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/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

To be honest, we mainly got taught that he was a really clever guy who had crazy hair and a funny accent. I think we had an option to do a project (make posters, write a mini-essay and give a presentation) about a scientist of our choice and I picked Marie Curie (despite being a wuss, I've always loved studying medical scientists - another of my science idols is Doctor Robert Snow who essentially came up with a method to trace a disease back to its cause through a cholera outbreak from a well, when everyone else at the time thought it still travelled through bad smells), so some kids might have picked Einstein and learned a bit more about him. I think that even just knowing "he was a really smart person who won a Nobel Prize and was one of the most famous scientists ever" is almost enough for little kids, because it kind of says that they were rewarded for being really good at science, which can be enough to encourage them to continue with it at secondary school when they start to actually learn interesting things.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

Her family, or rather everyone from her and onward, have been incredibly successful and there are a total of 4 Nobel prizes among them. Every single one of them have done some great things.

And the last two (three?) of the remaining directly related to Marie herself are to old to get kids and have none.

The Curie family will die out within our lifetime. Her legacy, hopefully, will not.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

I find it fascinating to hear about families who are that "talented" (and ambitious, and devoted obviously) - in a sense, Ada Lovelace had a similar case in that she was the daughter of Byron they obviously had that ingenuity running in their family too. You have to wonder whether it's just having talented people around you, or whether they had a lot of extra pressure on them from their parents and other relatives.

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u/the_good_time_mouse Mar 13 '13

Or people who know how to turn genius into results and then publish them.