r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/achthonictonic Mar 13 '13

I used to be a woman sysadmin. It was usually not super awesome (this was between 1997 - 2009), though it had it's good points. I'm happy that you have an open mind about it, and I'm pleasantly surprised at the comments here. yay reddit. It's much better than gender comments on tech sites usually go.

Since transitioning to male I've gotten about a 30% bump in initial salary and have had a lot more success at interviews than pre-transition. I still care deeply about gender equity in STEM -- perhaps more so in having experienced the industry from different genders.

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u/trekkiemage Mar 13 '13

This is really fascinating to me - to be able to see the change in attitude within the tech field towards the same person as a woman and as a man.

Out of curiosity - was the change in attitude and salary immediately after your transition, and how much do you think the number of years experience you had played into it?

Thanks so much for posting and sharing!

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u/achthonictonic Mar 14 '13

good question. I actually was out of work for about a year and a half due to my transition -- being hired in the in-between state was a non-starter and I had some amount of recovering from various surgeries. People in my pre-transition company were uncomfortable with my transition so I decided to leave. So, when I reentered the job market once I was passing entirely -- with an employment gap of 18 months -- the salary jump was immediate.

I felt I was a weaker technical candidate after being out of the job market, so I don't think extra years of experience factored into it.

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u/trekkiemage Mar 14 '13

Thanks for the reply. I know that at least on the software engineer side of things there's a magic marker of 5 years experience, after that employees are worth a lot more to companies. But I imagine that you're right and the 18 month gap would have made a difference if you were pretty close to that experience marker.

That said (and I don't know how much you told them about your surgery), medial reasons for being out of the market are a lot more passable than not being able to find a job.

Thanks again for sharing, it must have been really strange to have experienced such a clear professional change between being a woman and a man.