[HN Gopher] Girl and Computer: Reflecting on the journey that go...
___________________________________________________________________
Girl and Computer: Reflecting on the journey that got me to where I
am today
Author : mpweiher
Score : 210 points
Date : 2021-03-05 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rmurphey.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rmurphey.medium.com)
| kitd wrote:
| Great article.
|
| _I can barely remember a time when computers weren't a part of
| my life, but I know with certainty that that time existed, and
| that when computers first entered my life, they were exceptional
| and special._
|
| I can distinctly remember the moment computers came into my life.
| It was around 1980. My school had just received a simple desktop
| computer which ran Basic (I forget the make/model).
|
| I remember being dumbstruck that a machine, _a machine_ , could
| understand what you were typing at the keyboard. What is barely
| noticed now was completely alien and futuristic then.
|
| I think that was when I started really wanting to get into
| computing.
| aparsons wrote:
| Lovely article indeed . I loved the attached photographs.
|
| I probably predate you and the author by a decade, but growing
| up in the 70s in rural Michigan, I did not even know what a
| computer was until my late teens (and by a stroke of luck at
| that). When our town got a second TV, it was a huge deal and I
| still remember that day! I started documenting my journey at
| [0] but have not written follow ups in the last 2 months as
| I've had to deal with some health issues.
|
| [0] https://romlane.substack.com/p/from-sawnwood-to-software
| nivethan wrote:
| Really enjoyed this, thank you.
| bitwize wrote:
| I can remember mine too. I was four years old and VERY
| interested in calculators. My dad, an engineer, had bought a
| new calculator-like device: a Radio Shack PC-1, a badge-
| engineered version of the Sharp PC-1211, which see:
|
| http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_pc1211-tandy_tr...
|
| He showed me how he wrote programs on it. One of them was a
| math quiz game.
|
| Later that same year he bought a "real" computer: a TRS-80
| Model 16, an absolute beast which could do high (for the time)
| resolution graphics and even, with a hard disk option, run
| Unix. He wrote a program in BASIC which plotted the mechanical
| advantage curve of a piston acting on a crankshaft while
| simultaneously displaying a crude, 0.5fps animation of the
| piston assembly. I was hooked. To keep my grubby mitts off his
| expensive machine, he got me a Commodore VIC-20 for my fifth
| birthday.
| jskrablin wrote:
| This strikes close to home - in a good way. While details are a
| bit different (excluding the college drop out part) I guess the
| best investment my parents made was when they bought me an
| i386... it sure took me places and then some. Being 40 soon
| computers had been a part of my life for well over 1/2 of it and
| I still enjoy the grind :)
| wilsynet wrote:
| In the early 80s, my mom read in newspapers that computers were
| going to be the future. So she spent much of our meager savings
| on what was then a very expensive Apple IIe. Because she wanted
| opportunity for her children that she never had.
|
| That was quite a bet.
|
| Thanks Mom.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I don't know what compelled my dad to get our first PC in 1989
| other than that it'd be cool, but he did it and plopped me
| behind it with a joystick and Paratrooper. I think he did a
| good there.
|
| (he may have been involved with computers before, iirc he
| mentioned MSX and the like, but that was before my time)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, the U.K. saw what was happening across the pond and made
| the right call with the BBC Micro.
|
| It's both sweet and sad to me to read this woman's account of
| her childhood where the best thing to come into her families
| living room was a $99 Timex Sinclair.
|
| What a fortuitous decision her parents made while the rest of
| the neighborhood jumped on the cable TV bandwagon with their
| disposable income. (I suppose I should be sad for her neighbor
| kids instead.)
|
| I guess what I really want is for every child to have the same
| access to opportunities that this one (only barely) realized.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| On the other hand, it seems sad that UK (as well as
| continental Europe for that matter) software industry wages
| seem to pale in comparison to wages in the US. I'm not really
| sure why that would be, even after accounting for things like
| healthcare and other social services. A bummer for American
| software professionals who are interested in moving abroad.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I saw a lot of people in Europe with the mentality "I am
| not paying the cable guy that much money", even if the
| "cable guy" was a highly skilled software engineer that was
| building the core of the company. Europe is also more
| egalitarian, doctors are also paid less and progressive
| income taxes and other factors are shaming people into
| earning less.
| [deleted]
| supert56 wrote:
| The is a really nice reflective article. We need more of these on
| HN.
| theobeers wrote:
| What a beautiful story. I'm a decade younger than the author, but
| still, I was flooded with nostalgia. Please do give this a read,
| if you're unsure what to expect based on the title.
| 2rsf wrote:
| A somewhat unrelated question- what is an Engineering Manager? is
| it a glorious title for a team leader?
