Women in tech
Finding ada
Wed Mar 24 2010
I'm working on drawing chapter 20. In particular, a crucial scene in your basic adventure story. The odds are against our heroine, all her friends have walked away, her enemies have already beaten her down, and what she has sworn to defend has been lost. And now she has to make a choice - accept things the way they are, that she needs to accept that she'll lose this one. Or push on alone, knowing it will only bring her more misery and pain. And it is in this moment that Heidi will make her vow to make a final stand for what she believe is right. It's a little corny and standard pulp adventure stuff, but there are people, real people, I know who have done this. And paid for it. But nonetheless, they are heroes. Heroines, actually.
Thirteen years ago at a Seattle financial institution, I was part of a team of network engineers that would in a few short years grow ten-fold in size. The IT group was unusual in that there were many women in tech leadership roles. Many of the tech staff was female as well the IT director as well as the CIO. They were "old school", from the days of COBOL and DEC systems, which brought with it an intimidating blaze of technical knowledge and demanding exactitude.
Executive management had decided to expand service offerings using a "clicks and mortar" strategy which meant adding Internet "branches" instead of physical ones. This was the mid-90s and our entire organization was currently running on terminals connected to big iron boxes. In addition to the massive infrastructure upgrade needed, we were looking at a very steep learning curve for the users.
This kind of growth is a challenge, especially at the leadership level. Strong IT operations is about hygiene. It's never glamorous and always first to blamed and have its budget cut. In my time as a tech professional, I've encountered many ineffective IT operations leaders. They were technically weak and more often, also weak in fortitude in protecting their people and the stability of the system.
Our leaders stuck to their guns, pushing for infrastructure building with an emphasis on security and stability despite the tremendous pressure for new gizmos and flashy toys. They made people define what
they needed, not what they wanted, and they held staff and vendors accountable for their actions and promises. In fact, I'd never seen higher standards and low tolerance of weak ethics during in a banking
atmosphere in my entire career.
In the end, we learned just how necessary this was. Their efforts supported tremendous growth, far beyond what was proposed by the executive team. The new infrastructure and the team weathered internet
banking, an explosion of new remote sites, business partners, and very sophisticated apps.
Were they rewarded and honored for this? Of course now. Once the foundation was built and apps began to roll, they were herded out the door to be replaced by yes men (I mean that figuratively and literally). They were seen as too pessimistic, too negative and too slow in getting things done. Based on what I've seen in my career, sometimes an organization needs someone to take the unpopular stance
and get things done, keep things on track. And that person needs not only to be smart, knowledgeable and they need personal courage to stand up for their convictions.. But one thing I've learned, that person does not need to be a man.
It's the spirit of those two women that inspired me as I drew on this sketch, which I call "Heidi defies the universe." You know she'll win.
Thirteen years ago at a Seattle financial institution, I was part of a team of network engineers that would in a few short years grow ten-fold in size. The IT group was unusual in that there were many women in tech leadership roles. Many of the tech staff was female as well the IT director as well as the CIO. They were "old school", from the days of COBOL and DEC systems, which brought with it an intimidating blaze of technical knowledge and demanding exactitude.
Executive management had decided to expand service offerings using a "clicks and mortar" strategy which meant adding Internet "branches" instead of physical ones. This was the mid-90s and our entire organization was currently running on terminals connected to big iron boxes. In addition to the massive infrastructure upgrade needed, we were looking at a very steep learning curve for the users.
This kind of growth is a challenge, especially at the leadership level. Strong IT operations is about hygiene. It's never glamorous and always first to blamed and have its budget cut. In my time as a tech professional, I've encountered many ineffective IT operations leaders. They were technically weak and more often, also weak in fortitude in protecting their people and the stability of the system.
Our leaders stuck to their guns, pushing for infrastructure building with an emphasis on security and stability despite the tremendous pressure for new gizmos and flashy toys. They made people define what
they needed, not what they wanted, and they held staff and vendors accountable for their actions and promises. In fact, I'd never seen higher standards and low tolerance of weak ethics during in a banking
atmosphere in my entire career.
