Accidentally in Code

Tag: technology

  • The Pipeline is a Bullshit Argument, and Other Rants

    The Pipeline is a Bullshit Argument, and Other Rants

    melting girl
    Credit: Flickr / Charis Tsevis

    The latest comments are from a guy who runs a startup incubator, but next week it will be someone else. Men, so many men, would like to explain why there are no women in the tech industry, and how it is not, actually, their fault, and there is nothing they can do, so can we just stop complaining, please? Why do they have to feel so bad about it? It’s just how the world is. Watch your tone.

    It’s The Pipeline, Stupid

    The pipeline argument is the ultimate refuge of the tech company or incubator that would like to pass the blame. There aren’t enough women graduating, so that explains the numbers. There aren’t enough girls going into the right courses at university, so there is nothing they can do.

    This argument is blind to privilege, but also, I think, classist. The tech person making in excess of $100k a year, would like to blame the school teachers who make a fraction of that.

    The school teacher could argue that 63% of women working in STEM report experiencing sexual harassment, why would they encourage students to go into that kind of toxic environment? They might be better off being accountants.

    The pipeline leaks from the age of 5 until all women have dropped out, or died. (See The Primer). Handily it means that everyone can divert attention from the leaks closest to them by pointing to leaks further away.

    Fast, Cheap, Good – Pick Two

    A constraint of project management is – Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick two. My understanding is that the VC model is built on Fast and Cheap. Postpone as much as possible (including finding a business model) until after the big exit.

    Women are shut out of this, and so women run business tend to more the Cheap and Good – bootstrapping – with a business model, and customers! – over a long period, with lower rates of failure.

    The myth of the 20 something male, is correlation, not causation. What are VCs really looking for? Hubris? Lack of interest in anything else, willingness to work 80 hour weeks and put their life on hold in pursuit of some definition of success?

    10,000 Hours and Other Nonsense

    One argument is that starting at 13 is necessary in order to have put in the 10,000 – as explained by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book – in order to be good enough at 23. Except it’s not just about the sheer number of hours thrown at it, it’s about the type of work done. 10,000 hours will get you a middle ranking at chess, but it takes 5,000 hours of deep practise to become a chess grandmaster.

    Also, this level of dedication is when you aim to become the best in the world at something. This is a master craftsman level of wood carving. Except what we are actually talking about is something closer to assembling a bunch of Ikea furniture, albeit in a tight timeframe. We wouldn’t extrapolate that playing with hammers and bashing together chaotic structures with no stability bears much relationship to the wood carver. And yet, writing terrible code with little feedback other than “it works” – for some definition of works, not a definition that includes any QA control – is seen to bear a significant relationship to the ability, 10 years later, to build a production quality service with millions of users and 99.9% uptime.

    The level of “deep practice” during universities is unclear, but at the very least, whilst men definitely outnumber women in university computer science, I can’t find any data that suggests they outperform them – I’ve actually heard the opposite, that women tend to do better in 3rd and 4th year, by which point they outperform men. The thing that women do score less well on than men, is confidence.

    So back to that argument about hubris.

    The One True Way of “Hacking”

    I posit that programming is a way of thinking, and that programming languages and technologies are just tools that we use. Why is there such a fixation on tooling? This is just an extension of the Vim vs Emacs war.

    In sports, something much more measurable, as things like how fast someone can swim 100 metres of butterfly has a definite answer, path is less prescriptive than it is in the tech industry. There are different ways of training, people who come to the sport late and still succeed – I heard a talk by Alisa Camplin who won Gold in aerial skiing at the Olympics, who didn’t consider the possibility of competing as an aerial skier until she was 20.

    Why is there this limited view on what it means to become good at something? Is it because we don’t really know what it means to be good at it? Or is it a deliberate attempt to keep the barriers to entry artificially high? Oh you’re learning to code at 18? Wow, you left it too late, may as well give up.

    Inclusive, Not Pink, Makes $$

    The video game industry was saturated, and then Nintendo launched the wii – opening up the market to people who had not bought video games previously. This included women, but please recall, the wii wasn’t pink.

    Women control the majority of consumer spending. Women are the dominant users of social networks. Inclusive products, make a lot of money. Under-powered pink products get cancelled.

    In 2014, still the idea of making something “for women” means making it pink (hilarious parody commercial of a pen for women). As a business strategy, this is stupid. This experiment in funding teenage boys to work incessantly and build things has only demonstrated what adult women have known all along – teenage boys have no idea what women want. The result is that the female market (and British women actually spend more money on technology than cosmetics) is completely underserved. The old way hasn’t worked. Surely, it’s time to consider the assumptions?

