More about IT:
Cheap, Fast, and Disposable
My “Leaving IT” post has received some attention; the trackback on Misbeaving.net was picked up by Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer and made it on Computerworld’s blog. Although I found quite interesting my obsession in reading my name quoted by others (think John Milton|Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate: “Vanity! definitely my favorite sin”), I would rather talk about what other bloggers have to say on the status of IT.
In Antigravitas, Jack William Bell talks about the conflict between his love for the intensity of IT work/satisfaction of “cranking up great code” and the realization that indeed something is wrong with the IT culture. But how is IT going to change if women are leaving?
If these are really the big issues for women, then I wish to all hell they would stay in IT. No matter how hard it gets. I wish they would stay, work their way into management, and change things for the better from the inside. Because we need them…
Too bad that sometimes women don’t get the chance to stay in IT and change the system from within. Dori Smith (Backup Brain) writes that the problem is not with women leaving IT, but rather with IT abandoning experienced and qualified programmers in favor of “cheap developers who are right out of college and willing to work 80+ hours a week.”
Shelley Powers (Burningbird) notes that it’s not the first time that women are first lured into the workforce and then sent home when they are not needed any longer. Shelley compares the contemporary attitude towards women in IT to the US Government propaganda during WWII in the strong and well-documented essay When we are needed.
When there is a need in the industry, women are welcome. When there isn’t a need, it’s Rosie the Riveter pack up your rivet gun and get out, all over again.
Some people pointed out that the culture of cheap and fast over good in corporate America goes well beyond IT. For example, Theodicius writes:
… that’s they way it is in almost every company, and the tendency increases with size. I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, not an IT company, and the attitude was prevalent all over the place. There wasn’t an emphasis on quality, despite the lip service. There was an emphasis on speed, and if quality was in the way, it quite often became a casualty.
And for some, this is not really a gender issue: the superhuman demands of the IT work hurt both women and men. And minorities are disappearing from IT even faster than women.
Technorati tags: women, technology
Leaving IT
After 5 years, a few weeks ago I decided I had enough of IT; it was time to quit. The same week I moved from IT to the Marketing department of my company, other two women who have managed me at various times did the same. It seems that we are not alone: Roy Mark wrote a commentary on Internet News (Where have all the women gone?; via Caterina Fake on Misbehaving.net) about women slowly bleeding out of IT (a 20% decrease in the percentage of women in the last 10 years).
I find reassuring that I am not the only one experiencing dissatisfaction with the IT environment. Mark quotes comments about “high-school locker room mentality” and “hostility to women.” In my experience, it’s much more subtle than that. I found that the IT culture, initially exciting and seemingly full of possibilities, in the long run does not fulfill its promises. What I found frustrating is not so much the exclusion from the boy’s club–although there is definitely some of that–but rather the excessive emphasis on speed rather than quality (for a different take on this issue, see Alan Key on the disappointing lack of new and revolutionary programming languages; via Andrew), on execution rather than strategy, and the disregard for the human and caring aspects of building applications (e.g., the quality of the user experience rather than the quality of the code).
I may be wrong, but I am afraid IT management is not paying attention to why we are leaving. I hope that the evolution of technology towards social and connected computing will demand a different approach to IT development and force the boy’s club to open up to the world.
Technorati tags: women, technology
Corporate geese
This evening, leaving the office way too late, I saw a bunch of corporate Canadian geese in a neat business casual outfit (it must have been “bring your chicks to work” day). I have pictures to prove that it was not just workaholic delirium.
Going to work
Done for today…
…time to go home
See more Corporate geese pictures »
Cassandra, the Columbia accident, and Corporate America
You probably have all heard about the myth of Cassandra. Cassandra was the beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy and his wife Hecuba. To seduce Cassandra the god Apollo gave her the gift of seeing the future; but because she didn’t love the god back, the revengeful Apollo placed a curse on her: her predictions will always be right, but nobody would believe her (more information here).
So, Cassandra told the people of Troy not to trust the wooden horse the Greeks had offered them. Nobody believed her, and Troy was defeated. She told Agamemnon that his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus would kill him (and Cassandra herself); he did not believe her, and they both were murdered. That’s a pretty stinky fate.
Now, I was telling my husband that if Cassandra were a corporate employee, she would have been rated as a Needs Improvement at year-end. No bonus and no merit increase, and a serious risk for a demotion. I can see her appraisal:
Although Cassandra demonstrates skills in analyzing problems, understanding situations, and making accurate predictions, she completely lacks the ability to generate trust in his coworkers and to persuade her team of the correctness of her suggestions. Her communications and negotiations skills are below those of her peers. As a consequence, her contribution to project work is limited or nonexistent.
Cassandra often complains about obscure threats and casts a pessimistic outlook on the future of the project, creating a gloomy atmosphere that does not promote collaboration and teamwork.
Corporate America has zero tolerance for Greek tragedy.
Cassandra Syndrome
Wikipedia has an interesting description of Cassandra Syndrome:
The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.
