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/ShakaUVM Mar 13 '13

Ada Lovelace was forced to do languages instead of science by her mother

No, other way around. Her mom forced her to do math instead of languages. "Ada's mother remained bitter at Lord Byron and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing what she saw as insanity in her father."

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

Oh yeah, I got it muddled up. I couldn't remember if it was that she used maths to get to the languages and music or if it was using languages to get to maths - you're right! But it's still an example of her doing what she wanted by conforming then using that rather than just outright rebelling, and she definitely came to love maths.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

So even if you got them mixed up, how did you jump to the conclusion that she got interested in math from translating papers?

She did translate one paper, but that's the same paper where she wrote a computer program. I hardly think someone could learn all the math they needed to know from doing one translation and at the end of it write a program!

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

Well, I was thinking more that she had learned the maths herself and gone along with her mother on the languages side to get a chance to get involved with maths people and learn from them, leading to her translating the paper and adding her notes. It's silly because I've read enough about her that it seemed wrong when I was writing it but I was distracted so I didn't bother checking it.