    Meanwhile, women have been bootstrapping companies, and turning to Kickstarter, and it might take longer, but I do think that eventually women-led technology companies will show the adolescent boys and their admirers what women really want, and importantly, what they will pay for.

    Such products may or may not, come in pink.

     

  • Emotional Women Have Context

    Emotional Women Have Context

    office
    Credit: flickr / decor8 holly

    Do you remember the thing at Pycon, earlier this year? I’m not going to write specifically what, because I don’t want to linkbait. But if you are on Twitter and follow any technical women… I’m sure you saw it.

    It seemed like in the end, the consensus on the Internet (which I do not agree with), was that “oh, that guy made a social faux-pas, educate and forgive”, but “that woman was not 100% her best self a situation she found hostile, burn at the stake”. I use the word hostile there, deliberately.

    And how many of us are our best selves in a hostile situation? I’ve been watching a lot of Covert Affairs (Amazon) lately, and her ability to keep calm when there is a gun to her head has given me an answer. It’s a special kind of person, like the kind of person who could be a spy. James Bond had a lonely life. Emotions are what make us human, and what bring us together – even if they also drive us apart. Not having them, well, that has it’s own downsides.

    I found the tweeting of a photo a little tacky. But later I was at a conference and a speaker made a dumb and gendered remark… I was tempted to add a photo and a twitter handle to the snark I tweeted. I didn’t. But I understood better why someone might think that was their best option.

    The thing about actions, and situations, that have historically been gendered, is that they disproportionately effect women. Because they come with context.

    One of the things I envy about my (technical) male friends, is their ability to just shrug off someone else’s attitude without letting it affect them. They say, “That guy is just an idiot. Ignore him.” One of my friends recently told me about how he was impressed by someone, and he described their behaviour and I thought, “wow, I would find that stressful” – because it would come across to me as though he didn’t value my knowledge, or judgement. And that has context.

    One thing that really pushes my buttons, is feeling patronised. A medical student interrupting me and clarifying when I’m explaining cloud computing and software as a service? Yeah, that’ll make me mad. When a high-school boy interrupted me, spoke over me, to answer the question I was helping someone with… and he was wrong.

    And you could just find that funny, right? I told my mom, and she was so confused, she had to clarify. “A high-school student? Patronised you? About programming?”

    Yes. Yes he did. And I was so annoyed.

    And here’s the context. I spent my four years of CS at University feeling like I wasn’t good enough, and my goal was to survive and then go work in something tangentially related. And there were so many reasons for that (Unlocking the Clubhouse covers most of them). But here’s a big one – guys on my course, they would be patronising, superior. I was worrying I didn’t belong, and the way they looked at me and interacted with me… that re-enforced the idea that they didn’t, either.

    I’ve got the advice, multiple times, that you need to forget the context. Essentially treat each new micro-aggression as the first.

    But studies show, that women drop out of the industry at a much higher rate than men. On days when I feel like there is a clock ticking over my head, I wonder if the reason why they go, is there is too much context, and if that will be true for me, as well.

  • Thinking About Statistics

    Thinking About Statistics

    Fifty years of sports statistics. Hardly recreational reading material, Marty.
    Credit: flickr / Nati Devalle

    I’ve been thinking lately, if we really accepted the statistics about technical women as being likely to reflect our own experiences, how might that affect our behaviour? It can be hard, as technical women, as we deviate from the statistical “norm” for a long time, and it’s easy to think that will keep going… but what if it doesn’t?

    Find a Sponsor

    I personally have had a hard time accepting that hard work and being smart is not enough. There’s a game on, and it involves getting the right projects, and getting noticed. Studies show that women are over-mentored and under-sponsored, and actually have a hard time convincing their mentors they are ready for bigger challenges. I do think mentoring is helpful, I’m so grateful for my amazing mentors, but it’s not a career strategy. That’s getting noticed, and getting the right projects, and sponsorship really helps there.

    Cluster

    Look very carefully at a place where there are no women – do there just happen to not be any? Or are there none there for a reason… maybe it’s a “brogramming gulag” (new favourite phrase). 63% of women in STEM report experiencing sexual harassment, and people who believe they are in a meritocracy (that word, it does not mean what you think it means) exhibit larger amounts of cognitive bias. Clearly, there are places that women would be best to avoid.

