Posted on 11/29/2016 5:32:51 AM PST by spintreebob
Edited on 11/29/2016 5:48:35 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Trying to find my place in the place I love, and constantly failing
It was dark and cold that night I stomped down Broadway, talking to my then-boyfriend-now-husband about my feelings. I am always talking about my feelings, and he is always listening. He “mhm”s at the right places and doesn’t interrupt and sometimes says good things at the end. Sometimes he says wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong, taking us down an emotional tangent that is frustrating and exhausting, but he’s trying to be helpful, I tell myself and breathe. Bless his little heart.
But tonight, he lets me talk. And I do, filling the minutes with long, twisting sentences that make sense to me, but as they tumble out, I’m not sure that they do, so I pause and I blurt, “I’m just not a white man!” Or something like that. This was years ago, so who knows what really happened. I may not have been on Broadway at all. But that’s where the anger ended, in not being white or a man or coding since I was two or some combination of the three. This wasn’t going to work. Coding wasn’t going to work. I didn’t belong.
Fast-forward three years. I’d choked down my feelings and learned to code and built things and knew stuff that even my then-boyfriend-now-husband didn’t know. We sat on our couch one evening while I explained how AJAX worked. He leaned back and I leaned in, excited and trembling at the edge of my seat. I heard the words coming out of my mouth, watched them float in the air between us, blooming with buzzwords and jargon and pride and I burst into tears. I covered my face with my hands, hunched over and shook. I couldn’t believe I understood the words I was saying. This was going to work. Coding was going to work. Maybe I did belong.
The cracks in that newly laid confidence would soon come, but not for reasons I may have lead you to believe. I apologize if you assumed this was a story about a difference rooted in race and gender, because it is not. That’s not where we are going. This is about a difference of values, beliefs, perspectives.
I wanted so badly to think like a programmer, which implies that the way I think is wrong. It needed fixing in many ways. This observation is frustratingly fuzzy, cloudy, unfocused, but I’ve squeezed it hard enough to make raindrops, something I can taste and feel, and I shall give you three.
I am not solution-oriented. I don’t see a problem and get giddy at the idea of solving it, patching it up and sending it on its merry way. I want to poke it and ask it questions. Where did it come from, what is it doing, what’s its story? I want to take it to tea and hear about its life and understand it to its core. And if, at that point, I’ve come to a wholistic understanding and am able to solve the problem, by all means, let the problem-solving commence! But my instinct is never to solve, but to understand.
This is the part where you tell me that this is a great asset in a programmer! That all programmers would be much better off if they took the time to understand before diving in! My thinking isn’t broken at all, you say, it’s super awesome!
That’s cute. And truly, I appreciate your defense of my broken brain. But no matter what Medium blog posts tell you how crucial it is to understand the problem before coding its solution, this is, at best, an annoying part of an average developer’s job, and, more likely, a distant idea that is happily ignored.
Developers solve problems. It is the problem-solving, not the problem-understanding, that gets you high. Hm. Maybe this isn’t going to work.
I am not comfortable making half-ass ****. Once in a while I look up the famous quote by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who said, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” I say it to myself. I say it again. I let it sit and turn it over and convince myself this isn’t insane. I understand this concept at an intellectual level. I get the value of the MVP (minimum viable product) and was excited to learn the pseudo-scientific process of the lean methodology. The quote is a punchy way of encouraging product creators to start small and test an idea before investing loads of money and time in an expensive mistake.
And this advice is great! You should start small and test and learn. But the way this advice manifests itself is often in writing ****** ****that makes ****** **** products, and leaving it in its ****** **** way. It’s the shrug that accompanies the mindless defense, “But it works.” It produces a mentality of doing the absolute bare minimum, not because it’s what’s best for the product or your team, but because, why bother to do more? It works! It condemns everything I’ve learned and loved about craftsmanship and quality and just plain giving a ****. There are no As here, there is only pass and fail. Maybe coding wasn’t going to work.
This is the part where you tell me that there is such a thing as beautiful code! There are talks that preach the value of well written code, books filled with advice on how to hone your craft, podcast interviews of developers raging against poorly written programs. My value of quality is wonderful, you say, do not fix it, you shout, keep going, you plead!
