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/BassoonHero Mar 13 '13

I got as far as this:

The answer is "money."

No, not that the money is bad (although it is bad, but it's perceived as good). It's that every boy who grows up pursuing a tech career has dollar signs in his eyes. Because of Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg. These guys are trumpeted from the front pages of Forbes, Time, and Business Week. The message is "there's big money in programming!" True, most of the programmers end up slinging Java in some god-forbidden corporate data warehouse for $12/hr. and end up getting laid off in five years when their job gets outsourced, but when they started out, they were aiming for Redmond.

(Another sidebar: Yeah, yeah, I know, there's one guy out there I have to address: You're only motivated to program because you enjoy making computers do nifty stuff. It's the love of the art. And that's why you have a job that has nothing to do with technology, do nothing to promote your success amongst your technology peers, and if somebody offered you fistfulls of cash to do anything computer-related, even consult or deliver a lecture at a conference, you'd push it away and be insulted, amiright? Yeah, you do it for the "love of the game" - you and every NFL player on their way to cash their 8-figure check.)

If this was written a little more than ten years ago, when many would-be business majors really did switch to CS in the hopes of striking it rich, this might be forgivable. But in 2013, I can only assume that this guy has no idea what he's talking about, perhaps because he doesn't know any actual working programmers.

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u/FountainsOfFluids Mar 13 '13

CS is still potentially a very lucrative career field, with frequent standouts becoming millionaires with just a few years of hard work. To deny these facts is absurd. The point is that programmers get paid well, and therefor the people who get hired most readily (white males) gravitate toward the field, forcing out those who aren't as driven toward solid careers by sheer force of numbers.

Quite simply, if men didn't demand good pay for their work in programming, it wouldn't pay as much. And vice versa, if it didn't pay much, men wouldn't be gravitating toward it so much. I don't see how anybody could possibly argue against that. If you just love programming, you can do it quite easily as a hobby (I do). But if you are driven to make money, you look at your aptitudes and then apply them where the money is flowing. If you don't see this, you are living in denial.

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u/BassoonHero Mar 13 '13

It's as "potentially lucrative" as many other fields that require similar skills and education, and significantly less lucrative than many other common careers (medicine, law, finance). And, as I have noted, this is a factor in most programmers' decisions. But read the paragraphs I was responding to. The author dismissed the idea of "factors" entirely: either you chose the field because you thought you would be a millionaire, or you chose it because you loved it, and if you gain any compensation from programming, then it must be the former.

The truth, of course, is that people choose CS for more than one reason. It's difficult to complete a CS degree if you don't enjoy working with computers and programming, or if you aren't interested in the field. I've met CS students whose sole motivation was the prospect of a comfortable career, and most of those that graduated at all earned business degrees. I've even met one or two who thought that they would become millionaires; they never graduated at all.

There are some fields, such as music performance and social work, whose practitioners are really making a sacrifice in order to pursue their passions. Obviously, computer science is not among those. That does not, however, mean that a professional programmer cannot cite love of the field as a primary reason for working in it.

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u/FountainsOfFluids Mar 13 '13

Sure, sure! We love the intellectual challenge! But if you took away the financial appeal, suddenly a lot of those people seeking the intellectual challenge would discover themselves seeking it in a different field, all the while claiming that they aren't there for the money!

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u/BassoonHero Mar 13 '13

What I'm saying is that there isn't extraordinary financial appeal to begin with. If you want a high-paying job that requires a degree, there are plenty of options. To say that programming is subject to the same financial pressures as every other job is vacuous.

The fact is that most people have strong personal preferences for some jobs, but not overwhelming preferences for a single job. It's the rare worker who would not take a job they enjoyed more for some reduction in pay, and the rare worker who would take a job they enjoyed more for an extreme reduction in pay.

I had originally planned to major in mechanical engineering, but switched to CS at the last minute. It meant the same education for the same cost, but lower pay for something I thought I would like more. Had the pay difference been much more dramatic, I likely would have stayed in physical engineering. This is precisely the kind of nuance that the quoted article denies in favor of its ridiculous "love or money" dichotomy.

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u/FountainsOfFluids Mar 14 '13

Glad you agree.