    Accept a Slower Trajectory

    Women do not get as many promotions as men. Which is super-depressing. No-one wants that statistic to be true of them, but if it is… how do you find a way to be OK with it? Less responsibility, less money… but more time to live? One idea.

    Expect Burnout In 30s

    Studies show that women leave in their 30s. So if that is the timeframe, what are some options?

    1. Work to burnout, save enough money not to need to work, or work much less at something else.
    2. Maintain or develop other skills, as an exit strategy.
    3. Marry “well” – i.e. another high-earning professional. (I hate this, but… can’t deny it).

    Avoid HR / Quiet Exit

    I think this post from Penelope Trunk is interesting, on reporting sexual harassment. Key quote: “The law is set up to encourage a company to take proscribed steps to protect itself from liability rather than to protect your emotional stability, or, for that matter, your career.”

    Have an exit plan instead. Women often move to other companies to get their next challenge, and I infer from this that it’s best to quietly notice the signs that a situation is bad, or no more opportunities are forthcoming… and move to somewhere where that is not the case.

    Open Question

    I find Facebook’s focus on women interesting, cynically, women are the dominant users of social networking and the drivers of consumer spending. In this context, “understanding women” is not a joke about heterosexual relationships… it’s a necessary business strategy. And I wonder – in that kind context (Facebook is not the only place where this is true) – is it be better for women?

  • Three Phases of Technical Women

    Three Phases of Technical Women

    Zodiac's Stuff - One of pisces stone
    Credit: flickr / Vivian Viola

    Amongst other technical women, I’ve observed three broad phases when it comes to their feelings and attitudes with respect to the issues of women in tech. These are my unscientific and generalised observations.

    Ignorance is Bliss

    This phase is where women deny that there are any issues facing women in the industry, and sometimes even point to (some) guys as being worse off. They don’t notice gendered experiences, their own or other peoples – e.g. I once heard a women say “I’ve never experience any issue as a woman in tech”, and then immediately account a horrifyingly sexist remark someone had made to her.

    They sometimes reject conventional femininity, by for example, always dressing in jeans and a tshirt (to be clear – not a judgement on people’s clothing choices, there are many reasons to reject conventional femininity, but whether they feel they have them – what’s interesting here is whether once they move into another phase they start dressing differently).

    Mostly students and early career women, although some women manage to keep this up for a impressively long time (interesting perspective from one woman attributing this to Aspergers). As much as I sometimes find it difficult to interact with women in this group, I think women in this phase are the happiest – power to them.

    Engineer it Better

    This phase is where women have more awareness of the issues, through literature and have observed or experienced issues that they suspected were gendered.

    Here, they have often accepted that they are different than the stereotypical techie – sometimes this manifests as choosing to dress how they want, and be willing admit to “girly” hobbies or interests. They get involved in women’s events, read up on literature, look for ways to support other women.

    The key thing here, is recognising there is a problem but believing that things will change and our actions will make a difference. It is also being able to shrug off the gendered experiences, as not being the norm. Also here, they recognise and appreciate the occasional things that are better for women – the network of other technical women, for example. It’s a necessary support network, but wow is it amazing. There’s the occasional extra opportunity, for example recruiters and teams looking harder to find women, rather than expecting women to come to them (necessary because women are more likely to underestimate themselves, but still – nice), or many companies (Cisco, IBM, and others) run internal programs aimed at developing women leaders.

    Deprecate

    These women are hyper-aware, familiar with the depressing nature of the numbers and the research (for example the downward trend since the 80s). They have experienced and witnessed sufficient gendered situations that they have lost the ability to shrug things off and instead may find themselves braced for them.

    Here, there are low expectations for the future and the morality of encouraging future generations of women may even be questioned. Yes it will be better for the world if we have a more diverse representation of humanity building the digital experience, but for any individual this may well not be the case (consider the statistic that 63% of women report being sexually harassed).

    This is where women drop out. Either actually dropping out, or by mentally dropping out and trying to find ways not to care as much – for example citing the job flexibility and the high pay as reasons to stay around, rather than what they are actually doing.

    What To Do?

    Since these phases seem to come with information and experience, it is extremely hard to move back to a previous phase, and (short of drugs and/or a major head trauma) it seems impossible to move back to “Ignorance is Bliss”. Once you have noticed, there is no un-noticing. The best we can hope for is to prolong each one, but especially the middle phase.