That’s cute. But no matter how many conference talks you’ve tweeted about praising code as craft, open up your company’s production-level app right now and tell me how much of that has made its way to your product. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Because in the real world of death marches, limited runway, and just plain old pressure from the higher ups, quality and care are a dream: sweet, distant, and rarely realized.
But perhaps the biggest way that my brain is broken is less about code, and more about the tech industry as a whole. If you’re thinking to yourself, “But everyone uses tech so everything is the tech industry,” please sit tight while I take a moment to roll my eyes. … Ok, I’m back. For our purposes, let’s define “tech industry” as companies and professionals who view code as a core part of their business and their self-understanding, both internally and externally.
When I was at NPR years ago, I did a story on public education in California. I don’t remember the angle, but I remember looking up a stat to use in the script. I used that stat in a few places, and after fact-checking, I realized there was an updated number available. I went back and changed the references to the new number, relieved that I’d caught this mistake before handing over my script to the host. But I missed one. I heard it over the speakers when Michelle Martin, the host, read it out loud during the interview, and my heart stopped. I knew it was my duty to report it, so I went up to my editor and told her. She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her disappointment in me. I felt so small.
But here’s the thing. No one will ever remember that number. No one remembers it now, and I’m sure no one noticed it when it happened. But I knew it happened, that it was an easily preventable mistake, and, in journalism, being wrong in that way is absolutely unacceptable. So imagine my surprise when I first heard of “fail fast and break things,” one of the famous tech mantras for product creation. Imagine my shock to find out that being wrong is not reprimanded, but, at times, encouraged. Imagine my confusion stepping into a world where people are told to “just try it and see.” I tell myself over and over that this is different, that this is good, that public experimentation is not a holy sin. I’ve managed to convince myself, when I’m not busy quieting a nauseous tummy tormented by public broken attempts and shameful failures. But here, I will admit defeat. Being wrong in software is fundamentally different from being wrong in reporting. Except when it’s not.
When I use your product, I’m trusting you. I believe you when you tell me that clicking that button will create my profile, that I am indeed submitting an email by hitting enter, that I will see my mom’s message when I click on her little, round face. My belief in you is delicate and deep. Do not take my trust for granted. Do not take advantage of me.
We are in a relationship, you and I. Distant and faceless, yes, but a relationship nonetheless. I give and you take and you give and I take, and I believe your words, your lines, your interfaces. It should be precious. It should be handled with care, but the carelessness I see in tech is unsettling. The willful ignorance, the rejection of our relationship, hurts.
It might come big, like playing with my emotions by purposefully filling my feed with sad or happy content, just to see how I respond.
It might come small, like your claim of being the number one this-and-that in your this-and-that field, according to … no one. You are so proud of your accomplishments and so comfortable in your grandeur that you forget to be honest with me.
Sometimes it comes deep, like spending months together trying to solve a problem you promised me you could solve to later find out that you got it all wrong, you made it all up, you have no idea what you’re doing. You brag about this in your interviews and inevitable autobiography. For some strange reason, you wear this ignorance as a badge of honor. You failed fast and broke my heart.
But you will never see it that way. You’re too excited. I feel you whisper make the world a better place as you drift to sleep, so obsessed with changing it that you forget that the world is made up of little people like me.
You are experimenting, trying new things, and for this, you are great and lean. But sometimes, you forget that I’m at the center of your experiments. Sometimes, you forget me.
I take these relationships seriously. So seriously that often I’m immobilized and overwhelmed. And in those moments, you push products I’m too uncomfortable to push and you win. You get there first, making waves while I sit in last place and watch. So I choke down my values and discomfort and attempt a push of my own, amid the internal screams that this is wrong and irresponsible and how dare I. I don’t get very far. My feeble, half-hearted steps cannot compete with your bold, proud strides. So I cower back to my corner with my broken brain and peep at your success through the leaves.
I do not belong. My values are not valued. My thinking is strange and foreign. My world view has no place here. It is not that I am better, it is that I am different, and my difference feels incompatible with yours, dear tech. So I will mark my corner, a small plot of land and stand firmly here, trying to understand you and reconcile these conflicting differences.
Maybe I will change. Maybe you’ll surprise me. Maybe, one day, I’ll belong.