In the end, we learned just how necessary this was. Their efforts supported tremendous growth, far beyond what was proposed by the executive team. The new infrastructure and the team weathered internet
banking, an explosion of new remote sites, business partners, and very sophisticated apps.
Were they rewarded and honored for this? Of course now. Once the foundation was built and apps began to roll, they were herded out the door to be replaced by yes men (I mean that figuratively and literally). They were seen as too pessimistic, too negative and too slow in getting things done. Based on what I've seen in my career, sometimes an organization needs someone to take the unpopular stance
and get things done, keep things on track. And that person needs not only to be smart, knowledgeable and they need personal courage to stand up for their convictions.. But one thing I've learned, that person does not need to be a man.
It's the spirit of those two women that inspired me as I drew on this sketch, which I call "Heidi defies the universe." You know she'll win.
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Finding Ada
Tue Mar 24 2009
It's Ada Lovelace Day and this my blog post for my pledge.
Buried in the credits of Heidi book 1 (and also in the foreword to the paper version) is the following acknowledgement to the women who inspired Heidi. I thought I'd write about the biggest influence on Heidi, and not coincidentally the first name on this list.
I met GG back in the early 80's in my first computer science class as a freshman. It was a weed out class, a tough large lecture class on algorithms where they threw you into the deep end. With minimal instructions, we had to figure how to login and navigate a command-line system (MPE), find and learn a text editor (no up down cursor controls), and generally fight with the Pascal compiler. This was a weed out class and you needed an B or better to move on. Only about ten percent of the class made it. It was a big class of hopeful computer programmers with a male-female ratio of maybe five to one.
To survive the class, I spent a few nights a week in the terminal room (open 24x7) tanning myself in the glow of a Vt100. That is where I got talking to talking to a fellow classmate, GG.
The first thing she showed me was the the other thing in the terminal room, the Plato system and it's online multiplayer gaming system. Sure, I had met girl computer users before, but GG was the first hard-core one I'd met. The first who made me feel like a newb, not just in technical skillz but in online culture. She led me in some of my earlier explorations of Bitnet and taught me a lot about how systems worked and where they didn't (ahem). She was also deep into InfoCom games, so we often discussed puzzles and solutions between coding sessions.
Okay, let me head off a distracting concern some might have. I'm male, she's female. We were not romantically. I never really thought of her that way. She just wasn't my type (and I don't what that means either since I did date geek girls later in life) My attraction to her was entirely about a kindred geek spirit. She was simply smart, creative, curious, and technically experienced.
We progressed on in the CS program (we both passed the weed out class). She got a terminal operator job at a large bank and one of her duties was running reports to chase down credit card fraud. She helped bust a couple of people.
After a few years, our little community of hackers splintered into factions around rival BBSes and online flame wars. Though we never disagreed with each other directly, GG and I ended up on opposing sides of a particularly nasty schism that ended with the police getting involved in a hacking investigation (no arrests, they had no idea how to treat us back then). After that, we all kind of parted ways and lost touch.
I haven't seen her since the late 80's. She may have gone on to be a dot-com success story or a helluva CIO. She was never one to self-promote or call attention to herself, so who knows? She wasn't a genius hacker, or a particularly gifted innovator. Just a keen, bright techie. The whole male/female thing never really came into play - we were all just geeks. Her confidence and whatever attitude formed the foundation for my writing of Heidi. There are times when I'm writing when I can hear her in my head. And that makes me smile.
I am the Network Guy
Tue Nov 08 2005
"I am the Network Guy" was one of the suggested titles for this book, but I figured it would be too confusing. I do love the title and that first scene from Heidi's story. It's a shame that it's not entirely fiction. When I sat down to write this story, I consulted with many of my female geek friends. One of them (shout to Julie!) told me of a recent incident that became the basis for "I am the network guy". Despite having worked around female computer scientists (and my fair share of lady hackers), I was a bit taken aback that such sexism still existed in the field. Many of the women out there weren't. That said, perhaps it's time for me to list a few relevant links:
- Misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology
- WITI is the premiere global organization helping tech-savvy women attain their professional goals.
- The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
- National Center for Women & Information Technology
- See Jane Compute, The adventures of a woman in computing.
- The Escapist: "OMG Girlz don't exist on teh Inatarweb!!!!1"