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| I answer this question a lot. For me, a summary version of my
| model is as follows:
|
| EM is a technical role in the sense it includes managing
| technical projects. However, it is not an engineering role. I
| hold Engineering Managers accountable for the following three
| things:
|
| 1. People Management. You are the line manager. You must deal
| with hiring and firing. You should know the intrinsic
| motivations of everyone on your team and be able to feed those
| motivations. There are rote parts of the job as well, such as
| signing expense reports, vacation requests, and performance
| reviews.
|
| 2. Project Management. You are responsible for your team's
| delivery. If the team is blocked by something external, you
| need to resolve that.
|
| 3. Program Management. You should "own" your area. You should
| understand why the company is investing in your area and you
| have an opinion and a view for how your area can best
| accomplish the company's goals. You should understand your
| users/customers as well as or better than anyone.
|
| Even if you can code, as an Engineering Manager you should not
| take work items for your team. If you need to switch your focus
| to interviewing a candidate, or a valuable team member is
| getting poached, or you need to talk to a customer, etc... your
| team needs you to take care of these things. If you have to
| make a choice between doing your EM job and keeping your team
| unblocked by delivering code, you messed up.
|
| That's a very brief overview of how I treat the role. I know
| many folks disagree, so YMMV.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| The responsibilities vary significantly across companies of
| different sizes. What follows is typical responsibilities of
| EMs in Amazon/Uber/Google type of orgs.
|
| 1. Project manage your team's deliverables.
|
| 2. Interface with other teams/EMs to unblock your team's
| progress.
|
| 3. Interface with product manager/owner to plan for the
| upcoming quarter/half.
|
| 4. Represent/sell/market your team in appropriate forums so
| that you keep getting high impacting projects/work.
|
| 5. Keep an eye on inter-person dynamics within the team.
| Address them early.
|
| 6. Hiring. For your and other teams.
|
| 7. Plan for your team member's career growth within the org.
| Promoting someone takes active participation of the manager
| with a plan in place.
|
| 8. Keep abreast of the tech-architecture that team owns. You
| don't want to accumulate too much of tech debt.
|
| Typically, a "team leader" works mostly within the team;
| infrequently interfacing with other tams; I'd say it's 80-20
| split between within team outside team focus.
|
| EM on there other hand spend about 60-70% of their time
| interfacing and interacting with people _outside_ of their
| team.
|
| Of course, exceptions exist but this is how it's been in my
| experience.
| fatnoah wrote:
| As an Engineering Manager vs. team lead or Principal
| Engineer, the main difference is your #7 (growth and
| performance). That's the thing I list as #1 in terms of what
| an Engineering Manager does. You'll play a big role in all of
| the others as you progress in seniority, but if you don't
| love the growth and planning, it's hard to success as a
| Manager. Related, you're also the one that has to make the
| hard decision when it's time to part ways with someone who's
| not working out.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| My plainspoken definition:
|
| An engineering manager manages engineers. They understand the
| technical work about as well as the people they manage, so that
| they can give relevant coaching. They also understand
| management principles that make engineering projects successful
| (WIP counts, release process pros and cons, etc). In other
| words they know how to structure work flows.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| So you have an Engineering team or group, and there is this
| manager(s) who oversees the engineering things that they do..
| 2rsf wrote:
| > team or group
|
| There's a big difference there, managing a few people is what
| I know as a Team Lead while managing a group means managing a
| few teams with their team leads.
| bencoder wrote:
| Yes, everywhere I've worked (UK), the EM manages a group of
| teams, each with their own team lead.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I said team or group to highlight there could be multiple
| engineering managers, typically, yes, with a team of 8-12
| (perhaps 15 in some orgs/companies) members..
| nicoburns wrote:
| Job titles are all a bit fuzzy in general, but generally I
| would expect a "team leader" to be someone who manages a small
| team and is also part of that team as an individual contributor
| and may way be lead technically too.
|
| An engineering manager is not an engineer at all (although they
| may have been in the past): they _only_ do management (of a
| team of engineers). The idea being that they remove that burden
| from the rest of the team. A team with an engineering manager
| would usually have a separate tech lead who lead on technical
| decisions.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >An engineering manager is not an engineer at all //
|
| I thought the "ing" made the role specifically one for
| engineers.
|
| The idea being that engineers could continue to work doing
| engineering whilst moving into management. An engineering
| manager would be a senior engineer who also manages people:
| particularly those people's engineering activity.
|
| But, I don't have much experience of this, so I might be
| wrong.
