today about a user unable to do pretty much anything in our portal. After investigating, turns out the problem is they are using IE8 and we don't advertise any 'minimum' requirements. I'm going to campaign tomorrow that we officially do not support this browser, and this will be good evidence to support my claim. Otherwise they'll have to pay for an extra week of dev work while I go through everything that isn't working the way it should and figure out a way to re-write it... (mostly CSS issues, but some terrible hidden/disabled field validation problems in there as well, and probably some other shit I haven't found yet...)
My official title at work, according to my SAP record is 'Developer Programmer'...
Logo did well in that some schools bought it I guess. We used to use it in early primary school, along with playing Lemonade Stand in our weekly 'computer class' on the Microbee's. I enjoyed it because I loved anything computer related (we didn't have one at home) but I don't know if it was really 'fun'...
Fair enough. Next time I am the only woman in a meeting I'll make sure to tell my friends all about it. It may be actually fascinating to them. (not sarcasm)
...but the summary beat me to it. Dammit! I was going to say something like, 'but what are they doing to get girls into coding?' I was going to be so witty. Then I saw that it's actually a real thing. Now I don't know what to knit-pick. Are they doing enough to encourage black people? Maybe they need a kwanza-bot tracker?
At least if it's going to rain, the Chinese won't be left in the dark!
This was about being a woman in a mostly-male work environment.
It's not really that interesting a topic. I can sum it up for you in 3 sentences.
1. The ladies toilets are usually pretty clean because they get less use, I hear from the guys on the floor that theirs are usually below par, cleanliness wise.
2. I have a lot of people to talk video games with, as I find more men than women are into gaming and none of my girlfriends play games, so that's awesome.
3. Um... hmmm... nothing else significant comes to mind actually. I guess it's even less interesting than I originally thought.
I bet he was disappointed you didn't have any horror stories to tell.
Personally I like being one of the only women, the girls toilets are really clean, and only very rarely does someone bring their kid in.
There's a lot of good stuff here. I tried to say the same thing on another forum and got shot down for not agreeing that we must push for more women in tech and for companies to have quotes for hiring women, which would be so so bad for the reasons outlined here. Anyway... I work in a large IT department, we probably have about 50/50 men/women overall, though the numbers vary per job. The hardware/networking/infrastructure is mostly male, the business side, project management office etc is mostly female. As such the team I work in on a day to day basis is pretty evenly split, with my manager, several BA's, UX, testers, developers etc. When it comes to only the developers, I am the only women out of around 25 of us. This isn't counting some of the admin/config people, like SAP admin, Sharepoint etc. there's more of a mix there, and also the website team are about 50/50. Does anyone give a crap? I don't think so. We all just do our work. I go to developer meetings, I'm the only women in the room, it doesn't make a difference to me, and I don't think to anyone else either. If we got another women in the team I don't think we'd be gaining more diversity, we'd just be getting another developer. At yet people are telling us that we should care? And that we have a problem? In my career I've only ever felt like a minority and outsider for one reason, my race, being white and also born here. No one wants to be the only person not speaking Hindi when everyone around them is. When looking for a new job I'd be more keen on it if it's not an entirely Indian team. How many women they have, don't care.
So... now that programming is considered important, and difficult, I can see there would have been a swing back towards it being 'mens' work. I'm sure my mother was never offered it as a possible career choice.
These days though, there's really nothing stopping people from pursuing any career they want. My high school we all did cooking, sewing, computer studies, metalwork, woodwork, doesn't matter what gender you were. Then you could pursue whichever subjects you wanted in later years. I don't see how any system could squeeze anyone out. We all learned BASIC in year 8, pretty much everyone hated it. I liked it, so I was encouraged to do the harder of the two IT subjects in year 12 (we did programming in Pascal and VB while the other one they did excel and word). I was never given the impression it was a boys subject, though I was the only girl in the class.
Personally, I think that most women just aren't interested. The kind of people who make good programmers are those who like to understand how things work and learn how to build things. Women in general just like to learn how to use things. Plus it's a bit of a crappy job and I think most women are smart enough to see that. I love it though. There's something wrong with me. None of my female friends are interested in learning how to put a PC together, or learn much code beyond customising a wordpress site. I don't think it's because the opportunities aren't there. I think it's because they can do anything they want, and they have better things in mind.
There are several surgeries but their effectiveness isn't that great. An acquaintance went to South Korea for hers and she doesn't sound much different. But I'm sure plenty of trans women would pay top dollar for something that actually works.