    There is a catch-22 here, in that the existence of “Ignorance is Bliss” slows down progress. One woman thinking there is no issue is often presented as over-riding all statistics, which is ridiculous, but prevalent. However, without this phase, if every 18 year-old-girl entering university knew the statistics and recognised the issues, I don’t believe we would even be hitting the measly not-even-15% we are (US and Canada).

    I think the key is managing burnout, and maintaining hope.

    Managing Burnout

    We need to remember why it is that we want to be in this industry. Shanley wrote a good post about this recently.

    Make time to remind ourselves why we want to be an engineer. For me, this is because I love to make things. So, I look for projects where I can feel a sense of satisfaction – regular milestones, regular shipping (in a little less than 3 years, I’ve worked on 3 new products). Places where I can focus on creating a great user experience, and ideally solving real-people-problems, not what in an angsty mood I would describe as “made-up-engineer problems”. Making time for personal projects also helps.

    Let go of obligations. Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by things that I’m being asked to help with, that will help other women. Making time to talk to someone, or take an interview, or speak at an event. I want to do all these things, but sometimes it is just too much, and I have taken to reminding myself that the best thing we can really do, is be great at and love our work. This means sometimes saying no, or taking a deliberate break, and being OK with that.

    The network of fellow women is so important for me. Feeling alone in my worries, concerns, and negative experiences would make me feel like I was going mad. When I’m feeling despondent about something, and I read about someone else’s similar experience or situation… it’s a sign, that as much as there may be wrong with me, there’s a fundamental problem in this industry that is far bigger than my flaws as an individual. And as I work to always be better, nicer, more effective… I can also work to find situations where it is easier to be better (hostile situations rarely bring out the best in anyone).

    Hope

    This week it’s the Grace Hopper Conference. This will be my fourth year attending. Every year, I meet amazing, amazing women, listen to amazing talks, and leave with a bunch of new ideas and information. It’s my shot of hope, that I need to sustain me for another year, or at least until the next one is close enough to look forward to.

    Role models, I think, are key for hope, feeling that there is a career path and that other people have thrived in similar situations and with similar experiences. I imagine that internal programs for women also help with this. The network of technical women helps with this – the high profile women, the Marissa Mayer’s and the Sheryl Sandberg’s don’t actually give me that much hope (especially when I see the press about them), the more normal-seeming women who seem to be enjoying their work and their life are much more immediately inspiring to me.

    Other Considerations.

    One of the things that I am – shamefully – only recently starting to notice is the prevalence of racism and transphobia. It won’t be equality if we don’t all win.

    Only in the tech industry is a middle-class white woman “diversity”. I had a very privileged upbringing, and whilst my university experience was hard because of feeling other, and displays of rampant sexism (watching so many of the other women in my class be portrayed as the “token girl” in the group project exercise for example), I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been whilst say, struggling to make ends meet, or dealing with the extra challenges of being a “visible minority”.

    So if we could just keep reminding ourselves what equality really means, that might be a start.

  • Smart Calendars

    Smart Calendars

    Below is a picture of my schedule for this week:

    Calendar for w/c January 18th
    Calendar for w/c January 18th

    Bear in mind, that the scheduled times are typically those when I am not working – yes I am a little stressed, and incredibly unsympathetic to people who tell me they don’t have time to do things because they are “too busy”.

    I’ve had to start scheduling gym time, because otherwise there’s a good chance that I won’t be able to make it. Which has set me thinking, because normally there are a couple of classes I could go to and I pick the one that works in my schedule. What would be good, though, is if I could put all the possible times in and my calendar could work out the ones that are possible, and then remind me an hour before.

    In fact, you could suggest degrees of aggression for the reminder, i.e. I would like to set a goal, say for 5 workouts in a week, and it would harass me accordingly, i.e. if it’s Wednesday and I haven’t trained yet, it should start getting really pushy. But if it’s Thursday and I’ve already been 3 times, it could be a little nicer and say, you can have today off if you like – provided that I can make two more training times on Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

    It’s not just workouts, either, I’ve blocked out four hours on Friday afternoon to do “inbox processing” (very GTD of me), but realistically that can happen any time of day. So I’d like my calendar to be a little flexible in appointment scheduling around that, provided there’s a four hour block between, say, 10am and 10pm for me to have that time.

    I think there’s a lot that could be done with location awareness, too. What do you think?

  • The Future

    Future Or Bust!
    Credit: flickr / Vermin Inc

    The other day, I blogged about how technology education had to better prepare students for the future, but I didn’t come up with many ideas for how. Ultimately, it’s hard to prepare for the unknown and I evade predictions about the details. It’s really hard to educate for the future, if you don’t know what it will be like. However I think there are some things that we do know – mostly because they’ve already started happening.