A few months ago I read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, which devotes an entire chapter to the analysis of how NASA’s “can-do-no-matter-what” culture played a strong role in management (bad) decision-making.
I do understand the corporate tendency to reward optimism and can-do attitude. It’s actually really nice to have people around you who are positive and energetic. But sometimes things are pretty bad, and the only way to make them better is to first recognize how bad they are. I just cannot shake this impression that some behaviors I see in companies should be classified as Cassandra Syndrome.
“A tendency to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial.” As much as the employees have an obligation to tell persuasive and articulate stories, isn’t there a similar obligation from management to listen with an open mind to both good and bad news and do some fact checking before dismissing the bad news or accept the good ones?
[And of course, whatever you do, do not EVER use PowerPoint to deliver bad news.]
Theme of the day: Office Angst
Is it just me, or does it happen to you too to have these days in which everything seems to revolve around the same theme, like in a sit-com? The theme of the day for me today was office angst.
Granted, I am sensitive to this particular theme in this period, but still, it feels like it was looking for me.
It started this morning, when I checked out Boing Boing. Xeni Jardin had published this list of Zen flash animations (originally from chaos kitty) and I watched the beautiful British I’m a creep, which I highly recommend (warning: the site is called “Low morale: a series of animations portraying one’s man struggle with working life,” so don’t expect anything uplifting). On the same list, the thematically related and interesting Not my type.
This afternoon, Scott and I went to see Spirit: The Seventh Fire at Fairmont Park. The synopsis:
Spirit - The Seventh Fire tells the dramatic story of one man’s journey to find a balance between the culture in which he exists, driven by the “American Dream,” and his roots, rich in heritage, tradition and connected to the natural world.
And again, the office cubicle was the metaphorical representation of the “American Dream” as well as of the disconnection between our day to day life and our deep needs and longings.
I’ve always thought that one of the biggest failures of corporate America is to have created a work environment where people feel alienated, pressured to the point of rupture, and out of place. True, not everybody feels that way; but judging from the people I know, the number of people who feel their corporate job is just a temporary pact with the devil is just too high to consider the office a healthy and happiness-promoting work environment.
Caterina Fake on hard-working women
Yesterday Caterina Fake posted a commentary on Misbehaving.net about the effort women need to make to succeed in high-tech [Work Twice as Hard].
I am sure high-tech executive women need to work really hard to get were they are. But I also see a lot of (really talented) women working twice as hard just to survive. Going against the current is not very rewarding: you swim like a crazy woman just to remain in the same place.
Not to mention that in addition to the work our beloved companies force that upon us, we have often to struggle with the voices in our head. I do work a lot (well, some days more than others), but I am also so conflicted about it that it feels even harder. I work so much more that I would like to do or that I consider healthy. And sometimes I find myself still in the office at 8:30 PM and I realize that even if I worked for 24 more hours straight I wouldn’t be able to scrape more than the surface of the pile of things to do.
If I just had been so thoughtful
Today I had lunch with Amber, a Business System Analyst who works as a contractor for my company. I met her at PhillyCHI, the local chapter of the ACM Computer-Human Interactions special interest group. She is such a smart wise young woman. I am in total awe of young people who are thoughtful and deliberate in their career choices. In comparison, my professional history resembles the random path of a disoriented fly (including repeated crashes against the light bulb and related first degree burns).
The entire PhillyCHI group is impressive. Really smart, passionate young people. It’s nice to have a local group like this. Hey, we are not in San Francisco or New York, but we are still extremely cool.
The myth of infinite flexibility
Fast Company has dedicated his latest issue to the importance of dealing with change in the workplace [Change or Die]. Very timely topic, and useful tips, given my excruciating need for a job change right now.
Thinking about this made me also reflect on the corporate myth of infinite flexibility of the workforce. Several examples of people ruined by new “opportunities” or promotions crossed my mind; people misplaced from the job they loved and they did with satisfaction and pride to a job they neither loved nor did well. For example, I thought of the guy who works in my cafeteria. Let’s call him Mark. Mark used to cook and serve food and he did it with a passion. He loved cooking food and feeding people and was able to add some nice specials to the daily boring and never-changing menu of the cafeteria. One day, some people left the job or were moved and Mark was given the “opportunity” to step up as manager and work at the cash register. He took his job seriously. I watched while he struggled to learn how to use the impossibly unusable cash register, while infinite lines of impatient corporate employees waited to pay. I could see his creative juices getting dry, his soul withering a little bit every day. Keeping him away from the kitchen was unusual and cruel punishment. Not only for him, but also for us customers, now having to deal with the boring and fairly bad daily selection of prepackaged food as well as with long lines at the cash register. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending (at least for now). Mark is back to the kitchen, the yummy specials are back, and we don’t have to wait too long in line to pay. He shines again, promoting with pride his new specials (don’t miss his Mexican dishes) and running up and down behind the counter.
Was Mark unable to change to accommodate to new work conditions? Or, rather, was it bad management, arrogant and unable to understand strengths and weaknesses of its employees? Why this blind drive to move people that are good in their job and happy to be there? And yet, I see it everyday, and the results are often catastrophic. The infinite flexibility of the workforce is just myth, and it can be very dangerous.
