Glad she's not the "guy" writing the next hospital/security/financial software or hardware system.

"It's too hard." "The guys made a pass at me."

Maybe she go work for HRC. I'm sure they will have something for her to do at a higher wage than they would pay a guy. (Unless it has to do w/HRC's server.)

She spends several paragraphs detailing how her male fellow-students have achieved far more than she has, and are far-more capable than she is of doing the course work - but then blames it all on sexism and her own lack of confidence?

"Like many a woman before me, I had run smack into the confidence gap."

No, lady, it's not a confidence gap - it's a competence gap. You have to have the second, before you can justify the first. Sure, your male fellow-students may have more confidence in their abilities than you do - but they have the competence and the proven performance to back it up. The successful internships, the ease with which they take courses that you find difficult, their ability to master challenges - face it. They can do it, and you can't. They are quantifiably better at this work than you are - you said it yourself! Confidence has nothing to do with it. You want to get that same confidence in your work - get yourself to be as good as they are, instead of whining and sniveling about how it's the sexism that's somehow holding you back.

CS is unique in this field - unlike roughnecking or ditch-digging, upper-body strength matters not at all and the keyboard cannot determine gender. The only reason you're not as good at it as the guys in the major you abandoned is between your ears. And that's not their fault. Deal with it.

llater,

llamas

My take when things are too hard -- like when you needed connections to get a job at Ogilvy & Mather/NY -- is to find another way.

This is what I tell inner city kids I speak to once or twice a year at a school in LA.

When my letters asking for an interview didn't work out, I tried to sneak in and show somebody my student film. The guard caught me, so I waited for somebody important to come out. I followed this man (in business pants and a Dr. Zhivago shirt) to Fifth Avenue and gave him my (creative and funny) resume. I got a letter telling me I would be interviewed a few days later. I'd stopped Norman Berry, head of creative for Ogilvy Worldwide.

Ogilvy, back then, had the best production department in New York and probably anywhere, and I just wasn't willing to not work there. And I had put in a lot of work, from my teen years on, in gaining experience and making little funny films. I was nobody and my parents were nobodies, and I knew I had to get in on my own.

A tweet:

@BevfromNYC
@amyalkon We fought to be treated equally and now we are complaining that they popping towels at us in the locker rm like 1 of the guys...

My tweetback to @BevfromNYC:

Exactly. Kingsley Browne makes this point in "Biology At Work" -- that women are complaining about being treated...equally!

I'm not buying any of all that BS from Tracy Chou.

My internships at Google and Facebook were both incredible opportunities. I could hardly believe my luck to be on the inside of two of the most glamorous and prestigious companies in Silicon Valley....

She should find it totally believable. Google and Facebook are full-on crony capitalists welded at the hip to Big Government, and have the deep pockets to throw resources at empty gestures and diversity theater.

....The big project I had been promised for my internship was given to someone else.

Since when do interns get "big projects"? And was that "someone else" perhaps more capable and experienced?

I have self-confidence issues. Blame the men. While you're at it, somebody get me a binky!

Just nobody go and suggest that maybe they are better than me, or maybe they boast and suck, or maybe they have spent more time on this and thousands of hours of practice programming their calculators to play PONG during high school were actually useful.

Because if I'm not awesome at a random skill I want to be awesome at, we need to blame somebody... else.

Latest version - Uber For Women Only (women drivers, women passengers). Because male passengers, or male cab drivers, can be icky!

IOW, we want to cherry-pick "equality" for just the bits that are profitable, easy or low-risk.

Next step - when rides on UFWO are running 2x - 3x the cost of rides on Uber for Everyone, Regardless of Genitals, this will be positioned as 'sexist' and 'unfair'.

llater,

llamas

I interviewed a guy recently. I wanted a programmer; he wanted an internship. He asked, "How many other interns will there be? Will we be responsible as a group or individually for work being done? Because I do great in a group environment!"

I started coding at age six on an Apple // in Basic. I destroyed a few things before I got the hang of it. (That was a great time to understand what the box did, and, if you issued a command to overwrite line 10 of the program and write it to disk, you would ruin your parents' accounting software...they weren't so proud that it printed "Hi This Is Verde!")

At age 11, I went to the local bookstore (you remember those), and bought three of the animal bestiary books O'Reilly was putting out at the time. I spent the summer learning how to code those three languages.

25 years later, I still use derivatives of those languages every day.

Now, in college, I skipped programming 101 and went to programming 202. My best friend in there was struggling the whole time because he'd come to get a programming degree and assumed that his first experience coding was going to be in those college classes, whereas my opinion remains - you learn to code outside of anything structured by anyone else.

It's like Lemmy Kilmeister said when asked if he would support money for musical instruments in schools: "Absolutely not. This is rebellion. You're learning a skill they don't want you to have."

