Technology's Gender Problem
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I was reading The Guardian today and ran across a striking article[^] about women in computer science. It takes me back to the 1980s, when I worked for Interdata, a company that used to build minicomputers.
In the computer center, most of the operators were women. One of the women complained to me about one of the utility programs she had to frequently use. When she asked for modifications, she was belittled and denied. She asked me for help, but I was behind schedule on my project at the time. Instead, I had been helping her with her computer science homework, I suggested that she modify the source code. She did and logged it into the library. I countersigned as the "supervising engineer." The new version began shipping with all new computers and was included in the software maintenance update.
Then the problems began. Customers complemented Interdata on the improvement. Only then did management realize that the utility had been updated. Because of government contracts, all software updates had to be signed by the "responsible engineer", that is, the engineer who actually did the work. She did not have the title of "engineer". I, as "supervising engineer", refused to modify the release document, citing the IEEE Code of Ethics which the company officially supported.
This went on for several weeks. There was a government delivery approaching, which would include a software library audit. I suggested that, since she had the skills and would soon receive her bachelor's degree, that she be promoted. I was told that the idea would never fly. Guess what? Just before the delivery, senior management promoted her to Junior Engineer.
Guess what also happened.... I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
From the article, however, nothing much has changed in the past forty years!
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn
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I was reading The Guardian today and ran across a striking article[^] about women in computer science. It takes me back to the 1980s, when I worked for Interdata, a company that used to build minicomputers.
In the computer center, most of the operators were women. One of the women complained to me about one of the utility programs she had to frequently use. When she asked for modifications, she was belittled and denied. She asked me for help, but I was behind schedule on my project at the time. Instead, I had been helping her with her computer science homework, I suggested that she modify the source code. She did and logged it into the library. I countersigned as the "supervising engineer." The new version began shipping with all new computers and was included in the software maintenance update.
Then the problems began. Customers complemented Interdata on the improvement. Only then did management realize that the utility had been updated. Because of government contracts, all software updates had to be signed by the "responsible engineer", that is, the engineer who actually did the work. She did not have the title of "engineer". I, as "supervising engineer", refused to modify the release document, citing the IEEE Code of Ethics which the company officially supported.
This went on for several weeks. There was a government delivery approaching, which would include a software library audit. I suggested that, since she had the skills and would soon receive her bachelor's degree, that she be promoted. I was told that the idea would never fly. Guess what? Just before the delivery, senior management promoted her to Junior Engineer.
Guess what also happened.... I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
From the article, however, nothing much has changed in the past forty years!
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn
Guess a better name for InterData would have been InterDit :-\ At my company things were quite (or maybe too) relaxed, until we had to certify for the ISO 9001, we expect to finish it in the next couple of weeks.
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I was reading The Guardian today and ran across a striking article[^] about women in computer science. It takes me back to the 1980s, when I worked for Interdata, a company that used to build minicomputers.
In the computer center, most of the operators were women. One of the women complained to me about one of the utility programs she had to frequently use. When she asked for modifications, she was belittled and denied. She asked me for help, but I was behind schedule on my project at the time. Instead, I had been helping her with her computer science homework, I suggested that she modify the source code. She did and logged it into the library. I countersigned as the "supervising engineer." The new version began shipping with all new computers and was included in the software maintenance update.
Then the problems began. Customers complemented Interdata on the improvement. Only then did management realize that the utility had been updated. Because of government contracts, all software updates had to be signed by the "responsible engineer", that is, the engineer who actually did the work. She did not have the title of "engineer". I, as "supervising engineer", refused to modify the release document, citing the IEEE Code of Ethics which the company officially supported.
This went on for several weeks. There was a government delivery approaching, which would include a software library audit. I suggested that, since she had the skills and would soon receive her bachelor's degree, that she be promoted. I was told that the idea would never fly. Guess what? Just before the delivery, senior management promoted her to Junior Engineer.
Guess what also happened.... I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
From the article, however, nothing much has changed in the past forty years!