    But what can we say about the future?

    • Being able to find stuff will be more important than knowing stuff.
    • Not being comfortable with technology will be a huge disadvantage.
    • Need to be adaptable due to the fast changing nature of life and work.
    • Everything will be customizable.
    • We will need to be smart about our privacy.
    • Context and location awareness will become more prevalent (you can already see this with your todo list on Remember the Milk)
    • Interactivity will take on new meaning – check out this iPhone book, and the future of shopping.
    • Connectivity will be ubiquitous.
    • Never lose touch with friends because of services like Facebook.

    I think informatics education makes students better prepared for the future. Informatics is becoming increasingly prevalent – especially in biology, geography (GIS) and physics. So I think we’ll see a rise in joint degrees, and a good grounding in technology will be as necessary as basic math.

    Now to convince everybody else…

  • Mini-Generation Gaps

    Mini-Generation Gaps

    One Laptop Per Child
    Credit: Wikimedia

    When I gave the Holiday Science lecture, one of the things that I touched on briefly was how my childhood was unrecognizable compared to the childhood of children 10 years my junior.

    This article – The Children of Cyberspace – from the New York Times elaborates on that further. From the article:

    “Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.”

    Lately, I’ve been thinking more about this and how technology education needs to prepare people for the future – both in terms of how we encourage children to take an interest in informatics (Computer Science) and what they’re taught when they get here. I’m starting to work out the details for a presentation, which I’m thinking about calling “Preparing for a Revolution”.

    What do you think? Any suggestions?

  • Holiday Science Lecture Presentation: Art, Life and Programming

    Here’s the slidedeck! Because I’m presenting in French I’ve kept text to a minimum:

    Art, Life and Programming

    View more documents from Cate Huston.

    Posts with detailed notes about what I’ll be covering and the videos (which won’t work from Slideshare – boo!):

    Part 1: Introduction

    Part 2: Art

    Part 3: Life

    Part 4: Programming

  • Time to Pull Myself Together

    Inspire Particle Show
    Credit: flickr / arthurx Titanium

    On Monday, I’m giving my “Art, Life and Programming” presentation. I’m a little burnt out after a crazy semester and frankly terrified, because I’m presenting in French.

    So since I got back to Canada, I’ve been working on revising my slides and thinking about what I’m going to talk about. It’s turned out, that there’s a lot more work to do on them than I thought. So I’ve been getting panicky and stressed, which makes me less inspired, so it all seems harder than it should.

    This morning, though, something clicked. 1. I have a hard time believing that I have something of value to say to that number of people, and 2. the university promotion of my talk has several errors in it (this was a little upsetting – I would have been happy to correct it, had it been sent to me). However, let’s combine these things – clearly, what I’m talking about is not obvious. Not everyone knows about it. So hopefully there will be something of value that I share with all these people.

    And, if I’m not happy with my slides (which I spent a lot of time on back in August or December), that just goes to show that my presentation skills have improved.

    If I’m not happy with my content, if I feel like there are things missing – that just shows how much more I know now than I did 3 months ago.

    At the highest level, my talk is about how technology has changed the world, and how it will continue to. At the highest level, what’s my goal? To inspire people with and about technology, to make it seem accessible as a career, a choice for university.

    On Monday, I’m going to be terrified. No point denying that as if you see me you will almost certainly know. But also on Monday I’m going to be doing my tiny bit to make a difference. I’m going to be jumping up and down and hard and as high as I can, because we need to make a tidal wave to make a change.

    We can recycle all our plastic bottles. And we can cut down on international flights. We can walk to the corner store instead of drive, but our world has more problems than global warming. We can shop sustainably, we can encourage development through services like Kiva, but globally, there are many problems other than poverty. Governments can borrow money and spend it on services to create jobs, but how well that works is variable.

    Here’s what I believe – technology will help us save the planet – it will provide viable alternatives to flying, and smart solutions to reduce our global footprint. Technology will make the world smaller and provide more options to people in developing countries, lifting them out of poverty. It will make it easier to force corrupt governments to be accountable, and provide means for citizens under oppressive regimes to communicate with the outside world. Innovation, not just in the financial sector, will be how the west recovers from this latest collapse.

    This, I think, is bigger than my fear. So that’s what I’m going to focus on. Because I think in order to make this reality, we need nations of technologists and innovators, not bankers and traffic wardens. What better way to start than with a big group of 7-10 year olds and their families?