I have been an IT Director for 5 years, and I came up through a more traditionally "female" way (no, not sleeping my way there, get your mind out of the gutter)--I worked in training and applications support before hitting the top role. I learned the networking side as well, because I followed around the network engineer when no one would show up to my training classes. (gosh, I was an ABYSMAL trainer--I dislike repeating myself.
Two years ago, I decided to get my pointy-haired-boss on and go to business school. I elected to go to the only all-female MBA program in the country. Why? Because the biggest weakness I had was that I did not know how to deal with *women* in the work environment, and my boss was (and still is) a woman.
It's not easy to be in IT regardless of your gender. If you dislike foul language, well, good luck--I've thrown my share of f-bombs around when firmwide printing dies or the HVAC springs a leak and pours water through my servers and switches. Do you hate being around people who are angry? Heaven forbid you ever answer a support call. Do you like a complete night's sleep every night? Well, don't take a job that touches a data center or users who work in different time zones (don't have kids, either).
Because of IT's difficulty, we behave differently. We have a harder edge, but we laugh more as well. The jokes might be off-color or at someone's expense, but without the laugh, there's no pressure valve. Most of us drink fairly heavily, because we don't have much downtime and enjoy the relaxant effect of EtOH. Now, I don't know if we behave differently because we are predominantly male, or if we have different pressures, but most of us do behave this way.
Now add in technology's complexity, and you have a complicated situation. Most folks are in IT because we think (or at least used to think!) that technology is really cool. Not everyone does so. And, frankly, little boys are socialized to think technology=cool much more than little girls are. We are a product of our upbringing to some extent.
So how do I make IT work for women? For anyone? It's a question of alignment. If who you want to be aligns with your work environment, then stay. If something has to change and you can change it, do so and stay. If not, leave your job, or leave the industry, if you have the freedom to do so. If you do not have the freedom? Well, have a drink...
I don't know if you're in the US or not, but if you were at this job and you're visually impaired, your boss could not by law remove your right to accommodate your disability. If your employer was that clueless and cruel, getting out of there was absolutely the right thing to do.
They're doing this because Donna Payne from Payne Consulting Group gave a talk at Microsoft in which she downloaded some Word files from their website and showed them the network shares and tracked changes that showed up in the metadata of the document.
I saw that metadata and I must admit that seeing the last 10 authors, the fact that MS folks had crashed no less than 2 times in the document itself, and seeing the revealed tracked changes that showed up again as a result of the corrupting document was a real hoot. Apparently the folks at Microsoft were somewhat horrified...
I don't know about most verticals, but in the legal vertical, there are often programs that insist that users are power users or (worse) local admins.
We have one that insists on the latter. We use interactive user to keep their hard drives relatively private, but we're completely hosed when it comes to trying to lock them down. We do run SUS, which helps some, but we're going to have to invest in web security software next budget year for our own sanity--we hate to be nazis about it, but I don't have the budget and staff to deal with this crap.
Well, if they've lost ~2,000,000 units/year due to file sharing at 1 per 5,000 downloaded songs, that would put it at ~27.4 million songs downloaded daily. Of course, that doesn't count the one CD bought per 150 downloads of a "hot" song...
While that may be true with Windows XP, Office XP and 2000 are significantly different. I know many law firms going from Office 97 to Office XP and skipping 2000 simply because 2000 was NOT an upgrade as far as they were concerned.
Office XP has a number of major changes that are actually useful. I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that, but it's true...
I was under the impression that on the left-to-right scale we went from communism to liberalism to centrism to conservatism to fascism. Was I taught incorrectly? If that scale is the case, then fascism is very radical conservatism, yes?
But I do agree wholeheartedly that destroying sales records to protect my privacy is the way to go.
All these stupid techies think that improving software means adding more garbage graphics and TRASH that nobody needs or wants, that take up 101% of processor cycles, making everything slow, contorted and crash prone
I'm fairly certain that it's usually the marketing people, the management, or the users who ask for most of the trash. Most techies I know just want it to do whatever it does well and to work; bugs are embarrassing and a pain to deal with. Patches suck & make marketing and users who basically caused them by not accepting "no" for an answer unhappy.
Of course, I work in IT (well, I'm on my way to PHB-land), and I get covered in grease, toner, and dust far too often...
But then, I've always admired people who get their hands dirty--why else would my favorite TV shows be Monster Garage & Junkyard Wars? (Well, and Buffy, but we won't count that one...)
I work in a law firm, and I knew to be afraid when I was helping an attorney scan in some pictures of a nuclear plant specifically to scare a jury...
But seriously, a Park Avenue firm costs a pretty penny per hour. If you were famous, would you waste your money on suing someone who (a) had that name before you, and (b) actually returned any checks he accidentally received? Talk about abusing someone...
I trained in biology & moved to IT due to academic politics. I'm the IT director of a pissy law firm and I feel _lucky_ to have escaped the academic politics.
And breaking test tubes just sucked, anyhow...
Specialists do have issues with this. However, from working at BCBS, I know that there exist doctors who have never passed their boards but get by with training verifications.