I'm sure if she embedded herself in the ecosystem, she could do fine. However, she sees herself as having to done the false beard and pretend she's a born coder...and she simply isn't. Neither was my buddy, who went on to make a lot of money getting a business degree and selling software. Such is life.

For people who claim to value diversity, they really have a narrow and provincial view of what somebody can do to make money.

Since when do interns get "big projects"? And was that "someone else" perhaps more capable and experienced?

Or somebody more determined/desperate. Look how I fought to get into the company I wanted to work for. That's what I tell inner-city kids -- that they have to work harder and be more creative than the kids from Beverly Hills, whose parents have a lot of connections.

I was surrounded by men who'd breezily skipped prerequisite courses. As freshmen, they'd signed up for classes that I was intimidated to take even as a sophomore. They casually mentioned software engineering internships they had completed back in high school,

So, they laid the groundwork beginning in high school and you started laying the groundwork late in college?

And this is sexism?

Later, I went to college at Stanford University, where our university president was a computer scientist who had made a fortune in microprocessors.

Somehow, she thinks because the president of Stanford is a computer scientist, that should have made her path to Silicon Valley easier.

During the summers, I interned at Facebook and Google.

In which departments?

I remember when the department I worked in for a major grocery retailer hired two interns, one male and one female, from UC-Berkeley. The female intern was driven, ambitious, and friendly. She had come to work on a big project. The male intern was more laconic and ended up in my section, under me.

The other section boss created a "big project" for the intern which had nothing to do with the actual work. It was more of a class exercise. He fancied himself a teacher. He'll be teaching convicts now, since he was later arrested for insider trading.

My section boss had no plans for the intern other than that I should put him to work. So, I did. He ran reports and built Powerpoint decks based on the data. While he did that, I explained the whats and whys behind the data and how to extrapolate information and use it to tell the story we wanted senior management to hear.

Mostly, he did scut work. Paid, so no worries there, Amy.

She came out of her internship convinced she had done meaningful work and had gotten a taste of the real world. She hadn't. She'd done a classroom exercise. He came out with a more realistic vision of what an entry level analyst does and what the business is about, but no "big project" to put on his resume and no exciting tales of lunch with VPs and CEOs.

Which one got the better lesson?

I like to think he did. I ran into him later at a different company. He was working for a real estate firm we had retained. He thanked me for the lessons I had taught him, but perhaps he was just being polite. He was doing well (perhaps better than I was at the time).

I don't know what happened to her. I wonder if she's decrying sexism her industry or leading a major project.

"I could never shake the feeling of being petted as an adorably confused young intern. I felt as if I was welcomed because I was cute to keep around, not because there was any expectation of my doing useful, good work."

It's an internship! That is what interns are! An internship is essentially a really long job interview. I interned with Halliburton. One guy got to clean up their library of technical documents nobody uses. Another guy got to cut foam so equipment could be packed in boxes. I remember playing with a sat phone to see if it could work. You are only there for a few months. By the time you come up to speed it is time for you to go. But if you are smart you can get contacts for later when you want a full time job.

"One offered to give me a massage "because I looked stressed." Another tried to get me to watch a movie with him in a dark room with the door locked and blinds closed."

In the office? Now that is entirely inappropriate. If it was after hours, big whoop. If you were both on your own time it is not a business issue.

""How many other interns will there be? Will we be responsible as a group or individually for work being done? Because I do great in a group environment!""

Great story Verde. That is enough for me to say 'Thank you. Don't call us, we'll call you (when hell freezes over).'

I had access to a computer as a high school student in the mid-1970s. Back then, it was unusual for a child or teenager to have access to a computer. There was a group of us at school that did work on the school's minicomputer (a whopping 64K bytes of magnetic core memory, and two 5 MB cartridge disk drives). In exchange for computer time, we wrote software and did data entry for the school, and did some of the maintenance work on the computer. We did most of our work on clunky, noisy hardcopy terminals. When we ran out of paper, we stole paper towel rolls from the bathrooms and put those in. We stored a lot of our programs on paper tape because there wasn't enough room on the disk.

A group of us students had after-school sessions where we'd kick off all of the school users and experiment with the computer. The head of the "computer department", who was also a chemistry teacher, would tell us, "If you overwrite any school files, you'll be in a lot of trouble. So don't do that." And then he'd leave for the night. We taught ourselves FORTRAN and ALGOL and assembly language. We figured out how to enter instructions into the computer in binary using the front panel switches (back when computers had such things). We found the source code to the operating system on a disk that a field service rep had left us, and we modified it. Most of our modifications crashed and burned, but a few were rather brilliant. I figured out how to read a system file whose format was undocumented, and from that I was able to write a useful utility. The utility wound up on a user-contributed software tape, and then eventually the computer company put it in later versions of the operating system. I recall once working on a program for what seemed like only an hour or so, and then deciding I needed to stretch my legs. I was stunned when I walked outside and it was dark and the campus was deserted. It was 1:00 AM. I had no clue.