| foota wrote:
| In my experience this role is referred to as a TLM, a tech
| lead/manager.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Generally not the case (and where it is, it's probably a
| title or an employee being abused).
|
| Engineering is being used here as a categorical rather than
| descriptive adjective. This person is a manager; the
| category of people they're managing is engineering.
|
| If they were happy and you described them as a smiling
| engineering manager, smiling is descriptive (and used as
| you were surmising) and engineering is categorical.
| k__ wrote:
| Team lead(er) always seems to me like the attempt to make a
| manager look unimportant.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| There is no definition for it, in every company that uses this
| name it has their own meaning.
| dcminter wrote:
| That was an enjoyable read.
|
| The author got started on the US version of the British ZX81
| computer. Horrible keyboard and version of Basic, but cutting all
| those corners to get the price down made an opportunity for a lot
| of people to get into computers at just the right moment!
| elvis70 wrote:
| At least the US version had 2K of RAM.
| billti wrote:
| It was the device I started on. I think the limitation was part
| of its value. At age 11 I felt like I mastered it. I remembered
| the manual front to back. I could write assembly by "POKE"ing
| the OpCodes directly into memory. It gave me a sense of
| accomplishment and a desire to keep learning computers at an
| early age.
|
| Where to start and what to learn these days is almost
| overwhelming. It's a good and a bad thing there is so much that
| is so accessible now.
| ddingus wrote:
| Thanks for a nice read. It has been an amazing journey!
|
| I myself typed stuff on a machine in the early 80's and was
| hooked.
|
| Good times.
| williesleg wrote:
| Oh great we're all equal but I'm an attention whore girl, look at
| me!!!!!
|
| I'll tell you what, if you truly want gender and race neutrality,
| just ignore it and don't write shit like that. Get to work and do
| great things.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"...I swipe at the pages of a printed book, and wonder why they
| don't turn..."
|
| I once got into elevator, pressed wrong floor and then found
| myself staring at the rows of buttons looking for the one marked
| "Esc". I was overworked at the time.
| grahamburger wrote:
| Often when I make a mistake on a whiteboard or on paper I have
| an instinctive urge to Cmd-Z.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Pinch and zoom physical book/papers. I do it regularly.
| clairity wrote:
| i've sometimes absentmindedly expected to use a search
| interface to find stuff in my home, both physical stuff and
| (non-digital) content.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Ctrl-f glasses!
|
| I also have sometimes wished I could use an Internet Archive-
| like interface to see places at different times in the past,
| before buildings were torn down/new ones built/etc. Google
| Street View does this to an extent, but limited by what could
| be seen from a camera driving by.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I was looking at a building, wondering when it was built, and
| thought that I should click on Help/About and look for the
| copyright date...
| p0d wrote:
| Good read, paints a clear picture in the mind.
|
| I think my moment of awakening was in 1995 when I watched someone
| send an email from Liverpool to their son working in Africa. Just
| couldn't get my head around it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Internet killed the (ham) radio star....
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| I recall my wonder that emails were delivered overnight, which
| was typical at the time.
| 3l3ktr4 wrote:
| What a cute story and great writing! <3 Thank you for sharing
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I used to have dreams of setting breakpoints in my children, to
| figure out their objectionable behavior. Very strange.
| rmb177 wrote:
| My junior year in college, I had a semester from hell where I
| took AI, Distributed Programming, Operating Systems, and a
| 400-level Math class all together. One morning as I washed my
| hair in the shower, still in a state of sleep-deprivation from
| a long night in the lab, I kept thinking to myself that if I
| didn't setq my hair (or was it setf?), then it wouldn't really
| stay washed.
|
| When I finally woke up and came to, it was a mix of laughter at
| how out of it I was and worry that I was slowly going mad.
| foobarian wrote:
| Similar, but after a long week building a parser. I dreamt I
| was sitting under a tree, and falling asleep such that first
| my torso fell asleep, then my limbs and head, then my
| fingers/toes/ears etc. etc. Woke up laughing uncontrollably.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _I used to have dreams of setting breakpoints in my children,
| to figure out their objectionable behavior._
|
| Dolores, bring yourself back online. Analysis.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Wow, that's an awesome concept for a story/film!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Inside Out comes close, I think.
| teejmya wrote:
| I immediately think of Westworld, specifically how the
| engineers interact with the hosts in the service areas.
| jimbokun wrote:
| My family never bought a programmable computer, but my high
| school bought a few Apple IIe's. I would spend every study hall,
| and any other time I could manage, teaching myself to write BASIC
| programs.
|
| At night, I would write out BASIC programs in pencil in my school
| tablet, to type in the next day.
|
| I tried writing a basketball program that would generate a court
| in ASCII, with X's and O's representing players. I typed in NBA
| stats from USA today, to model various players field goal
| percentages and other attributes.
|
| I tried writing a fantasy game with a generated map. I remember
| drawing a meandering river, randomly plotting the direction of
| the next pixel within certain parameters.
|
| Needless to say, I was hooked, and have been programming
| computers for decades since.
| caeril wrote:
| Similar experience, here.
|
| I wonder what it's like for those born after 1990 or so. Is the
| opportunity for this type of magic still available? How do the
| younger generations develop our level of love and passion for
| computing without these experiences?
| z2 wrote:
| I'm right on the border of "younger generation" but I got my
| start when I discovered my parents' computer had Visual Basic
| 6 and found a bunch of tutorials online from making simple
| games like tic-tac-toe, progressing to word processors and
| networked chat programs. There's something to be said about
| how easy it was in Visual Studio to put a GUI together...
| Kids get grounded and less outdoor play time for punishment--
| I got Visual Studio uninstalled.
|
| On the simpler side, plenty of my friends got started in the
| early 2000's with Texas Instruments graphing calculator
| Basic. I'm glad to see the ticalc.org scene is still alive,
| but recall that the really magical stuff was almost always
| intimidatingly written in assembly!
|
| Edit: ...And perhaps not surprisingly, I went to ticalc.org
| to see that TI is locking down their ecosystem as well and
| removing native code execution. Obviously today's world has
| more out there for learning and tinkering despite all these
| walled gardens, but the flipside is that each microcosm is
| relative obscure compared to the past when there were a
| handful of mainstream ways to learn to hack and each was just
| as welcoming or intimidating as the other.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Kids get grounded and less outdoor play time for
| punishment--I got Visual Studio uninstalled.
|
| "z2, we are very disappointed in your behavior, and there
| needs to be a consequence. So I'm afraid you really leave
| us no choice...YOU ARE GOING TO GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY WITH
| YOUR FRIENDS!"
|
| Yeah, I was similar. Reading comic books or other geeky
| pursuits, and my Dad asking me to go outside and play catch
| with him. :)
| wassenaar10 wrote:
| 1998 here.
|
| Had a programming class in high school in which the teacher
| gave us a lot of free time to work on whatever interested us.
| I made dozens of games in Java during that time, mostly
| pretty simple ones, but by senior year I had written a sort-
| of advanced ray casting engine (Think Wolfenstein 3D but with
| textured floors and a fully-rendered ceiling layer) and I
| worked with two of my friends to develop it into a sci-fi RPG
| that we entered into a Game Development competition.
|
| There was a definite moment in high school where I realized
| that I liked programming, and not just making games with it,
| and decided that I'd study computer science at university.
|
| I don't think my experience is typical for my demographic,
| however.
| tobmlt wrote:
| I had an odd experience with my past computing memories about
| 7 years ago.
|
| We'd just hired a new guy after his masters. I guess I am
| older than him by say 5 years.
|
| I grew up on command line dos, hacking around on config.sys
| and similar to reconfigure the "extended memory" (above 640
| kB) to get say, Tie fighter to run with gouraud shading and
| stereo sound, little tasks like that kept me burrowed into
| manuals and using the dos shell as a kid, just before the Win
| 3.1 era. After becoming a teenager I ended up not touching a
| computer for maybe 10 years, so the dos shell was always this
| thing I hacked around on as a kid.
|
| Fast forward to seven years ago, and our new hire has never
| seen the dos shell (cmnd prompt/whatever) So I am explaining
| how to navigate, commands to issue etc. and it's the weirdest
| thing, reaching into my childhood to tell this guy about some
| work related particulars here and now. It kind of did feel
| like he missed out on something good. Then again he was
| probably hacking together a website at similar age and
| wonders what in the world we did growing up a few years
| before.
| fatnoah wrote:
| >gouraud shading
|
| The fact that I think you're a philistine going with Gourad
| over Phong shading is something totally incomprehensible to
| that person that came five years after you.
|
| I feel like my relationship to computers vs. newer
| generation is very much like my parent generations
| relationships with cars vs my own. My father in law can
| tell me about every car he's owned, upgrades made to it,
| etc. Similarly, I can recall every PC I've built, as well
| as all of the incremental upgrades along the way.
|
| At this point in my career, I've directly managed close to
| 100 different software engineers, and only a handful are
| terribly interested in the inner workings of the machines
| they use. For them, they're tools, some better than others,
| for doing the job.
