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.
It really isn’t like it was in the COBOL days. Back then, the programs were not tasked to do all that many things. If there was a single bug, it had to be fixed. The way it works nowadays is that you get the bugs to an acceptable level. It actually seems to work, but I think that is because the bugs are in “seldom used” user paths.
I can tell you I’ve found plenty of bugs in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It’s quite irritating.
“When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.”
Yup. I’m a woman in the IT field. Originally RPG programmer turned system admin/enterprise-wide scheduler. The users really don’t understand much, that’s for sure. Often I’d spend weeks (or months) on a project to learn they “forgot” they needed this or that. Meaning? Starting from scratch and doing over again.
Or they purchased something from out of house and it didn’t come close to what the salesperson claimed....and did they include IT in the research for this new application? Course not! Even worse there were times this glorious new product wasn’t even compatible with our own system apps. Drove me crazy. In one case had to purchase middle-ware to get the thing to work and product the reports in the “pretty way” the users wanted to see them. Argh!
It’s too bad that far less than perfect is acceptable but I get it. I guess.
Agreed. So saccharine!
I've been in IT for 20 years. IT is brutal. It is logical. It doesn't care that you have feelings. When you sit down to troubleshoot a particularly difficult issue, you start at the bottom of the OSI stack and work your way up; it is plugged in?
Coding, I understand, is a different beast, but you HAVE to fail. I spent months troubleshooting a PowerShell script I wrote that worked for 90% of its intended purpose, but one stupid function wouldn't give me what I needed. It came down to a misspelled variable. I don't make that mistake anymore. I learned from my failure.
Coders seem to fall into one of two categories: "I don't care" or "I care so much." The "I don't care" coders puke out code and turn it in when it compiles and passes regression testing. The "I care so much" coders have a nervous breakdown when they submit their code and start to cry when they're criticized. As much as I despise the "I don't care" coders for their cavalier attitudes, I know I can go back to them to fix something without a maudlin display.
tl;dr
We had repeated design meetings and they never said a word.
I just hate moving back and forth between screens when you can go back and forth between pages so much easier
This this this.
President Elect Trump should propose the following challenge to Silicon Valley companies
Build code schools in the rust belt and teach those who have lost jobs how to code. In fact pay them to learn and you will get tax credits.
For everyone of those coders you teach and hire, you will get another tax credit.
Considering the absurd cost of developers, or hell even marketers in the valley, late stage startups about to go public or be sold would jump on this chance to reduce costs and make the books look better. America would get a boost from fresh coders/developers/analysts/product managers
We still have COBOL and C (not C++) programs that have to be modded. There is still a lot of COBOL out there and they are writing more.
My last job was converting a Client-Server system back to COBOL/CICS/IDMS due to performance issues.
Every programmer in India is required to learn COBOL.
When I was a COBOL programmer, I found I was most effective using fan fold paper and also having the program up on screen to use the search function. My time was a lot more expensive to the company than a 2 inch stack of paper.
HR: "We want a website."
Me: "OK, I can work on getting one stood up. What do you want on it?"
HR: "Oh, this, and that. And some of the other thing. I dunno, why don't you put it together and we'll look at it?"
Me: "Well, I'm in IT, not HR. I'll be glad to provide a platform for you to work on, and show you how to use it, but the content needs to be made by you guys."
HR: "WHAT? We're going to need to work on this?"
Me: "yup. And, you need to keep it fresh. Putting out a brief "Letter from the CEO" once a year isn't going to cut it."
HR: "Content? What that? It's not something you do??"
Me: "Nope. Well, I'll be glad to give you a "What's new in IT" article once a quarter, or something. But you all will need to generate stories, or find people in the company to generate them. Then, you can upload them to the website. People like to see pictures of themselves. And read about awesome work they've done. You better get snapping!"
HR: "......."
I didn't make any friends in that meeting.
It’s too bad that far less than perfect is acceptable but I get it. I guess.
It’s all about cost vs benefit.
“Originally RPG programmer”
I’ll add you to the prayer list.
Much of what we do now is interface systems.
What people fail to realize is that 99% of all computer programmers are not engineers. They have little, if any, math or scientific training. They only code until something appears to work; not that it works well, it just gives the right answer sometimes, at least on their box.
Few programmers even know how a computer works. They have no formal education, they just taught themselves a computer programming language, something any 12 year old can do.
What’s worse: 99% of all managers of those computer programmers have no computer programming experience. They have things like a PMP or an MBA or just look good in a skirt (no exaggeration).
“This is a dumb essay and this woman is not a computer scientist—end of story.”
Agreed. Been at my current company 12 years. To date the only woman on my team (3 different teams). I’ve learned the fewer words when dealing with men, the better. Often “yes”, “no”, “will do my best” will suffice for them :)
Also, try NOT to use the phrases “I think” or “I/me” at all. Using “the solution could be”, or “upon research, the finding are....”. They don’t care what I “think” so much as what was found and what is known or unknown.
She should read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I meant: I have read Zena And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
That book was very well written compared the article which we are discussing. This article reads as essentially a “pile of words” a spewing of stream of consciousness that seems to have little point, other than to communicate an emotional distress.
There. That is what I was trying to say!
Saw a good book on the shelf.the.other day:
“F*ck Feelings”.
That sums up every female (and most of the men) I've ever worked for.
Coding is more than teaching a single skill....the base education must be there.....
It’s not like teaching welding.....
Most of the adults that would need re-training in the rust belt would require several years of training to be an effective programmer.....
Better to bring manufacturing and their jobs back to help them.....
meh
It’s software. I loved the hardware I developed and built
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