Doctors who can't pass the Medical Boards for one reason or another can have "training verification", where someone who has passed their boards verifies that they know what they're doing.
There's no reason that wouldn't work for any similar system. What real self-taught programmer couldn't be verified by a board-certified one?
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Two years ago, I decided to get my pointy-haired-boss on and go to business school. I elected to go to the only all-female MBA program in the country. Why? Because the biggest weakness I had was that I did not know how to deal with *women* in the work environment, and my boss was (and still is) a woman.
It's not easy to be in IT regardless of your gender. If you dislike foul language, well, good luck--I've thrown my share of f-bombs around when firmwide printing dies or the HVAC springs a leak and pours water through my servers and switches. Do you hate being around people who are angry? Heaven forbid you ever answer a support call. Do you like a complete night's sleep every night? Well, don't take a job that touches a data center or users who work in different time zones (don't have kids, either).
Because of IT's difficulty, we behave differently. We have a harder edge, but we laugh more as well. The jokes might be off-color or at someone's expense, but without the laugh, there's no pressure valve. Most of us drink fairly heavily, because we don't have much downtime and enjoy the relaxant effect of EtOH. Now, I don't know if we behave differently because we are predominantly male, or if we have different pressures, but most of us do behave this way.
Now add in technology's complexity, and you have a complicated situation. Most folks are in IT because we think (or at least used to think!) that technology is really cool. Not everyone does so. And, frankly, little boys are socialized to think technology=cool much more than little girls are. We are a product of our upbringing to some extent.
So how do I make IT work for women? For anyone? It's a question of alignment. If who you want to be aligns with your work environment, then stay. If something has to change and you can change it, do so and stay. If not, leave your job, or leave the industry, if you have the freedom to do so. If you do not have the freedom? Well, have a drink...
I don't know if you're in the US or not, but if you were at this job and you're visually impaired, your boss could not by law remove your right to accommodate your disability. If your employer was that clueless and cruel, getting out of there was absolutely the right thing to do.
And this just seems to be called "BE" for now, which just hurts my poor course 7 head...
Very true. But they're Microsoft. Of course they're going to incorporate something evil into their fix.
I saw that metadata and I must admit that seeing the last 10 authors, the fact that MS folks had crashed no less than 2 times in the document itself, and seeing the revealed tracked changes that showed up again as a result of the corrupting document was a real hoot. Apparently the folks at Microsoft were somewhat horrified...
We have it run automatically on users' machines if it locates certain files.
We have one that insists on the latter. We use interactive user to keep their hard drives relatively private, but we're completely hosed when it comes to trying to lock them down. We do run SUS, which helps some, but we're going to have to invest in web security software next budget year for our own sanity--we hate to be nazis about it, but I don't have the budget and staff to deal with this crap.
Well, if they've lost ~2,000,000 units/year due to file sharing at 1 per 5,000 downloaded songs, that would put it at ~27.4 million songs downloaded daily. Of course, that doesn't count the one CD bought per 150 downloads of a "hot" song...
Office XP has a number of major changes that are actually useful. I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that, but it's true...
Tall and skinny now is an ASSET.
Your mother's dying will make you stronger. But cry now & get the grieving over with BEFORE college.
Do not let your stepmonster bother you. She's little and petty; she will change after a house fire in 1999.
GET SOME SELF-CONFIDENCE! Go for it! Don't be afraid of engineering! You're smarter than everyone says you are!
Pierce stuff in college before marrying someone who hates it. Trust me on this one.
You look GOOD with black hair--goth is you!
Oh, and so much more...
From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]
conservatism
n : a political orientation advocating the preservation of the best in society and opposing radical changes [syn: {conservativism}]
fascism
n : a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
My mistake. Obviously, a fairly common one.
But I do agree wholeheartedly that destroying sales records to protect my privacy is the way to go.
I'm fairly certain that it's usually the marketing people, the management, or the users who ask for most of the trash. Most techies I know just want it to do whatever it does well and to work; bugs are embarrassing and a pain to deal with. Patches suck & make marketing and users who basically caused them by not accepting "no" for an answer unhappy.
But then, I've always admired people who get their hands dirty--why else would my favorite TV shows be Monster Garage & Junkyard Wars? (Well, and Buffy, but we won't count that one...)
Uh... I don't think you have to be in Soviet Russia for that...
I work in a law firm, and I knew to be afraid when I was helping an attorney scan in some pictures of a nuclear plant specifically to scare a jury... But seriously, a Park Avenue firm costs a pretty penny per hour. If you were famous, would you waste your money on suing someone who (a) had that name before you, and (b) actually returned any checks he accidentally received? Talk about abusing someone...
I trained in biology & moved to IT due to academic politics. I'm the IT director of a pissy law firm and I feel _lucky_ to have escaped the academic politics. And breaking test tubes just sucked, anyhow...
Gee, and I was thinking $99,999
Specialists do have issues with this. However, from working at BCBS, I know that there exist doctors who have never passed their boards but get by with training verifications.
There's no reason that wouldn't work for any similar system. What real self-taught programmer couldn't be verified by a board-certified one?