When I started college, they told me to skip the introductory computer class. I went directly into the assembly language class, which blew the instructor's mind. I was the only freshman in the class. By halfway through my junior year I was taking graduate-level courses. (Which messed me up later when I wanted to work on a master's degree -- I couldn't take the same classes again for credit.) None of this would have happened without those late-night jam sessions during high school, while a lot of my classmates were out on dates or hanging out at the river.

So yeah. There are plenty of women who have become successful because they put in the work up front. They didn't just walk in the room and expect it to be handed to them. Admiral Grace Hopper became the U.S. Navy's guru of computer science, at a time when there really was sexism. She didn't do that by just walking in the room.

My 5th grade classroom had a TRS-80. I played with simple BASIC programs. And even better my grandmother had one too that I played with.

In 6th grade my friend has an Apple 2e (maybe?) we programatically wrote those fill in the blank word games.

In high school I was on Math League and took a Pascal computer science course.

I was pre-med in college and changed my mind senior year.

I thought at the time that you must have CS degree to get into computers. My friend recognizing my computer savvy told me to look anyway. I bought a used intro book to study.

Found a job advert looking for smart people but untrained. They even asked SAT scores (mine are extraordinarily lopsided ~90th percentile in math and significantly lower in the English).

I was tech interviewed over the phone and could say I was putting in the effort to learn by reading the intro book.

We started at a relatively low salary but received significant raises quickly. I worked for them for close to 10 years. I survived through several layoffs when things got bad in 2000.

For guys in tech/science fields, it is often the case that they have had hobbies and intense interest in the subject since they were kids. I knew all the trees in my city by age 7. In college my buddy and I bought botanical books and went out searching for rare plants and edible plants. I had read dozens of books on evolution, geology, and of course dinosaurs, during high school. Computer guys have written their own games. Girls tend not to do this.
Guys will also talk tech for hours (cars, computers, software, wolves, cave men, aliens, you name it) but how often do you chance upon girls talking like this?
What these two things reflect is intense interest in the subject outside of the classroom, which equates to a level of background knowledge that is very helpful in class.
You can't say it is sexism that the boys are obsessed with Object Oriented Programming and GUIs and the girls are not--that is a matter of personal interest, but it has consequences for success in tech fields.

OOP/GUIs hmmm...

My current position recently gave us a shared Pluralsight subscription. I spend all of my commute watching technical video (on public transit). Minimally 90 minutes each weekday.

I am currently watching Docker Deep Dive.

We also received MSDN subscription yesterday. I can't wait to setup a lab at home with networked Docker containers. Last night I downloaded SQL Server 2016 Preview, Team Foundation Server, and Visual Studio Professional (I already had the free versions of SQL and VS).

My main computer has 16 GB RAM (and 1TB SSD) and I have a server that (with 32 GB RAM) now I will be able to put Window Server 2016 Preview on for lots of virtual machines and docker containers.

I love learning this stuff.

"You can't say it is sexism that the boys are obsessed with Object Oriented Programming and GUIs and the girls are not--that is a matter of personal interest,..."

Of course it's sexism. Boys are interested in tech subjects and girls are not only because they're socialized that way.

Feminists explained this decades ago.

"Like many a woman before me, I had run smack into the confidence gap. Researchers have shown that women consistently rate their abilities more negatively than men, while men give themselves inflated marks. In the face of my classmates' bluster, I didn't consider the idea that they might be bluffing. Instead I assumed the problem was me."

In other words the sexism she was experiencing all came from inside of her.

"My colleagues complimented me on the way I looked, not the work I produced."

This is the business world, so those colleagues were all competitors. did no one ever tell her what a huge advantage it is to have your opponents underestimate you?

My main computer has 16 GB RAM (and 1TB SSD) and I have a server that (with 32 GB RAM) now I will be able to put Window Server 2016 Preview on for lots of virtual machines and docker containers.

Thats hot

My main computer has 16 GB RAM (and 1TB SSD) and I have a server that (with 32 GB RAM) now I will be able to put Window Server 2016 Preview on for lots of virtual machines and docker containers.

Thats hot

Ha. Thank you!

My computer is 4 years old but until 32 GB on a desktop becomes affordable it doesn't make sense to upgrade. That's why I splurged for the 1 TB SSD less than a year ago. I upgraded from 140 GB SSD, besides being fairly expensive 4 years ago I don't even think they were available as 1 TB.

It was a pretty painless transition. The new drive came with software to copy your existing boot drive, turn off machine, swap out the drives, and it worked.

The server was bought used/refurbished from Amazon for a very reasonable price.