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn
My favorite Interdata/Perkin-Elmer memory is when for several months a coworker and I managed to keep the documentation and software folks working at cross-purposes. We found a slight difference between a program and the documentation for that program, and kept sending in requests; his asked that the software be changed to match the documentation, mine that the documentation be changed to match the software. For six months, each was changed to match what the other said or did, which meant they no longer matched again. Apparently after that stretch, either one of the groups failed to change it, or the two groups finally talked to each other. I do have fond memories of the day when we got our first 8/32, and thinking that we'd never fill up 256K of RAM!
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I was reading The Guardian today and ran across a striking article[^] about women in computer science. It takes me back to the 1980s, when I worked for Interdata, a company that used to build minicomputers.
In the computer center, most of the operators were women. One of the women complained to me about one of the utility programs she had to frequently use. When she asked for modifications, she was belittled and denied. She asked me for help, but I was behind schedule on my project at the time. Instead, I had been helping her with her computer science homework, I suggested that she modify the source code. She did and logged it into the library. I countersigned as the "supervising engineer." The new version began shipping with all new computers and was included in the software maintenance update.
Then the problems began. Customers complemented Interdata on the improvement. Only then did management realize that the utility had been updated. Because of government contracts, all software updates had to be signed by the "responsible engineer", that is, the engineer who actually did the work. She did not have the title of "engineer". I, as "supervising engineer", refused to modify the release document, citing the IEEE Code of Ethics which the company officially supported.
This went on for several weeks. There was a government delivery approaching, which would include a software library audit. I suggested that, since she had the skills and would soon receive her bachelor's degree, that she be promoted. I was told that the idea would never fly. Guess what? Just before the delivery, senior management promoted her to Junior Engineer.
Guess what also happened.... I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
From the article, however, nothing much has changed in the past forty years!
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn
Reminds me of the gender that was the driving force behind launching John Glen into space. Glad things are changing for the better.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I was reading The Guardian today and ran across a striking article[^] about women in computer science. It takes me back to the 1980s, when I worked for Interdata, a company that used to build minicomputers.
In the computer center, most of the operators were women. One of the women complained to me about one of the utility programs she had to frequently use. When she asked for modifications, she was belittled and denied. She asked me for help, but I was behind schedule on my project at the time. Instead, I had been helping her with her computer science homework, I suggested that she modify the source code. She did and logged it into the library. I countersigned as the "supervising engineer." The new version began shipping with all new computers and was included in the software maintenance update.
Then the problems began. Customers complemented Interdata on the improvement. Only then did management realize that the utility had been updated. Because of government contracts, all software updates had to be signed by the "responsible engineer", that is, the engineer who actually did the work. She did not have the title of "engineer". I, as "supervising engineer", refused to modify the release document, citing the IEEE Code of Ethics which the company officially supported.
This went on for several weeks. There was a government delivery approaching, which would include a software library audit. I suggested that, since she had the skills and would soon receive her bachelor's degree, that she be promoted. I was told that the idea would never fly. Guess what? Just before the delivery, senior management promoted her to Junior Engineer.
Guess what also happened.... I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
From the article, however, nothing much has changed in the past forty years!
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn
Jalapeno Bob wrote:
I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
You had to change your name several times in six years? Did they not have something like a witness protection program back then? :-)
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Jalapeno Bob wrote:
I was in deep political hot water. I did stay with the company through several name changes for the next six years.
You had to change your name several times in six years? Did they not have something like a witness protection program back then? :-)
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
I started at Interdata and was assigned a first-floor office. Interdata became the Data System Division of Perkin-Elmer and I continued to occupy the same office. Perkin-Elmer spun off the Data System Division to form Concurrent Computer and I continued to occupy that same office.
I finally left that office to join another company as it was becoming obvious that Concurrent Computer was not succeeding in the marketplace due to competition from that new-fangled product, the IBM PC :laugh: which put a whole, standalone (no networking, modem or anything else) computer on your desk which, if you had enough rank, came with two 5.25 inch floppy drives and maybe a dot-matrix printer....
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock