The Untold Story of Women in Engineering
A female engineer’s perspective after three decades in software development
The Ideal
Nowadays people are encouraged to develop hobbies, journal, exercise, travel, go to retreats, and side hustle to earn a passive income besides keeping a corporate job. The Internet sure throws a lot of ideas at us.
The Reality Then
Well, I didn’t have to worry about all these when I started working as a software engineer 30 years ago — before the internet. What did I worry about the most at the time? Hunger.
Just to try to grab a bite to eat is an endeavor. Shivering, I stood at the corner of Franklin Street and Broad Street with an empty stomach on a gloomy February afternoon in Boston’s chilling temperature, alone and not knowing where to go to buy food. I have never felt so vulnerable when my teeth chatter violently from the bitter cold, watching cheerful people in groups walking by with boxes of lunch heading toward the sunshine.
That was on the first day of my professional programming career. My fourth year in this country. $1.5 in my pocket for the T. I owned no credit cards. Dumb or smart you be the judge.
The Reality Now
Fast forward 30 years, and the world solved the hunger issue thank God. At least in my small world that is. I now know exactly where to get an excellent lunch, and exactly how to talk to my colleagues to be welcomed into their lunch parties, I even became the leader of parties from time to time. At the pinnacle of my career, you guessed right, I am the kind of person that will be laid off for even the slightest financial trouble in a company.
I got the layoff eventually.
The Personal
Have I become complacent over the years lost my drive to improve my technical skills and turned myself from an asset into a liability? If my technical skills did not decline then why? So many macro and micro factors affect one’s chance of being let go. What mattered in my case was that I didn’t pay attention to job security. I taught everybody and shared all my knowledge with them. Because I was so lonely.
Well, alright, I was also placed on PIP. I blame all of my faults on loneliness, anyway.
The Environment
All over the internet — Reddit, StackOverflow, GitHub, everywhere you look, who wrote most of the tutorials and open-sourced code in their spare time? They are all male-sounding names, from all races and countries around the world. As a consumer and (sometimes) contributor, I greatly appreciated their dedication, resourcefulness, and openness.
Entering a male-dominated tech world is your freedom of choice, to even attempt to dissuade a woman from doing that is discrimination.
In fact, what if, based on the current trend, women were to enter corporate leadership, and if we got women CEOs and CTOs everywhere, including the tech startups?
How would it feel to work in an industry of women CTOs managing all-male developer teams?
It seem that the current job market and hiring practices are not good either.
The Self
Let’s drop down to earth from the C-suits and consider on a personal level what it feels like to have no friends to talk to about your programming inspirations and aspirations.
I gave myself titles — creator, artist, researcher, writer, even entrepreneur at one time. I never reveal myself as a programmer if I don’t have to.
Just to show you my hesitation in mentioning I am still aspiring to stay sharp technically. I don’t tell my friends that I am learning ML — the next hot thing there is on the job market — instead I tell them I am not doing anything, just preparing to retire. Or I tell them I am gardening, cooking, or traveling. For the other group of friends who ask why I seem so busy on the computer, I just tell them I am writing. No, I have no friends with whom I can talk about ML or programming, even with the ones who are still holding software engineering jobs. It is a strange life.
The Take Away
Now you can consider yourself better equipped to enter the exciting tech world as a programmer, coder, developer, etc., go have fun and earn big money while it lasts. Then you can do whatever you like, even stay in tech after 30 years, and write bitter posts like this.
But hold on, 30 years? Do we even have 5 years left? If I open myself up to the flood of information all over the internet now, I could see an apocalypse already happening that doesn’t make sense to enter the “traditional” software engineering market.
If I were starting over now, I would treat engaging in technology the way I engage in physical workouts. I’m not competing with forklifts, even though I lift weights. I still code, despite being told it’s a job for AIs. When I felt less physical fatigue throughout the day, I knew I was doing something right in the gym. I hope to gain clarity from all the noise after I do my technical workouts.
There is no traditional career path for a software engineer, let alone a female engineer, nor is there even a defined path to follow. All that we can do is to stay fit physically and mentally, this way you make your own path.
For what it’s worth, I will just end this blog by saying that who you see on the path is completely random.