| kevincox wrote:
| For sure. I was born in 1994 and the details are different
| but the magic is the same. I started fooling around on the
| family computer (some of my earliest "programming" was
| actually scripted PowerPoint). Eventually I got my own laptop
| and was off to the races. I wrote scripts to do everything,
| websites for fun, little games. I started making AIs to play
| bridge and loads of terminal games. That desire to make
| things has never stopped. Sure, sometimes I slow down and
| sometimes I speed up but I am constantly making these small
| fun projects that are 99% for my own enjoyment of the
| writing.
|
| I don't think this will ever change. Creativity will always
| find a way out whether that is building in Minecraft or
| writing Minecraft mods in Java. Sure, it's a bit more
| "luxurious" with a computer at home or even a personal device
| and JavaScript rather than BASIC but at the end of the day
| nothing fundamental has changed.
| malwrar wrote:
| > Is the opportunity for this type of magic still available?
|
| Totally! The landscape was/is definitely different since
| there have been so many abstraction layers placed on top of
| the hardware, but even web programming is a fun first
| experience that creates that "woah I made that happen??"
| feeling.
|
| Personally my first real exposure to programming was playing
| with Atmel microcontrollers after watching some youtube
| tutorials and writing video game cheats after seeing a friend
| use one and wondering how the heck it worked. There was a lot
| of stuff to figure out, but each time you conquer some new
| detail of the overall system you're immediately hungry for
| more.
|
| It's actually assuring to hear folks older than myself ask
| these questions, because I find myself looking at the
| increasingly locked down computing tech of today and wonder
| new folks are going to get into this wonderful hobby if
| there's no ability to mess around with it.
| sixothree wrote:
| I made a "driving" game on my trs-80 when I was maybe 11 or 12.
| It would accept joystick input and draw the road accordingly.
| It ran at about 1 FPS. If I would have had better mentors, I
| might have been able to make a career of computing a lot
| earlier than I eventually did. I look at so many of the things
| I learned on my own and how if I just had access to even a tiny
| bit more knowledge things could have been so different.
|
| But I am extremely happy with my capabilities today. I build
| incredible things. And I got to experience moore's law from
| pong to today.
| agomez314 wrote:
| "In 2020, I brought home more in a month than I earned in my
| first year at the newspaper, adjusted for inflation. I didn't
| work particularly harder in 2020 than I did in say, 1997, and in
| so many ways the work I did--making there be a local newspaper,
| full of local news, every day, no matter what--was so much more
| important than the work I did to, uh, increase the velocity and
| quality of frontend development at <insert company here>."
|
| This is so important, as we seem to have become a society
| engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers
| technology
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Was it really more important? A lot of local news, and news in
| general, really is clickbait aimed at attention-grabbing or
| paid pieces.
|
| > This is so important, as we seem to have become a society
| engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers
| technology
|
| It's still people behind tech. It's just that they can reach
| much farther today than they ever did. But phrasing it like
| that sounds like yet another attempt of the humanities to
| demonize something they can't understand (or control). Like
| regimes pushing for internet censorship.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > This is so important, as we seem to have become a society
| engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers
| technology
|
| I would rather say that we're a society that is engineered by
| the market, and that the market is engineered by lobbyists. And
| one particular consequence is that the price of our work is
| determined largely by its value to those whom the lobbyists
| serve.
|
| The verbiage evokes a sense of conspiracy theory, but I think
| it's not only true but perhaps even eminently intuitive.
| ddingus wrote:
| How we value things and our priorities as a nation are
| impacted.
|
| Frankly, there is no need for conspiracy implications.
| Deliberate policy steps were taken down this road to where we
| are now.
|
| The simple truth is the outcome does not match needs, many
| legitimate expectations.
|
| We can also take a no blame, no shame path to a better
| overall scenario and should.
| m463 wrote:
| you could say the same of many industries.
|
| mathematicians fall to wall street. Artists to Advertising.
| Engineers to silicon valley. and even in nice jobs, all of us
| succumb to the pace.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about the sexism she had faced in
| the software industry. I was very pleasantly surprised. I had a
| very similar background (bartending and all!) and it put me in
| awe to think of my own path. We need more positive stories like
| this.
| groby_b wrote:
| If we'd have less sexism, maybe we'd see more positive stories.
| dang wrote:
| The author mentions a 2012 version of this post. It was discussed
| here:
|
| _Girls and Computers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757796 - March 2012 (84
| comments)
|
| and is at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120328175728/http://rmurphey.c...
| eplanit wrote:
| We're certainly the heroes of our own stories, this demonstrates.
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(page generated 2021-03-05 23:01 UTC)