Who wants to work in a team that are thinking at the back of their minds, 'well the boss only hired her because she's a women, she probably wouldn't have gotten an interview otherwise' even if you did have the skills. Or worse, did not have the skills and got hired anyway!
I landed a pretty competitive position a couple years ago and someone from university had to nerve to say to me they probably just liked that I was a woman. No buddy, I'm actually just better than you and very talented and personable. I was later involved in intern recruitment for the same company and we didn't even take any women this year, none of them were good enough. I am a developer, for context. Also a women if that was unclear. lol ;)
I thought we had advanced as a society?
Or maybe infosec workers need a trendy uniform?
I spent most of my time as a graduate 'junior' developer debugging and re-writing garbage code that was churned out by our 'specialist' contractors who got paid more than me. Oh wait, I'm still having to do that...
Because university graduates need on the job training, but an imported worker comes to you custom picked for their experience? Why train a grad to be your next SAP developer when you can get one from India who already knows how to do it?
Which I believe M$ bought the hardware rights to and turned it into the Zune. I loved my Gigabeat...
Aw man someone else is using my witty original wifi network name...
With access to steel wool from the kitchen and some copper wire and a battery from a smoke detector, I think I could fashion some kind of phone detonated exploding hacksaw bomb. Then take the drugs.
And we just realised this TODAY! Whoa!
Some people work because they LIKE getting out of the house and enjoy their chosen careers!
I enjoy my job and can't imagine being at home all the time. You'd go crazy! The prospect is extremely unappealing to me. A couple of guys I work with only do 4 days a week and spend the extras time with their young families. That seems reasonable. If I met a guy and we decided to have kids and he wanted to stay home, and we could afford it, fine. Not for me though.
We're all aware that getting your 'qualification' only qualifies you to start learning on the job though, right? So if you are ready to learn on the job in two years instead of four, sure why not?
However I think money would be better spent on in-house training programs, get the big companies to take more unqualified people like apprentices and train them in the real workplace along with some of the theory. You'd be a better programmer after a year of that than after graduating university. I had a couple of good coding 'mentors' early on that installed their ideas of best practices into me (subjective) and that was more valuable than any lecture.
I'll concede that there may be girls out there who are not encouraged in particular to learn how things work or try technical things, but I think if you are keen, you will find a way. I am a strong person who does what she wants not what society says, so maybe I can't speak for all girls. There may be some who want to take advanced IT at school but are put off by being the only girl in the class. It never bothered me. While my father was a telecommunications technician and therefore had the answers to 'how does electricity work' we never had a computer at home and I learned how to build them when I was old enough to have my own money to buy parts and seek out people who could show me how. My brother still has no idea how to build a PC or anything like that. Mum also taught me how to sew :)
Everyone learns a little bit of coding in school though (at least in Australia where I am) so I'd be surprised if teachers are aiming those classes at the boys only. My high school teacher loved that I was interested (I made a pretty kick-arse address book in Pascal for my final assignment) and in electronics I was known as the teachers favourite being the only girl, and encouraged a lot! So if there are girls being told they can't have a technical career if they want one, I'm sorry but I've never seen any evidence of it. I graduated high school in 1998.
Cheers ;) I'm not a newbie I just took a 5 year break and can't seem to find my old account. Used to be my home page but I left IT to work as a snowboard instructor and stopped visiting. Thought I'd see what old Slashdot was up to, it's still good!
I've got three male cousins who are in hot demand because they were smart enough to take these jobs. One's a nurse, one's a primary school teacher and the other works in child care. Though they did what they wanted to do because they wanted to do it, not because they knew they'd be sought after to 'balance' the genders at work.
'Society' never encouraged me to code. My entire high school class learned QBASIC in Info Tech class. Pretty much everyone hated it, I found it fascinating. I always wanted to know how things worked, I got my Dad to explain to me how the TV made pictures, how sounds went down the phone, how a microwave made things warm..I was born like this. There are the kinds of people that want to buy things, and there are the kinds of people who wants to understand what things are made of, and how to make them themselves. The second kind of people become programmers. More men than women are that kind of person, they are not taught to be that way, they just are. My female high school friends had the exact same opportunities to learn to code in high school, and to take electronics as an elective subject, but chose not to. I doubt they came from families where their Dad said, "you can't learn to do that it's a boys job".