Same here, engineer who moved to IT. I did software testing, documentation and training from a super-user point of view.
I was tasked to meet up with users for software requirements gathering, and when you had different people in the room for a second meeting, the priorities and must-haves could be very different.
Gathering super-users for testing rarely used paths, such as “what do you want it to do here”, was always herding cats.
Sounds like Agile. ;-)
There is no demand for that as long as these companies can bring in indentured labor. First step is ending HB-1 visas, employment permission for HB-1 visa holder’s spouses, the 1-2 years after graduation those on student visas get to work before they have to leave or get a new visa.
“Sounds like you might be due for a raise. A big one. And maybe some more vacation. “
I work for the government. Not a chance. I’ll die two days before my first pension check.
I periodically stop delivering a report just to see if anyone complains. If not, I eliminate the noise.
We actually had an artist design the interface. That was WONDERFUL. It looked good and all the HTML was created by the software. All we had to do was insert the functional code and convert to a GSP(Groovy Server Page). Programmers should never design or do analysis. My only feedback is “I don’t think they want that” but it is never my call.
However, we don’t have a choice. We have to talk to the users. We have been here longer than them and we know their jobs better than all the new people. I wish I had a dime for every time I heard “Teach me how to do this thing that you have never done”.
Verbal vomit.
She’s right, she does not belong in tech.
High RPM, zero torque.
in the 50’s, most programmers were women. It was only logical because it involved typing.
I do something similar. I have Scheduled Tasks creating spreadsheets that get placed on a NAS. They run every day. When someone wants to see a given report, it is always there.
For instance, if you want to see which userids have access to which systems, it gets generated every day and is on “the server”.
I'm 49 and programmed in Cobol for about 20 years (though I also did a lot of C programming too).
Now I use things like C# and Powershell and SQL. All in all... I preferred Cobol and C. I could do anything with that combination.
Sounds like Agile. ;-) >>>
Our new management started us on that (confluence/Jira). It might work OK if those in charge had spent time as IT professionals. Now I can spend 2 hours documenting a small project that only took 45 minutes to implement :<( Not to mention we already have run books in place and a change management system that contain the same information. So it’s double work outside of the project itself.
I don’t have a clue as to why I read that dissembling drivel but, I made it to the end.
Well put; I’ve worked with and for some very sharp women, but they were older than this demographic (they’ve be at least 75 now). They had no sense of entitlement, and understood that advancement came through added value - and that came through current skill sets. I suspect young women (and men) today probably get the same message now; they may be pampered, but they understand an employer has no use for dead wood.
I don’t know what the ratio is today, but I doubt they are the majority; what changed that?
I’ve consulted or been an employee at 17 companies. Every single one in the last 15 years that used Agile actually did a “waterfall/agile” hybrid.
i.e. they didn’t do agile, but it looked a lot like agile, only not as effective. :-)
Good question. But in the places I worked, women have been heavily represented in IT since the early 80’s. The money drove a lot of men into the field. It still does although I see a lot of people falling out of IT. My neighbor is surfing his mother’s couch after getting a Masters in Programming. He just couldn’t hack it.
You have to love coding to do it. If you don’t, it will eat you alive. You have to get excited about learning new things because they are coming whether you like it or not.
The best thing about Jira is that it is better than TeamDynamix at project stuff. But TD is better for upper management keeping track of hours so.....
“You start writing the code. I’ll go find out what they want.”
If any of you programmers are proficient in VAX/VMS/DECForms/COBOL drop me a private email as I may have some work for you.
“You have to love coding to do it. If you don’t, it will eat you alive.”
This is why I was a good programmer. I’m organized to a fault.
Yes, I’m one of those women who has NO time for panpering nails/hair. No need/want for makeup....but my house gets vacuumed every 2 days. My silverware sit upright in a straight line as do my dishes and such in the cabinets. I HATE streaks on my windows, ARGH!!! I wash the screens....
On my desk? I keep my computer, a day timer, and a pencil. I need nothing else whatsoever. So, keep it simple stupid is the best best BEST method....plus keep it clean and tidy :)
Ok, back to work I must go. A slow day and I’m loving this posting on FR. Not often someone like me who works from home gets to chat with other IT folks outside of work.
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