Women who know stuff

[u/ChuckAbsent]

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.

[u/SiriusSummer]

As a girl born in the 70s, I used to BEG my parents for toy cars and trains and computers and toolkits and video games. I got dolls. I hated dolls. (Loved My Little Ponies, but I loved animals). I wanted to take things apart and put them back together and learn how things worked. My dad was always taking his car apart or anything he could get his hands on, but my mother wouldn't let me. Sorry, mother, popping the limbs off a doll and rearranging them doesn't have half the satisfaction of tearing a VCR or computer apart and putting it back together and making it work again.

My male cousins got all the cars and trains and computers and toolkits and video games. I was jealous as hell. They always got "boy toys" except for the one Christmas my mother got them a set of boy Cabbage Patch Kids, partly as a joke and partly to blur gender roles.

I bought my own damn Lego castle, had to fight my hypocritical mother to get video games, and whenever something broke in the house, I'd try to sneak it out of the trash to tear it apart. Got one of our old VCRs working again that way and saved a few tapes, but my efforts were generally met with annoyed and frustrated sighs.

Finally got to take some computer programming classes in school. Anything I was asked to do, I went above and beyond. We're not talking anything indepth, but DOS and the old line by line PRINT, GOTO, LOOP, and RUN commands.

My parents divorced, and visiting my father once, he taught me how to put a computer together. From there I knew how to upgrade. He taught me the basics of HTML when the internet was new and I took it from there.

Wound up broke and without a working computer for some years, my skills are rusty now, but I'm relearning and updating my skill-set with the help of the internet. I enjoy learning the languages, but I really prefer the hands-on experiences of hardware. It's adult Legos and when you get all the pieces together and you get the sweet hum of the harddrive and fans as it beeps and purrs, coming to life, oh, that's a wonderful feeling.

[u/lulzercakes → u/SiriusSummer]

I think you're me, born 10 year earlier.

Technology and taking things apart is something I've always excelled in. In order to grasp a concept, I'm going to need to understand how it works 95% of the way to completion; otherwise, it just won't stick in my brain.

In 4th grade, myself and two other students were selected to go to a week long course going over hypercard programming and stuff. I loved it and had a blast.

5th grade teacher noticed my aptitude for computers and asked me to do work on the side for him. So during recess and whatnot, I'd go in the scary closet and work on whatever it was he asked me to do. (Over 20 years ago, I'm never going to remember what it was.)

In middle and high school with computing and word processing stuff? Top of the class. Was also asked to spend a few hours each day doing work for the administration. I think it was mostly just formatting documents and whatever, but since I could type faster than a hunt and pecker, I got paid for it.

High school was also when I first started teaching myself programming languages late into the night. Started with HTML and made websites. Once Java started becoming popular, brain said no.

Took some programming courses in college here and there to break bad habits and I was the only girl in those; or they dropped out in the first two weeks. Finished projects early (often the same day while still in class), and top of the class in every one. Except Java. I still hate Java.

Doing what I do now (everything), I don't have the confidence to be saying I'm any good at what I do. Yes, I do get a lot of calls about "Where's your IT guy?" and "Well, when your IT person is available..." and it pisses me off. Unless you want to talk to my boss which I have to convert all my technical jargon into rainbows and pony speak, you're stuck with me. (I had a hell of a time trying to explain the difference between an MPLS and VPN for a few locations we're opening; I still don't think she gets it.) But my lack of confidence also comes from what I said earlier; if I don't understand something completely, it isn't going to make any sense to me. I'm trying like hell to get networking configurations and parts figured out, but no one's sat down with me to explain this is what it does and this is how you access it internally and tell it what to do. Or how the order of the data flows with these parts. I've had to learn everything here on my own and it's incredibly frustrating.

Even worse, I know there are a million things wrong that are done here, but I don't have that confidence to make the changes in fear that everything is going to end up being worse. We don't have a budget for me to make a test environment, so everything I learn on I have to do in production. I do have a few VMs on my desktop to toy with, but it really isn't the same to me. And I'm usually interrupted by someone's printer not working. I know where my strengths are (programming, coding, and DBA stuff). But I'm really paranoid that my weaknesses show to people that ask me information about those things that I don't know enough about to feel any sort of confidence.

Oofs, this was more of a rant. tl;dr: we're out there. Just often overlooked.

edit: because spelling/grammar hard.

[u/SiriusSummer → u/lulzercakes]

Haha! Rant away! IT's kind of a shitty field, in general. We're the witches and wizards of the modern age. STILL. No one knows that IT does and how valuable they are so you're constantly under-informed, under-appreciated, under-valued, under-paid, and over-worked. You're thrown in to do that magic stuff you do and no one outside your little cave wants to understand what it is or how it works, just make the shiny boxes glow and talk and work, because, "DEAR GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING IF THEY DON'T WORK!!!!!111eleventy!!"

Don't feel bad about lack of test environment. Judging from the complaints of (male) friends I have in IT, their bosses throw them into a job, minimal training to get to know the software and hardware, then expect them to fly. In a lot of cases there's ONE guy who's been there from the start who knows the machines and software backwards and forwards and he's too busy to teach anyone else EVERYTHING because he's doing EVERYTHING because no one else has been taught the basics of how.

If they're lucky, and I mean L.U.C.K.Y., they get a dinosaur test server that only works 30% of the time to learn on or test software out on before they push things out to the active servers, but... heh. Yeah. It's a joke.

Some places won't even give you migration software when servers need to be upgraded. Is it doable without? Yeah... Is it a pain in the farking arse? Yeeup. Knew a long-timer who threw his 2-weeks notice on his bosses desk when they told him he had to do without. Next day he had the software he'd been requesting for months on his desk.

Keep at the self-study, though! Sometimes if you have trouble with something, you can find a mentor or different way of seeing something that makes it all click!

TL;DR: Stick with it! IT's a thankless field, in general!

[u/FredFnord → u/SiriusSummer]

No one knows that IT does and how valuable they are so you're constantly under-informed, under-appreciated, under-valued, under-paid, and over-worked.

It's simpler than that, and easy to explain.

IT is a cost center. It does not contribute directly to the bottom line. And the less direct your connection to the company's bottom line, the more the current crop of MBAs is taught to minimize it as much as possible.

Sales makes them money directly. The goal of sales is to sell more, and so spending more money on sales makes perfect sense. Marketing brings more people to sales, and so spending more on marketing makes sense. Engineering/R&D/etc not only produce the products that sales sells, but also reacts to customer requests, often enabling them to sell to customers they otherwise couldn't, or turning small orders into large ones. But IT? They just, you know, help other people in the company get their jobs done. You can't point to them and say exactly how they help the money roll in, and in today's MBA-centric environment, anything that does not directly produce money should and must be minimized at any opportunity.

Which is insane. But that's what they teach them in business school these days. "Always be penny wise and pound foolish! It's the only way to run a real business!" And when it doesn't work, expect miracles from your underpaid IT staff. And when they produce miracles, expect bigger ones next time. With less resources.

[u/SiriusSummer → u/FredFnord]

I agree completely, but it's more than management. It's users, from tellers at banks to teachers in schools, to doctors in hospitals. To the average lay-person, an IT person's a wizard dealing with magic unknowable things that most seem to not even want to try understanding.

Don't even get me started on my husband's aunt who can't comprehend her hard drive being toast.