Confessions of a berry picker
I’ve just discovered Jory Des Jardins’ blog, Pause. I love it. I spent hours this morning reading it, instead of eating breakfast (impressive: breakfast is my favorite meal by far and I was actually quite hungry). It seems that everything she talks about is fundamentally relevant to my life. She is gone through what I am going through now. But she seems wiser, more insightful, and she writes about it so much better that I would be able to do. Thank you, Jory.
Talking about women and work, I found Confessions of a Former Berry Picker enlightening. It’s a little bit eerie to see Jory describing at the letter the pain I’ve gone through lately at work.
One thing that struck me is her description of the dissociation she felt between her well-adjusted well-behaved self and her Intuitive-self, and the inner debate continuously going on (I wonder if men are “more productive” because they don’t have to deal with multiple personality disorder all work-day long). One thing that she didn’t seem to experience is the pissed-off self. When I felt that my work was just an endlessly stream of tasks that a robot could do better then I did, I didn’t feel so much sadness as total furious anger. When I pictured in my mind discussions with my bosses, I was imaging wrestling matches. What happened in reality what so much sweeter. I found a lot of openness and willingness to listen on their part, and my anger melted away in about a nanosecond. Imagination (at least my ghost-filled imagination) could be so much darker than reality.
Corporate (multicultural) Essay
One evening at work I decided to write an essay for the “Multicultural Communications Essay context.” It was late, I was tired, and I felt that if I didn’t do anything creative right away I would die on the spot. So I wrote it.
The essay was selected among the winners, and I had a chance to read it in front of a lot of people. It was an exciting experience as it was to listen to the other essays. Caution: People are much more interesting that they appear…
I was born in Rome, the geographical and existential center of Italy. Rome is just midway between the cold, fast-paced, organized, and efficient North, and the warm, laid-back, friendly, and chaotic South. Everybody knows Rome as a beautiful, old, and motherly city; but Rome knows how to be defiant, disrespectful, and caustic as well.
Rome is a city of emigrants and passers-by who moved there for college, work, or adventure; most Romans are first generation Romans. So were my parents. They both moved to Rome from the South to go to college. They were raised in two different cities in Puglia; they met in Rome and married in 1960. It was just fifteen years after the end of World War II. Both cities and people were still healing from the scars and devastation of the war. My mother lost her father in Albania when she was 5 years old. As many Italians, during the war she moved from city to city in search of safety. She still remembers vividly the hours spent as a child in a dark bomb shelter, protecting her ears from the noise and the fear of the explosions. At the end of each raid, more of her world was transformed into ruins.
My parents grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I grew up in the ‘70s. We were worlds apart. The ‘70s in Italy were complicated and dangerous years. It was a time of economic growth and relative wealth. At the same time, strong and often violent political movements were shaking the country. Terrorist movements were opening new scars: right extremists were bombing squares and train stations; left extremists were killing and kidnapping “symbols of the power.” The landscape of my country was changing as fast as under a volcanic eruption. Family life was not easy either. My father and I were standing on the two opposite sides of the historical fault that was breaking Italy in two, and still trying to understand each other. It took many years and many experiences to fill the gap.
During my college years, I moved to various cities in a slow, North-East migration. I had to adapt to new dialects and new ways to deal with life. At the same time, I witnessed millions of people from North and Central Africa, East Europe, and Asia moving through Italy as their first stop towards their promised land. Large ships brought thousands of people from Albania, where my grandfather was killed, to the coasts of Puglia, where my mother grew up fatherless.
I moved to the United States 10 years ago. I was 33. It was supposed to be just a one-year stay, but I met my husband and never went back. America! This country is so ancient and so young at the same time; so similar and yet so different from anything I had experienced before. Am I at the end of my journey? Have I finally found my place?
The humane side of business
Yesterday I was at a management offsite for my company. We were trying to “clarify and address” some of the problems we are having with roles and responsibilities, and how to make our department work. I was being my usual restless self, one mental foot there and the other out the door, threatening in my constant mental dialog to leave as I have done many times in the past (and judging from the past, I’ll probably not leave for now; but I will at some point, when all my hope supply is exhausted and the scary unknown future will look better than the known hopeless present). I was looking at the faces of the 26 people that shared the classroom-like place with me, and I had a kind of revelation.
As much as the impossible problem-solving exercise we were doing intrigued me–at least the overdeveloped cerebral, intellectual part of me–what I was really drawn to, what kept at least a part of myself there, was the human individuality of each of those faces. The messy story behind the proper business appearance. The feelings, the emotions, the struggles. The only reason I could bear the extremely appropriate behaviors, the smart discussion, the polite and not-so polite jokes (ever noticed how the less polite and PC a joke, the funnier? At the end of the day, when everybody was too tired to be so proper, we had so much more fun) was because I had a glimpse of the life behind the facade. How was Ann [not her real name] as a child? What brought all these people there? Why did Sarah [not her real name] look always so worried?
Boy, I’m never going to have a career in corporate America.
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