As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

>>The idea that you've got to be some sort of obsessive wretch with no life outside of tech in order to successfully fill a role at a tech company is nothing but a pernicious myth.

Right. But being good in this world is you vs your-peer-group. And if others in your peer group are too awesome, putting in insane hours and time getting ahead, sooner or later the top spots will be taken. And nobody likes to be stuck being ranked average despite the best they can do.

>>So is the idea that you've got to be some ridiculous super-genius.

Reminds me of this movie - "The Gambler"- A literature professor tells his students the difference between somebody who can write good stuff and being the next William Shakespeare. Everybody has to face this fact sooner or later. Special things happen only when you are ready to put in special effort. While reminding them, there is absolutely nothing wrong in being a electrician or a plumber.

>>All you have to do is be reasonably smart and capable of learning on the job.

Being good and not good enough will only take you that far. Of course, you can still do your job and get paid. But remember other people will likely take the top spots.

>>When interviewers at tech companies mistakenly believe that every successful candidate has to be building atom smashers in their spare time

Tech and especially fast changing ecosystem in Tech have seen large concentration of Nerds. Kind of people who've wanted to build video games, or win science fairs at school. When too many people of same type arrive at a place it becomes a culture.

>>But this isn't natural or normal or a product of biology - it's just bias perpetuating itself.

This is the most important part.

I had a friend who quit programming to do MBA and built a career there. He realized there is no way he would like to spend weekends exploring new tools that keep launching every few months and endless push to use bleeding edge stuff, work insane hours, weekends and with the overall fast paced, failure ridden culture of tech.

He is doing pretty well with managing business now.

"At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me."

The Bloomberg writer says that she left not because she couldn't relate to her coworkers, but because she was "never going to be as good" as those around her, because the work itself was not as interesting to her as it was to them.

I am unsure what working with "things" means, but when the OP got out of tech, she went into policy journalism.

"So I went to business school, and eventually I landed myself in the kind of career that I was happy to do on weekends, and nights, and most of my other time... My field, policy journalism...."

So for whatever reason, it seems that in her mind, journalism is less about working with "things" than tech work is.

Allow me to clarify some things in my post:

I intentionally worked on the basis of stereotypes or generalisations. If 60% of group A wants prefers X over Y while only 40% of group B prefers X over Y, it's accurate to speak in general terms, even if there are many individual exceptions. Any discussion of women in technology _in general_, as opposed to individual women in tech, inherently relies on the ability to make generalisations.

As to how I presume it, I was basing my thoughts on the the science of gender differences. Take a look for example here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

In particular, "Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension."

By "care to become them", I meant less the _desire_ to be a good engineer, and more _actually_ enjoying the hours spent in lone engineering. It's one thing to want to be a good engineer in the abstract, or to enjoy holding an engineering role at a company (and some engineering roles in some company cultures are much more people-oriented than other engineering roles), and it's another thing to be somebody who would happily spend a weekend understanding some algorithm, and evenings developing some new open source library as a side project. There are definitely some women who will enjoy these over the alternatives, but not many, and far fewer than there are men, as shown by the huge differences in the Things-People dimension and the huge differences in how many men versus women actually do those things.

And I'll speak just for myself: sitting away at a screen chopping away at some problem often just isn't emotionally fulfilling. And I don't think women who are not engineers really envy those who spend their time this way.

I definitely support initiatives to expose more girls and women to technology, and to raise the profiles of minority group role models in tech. And perhaps the lesson of the Things-People difference is not that engineering isn't for most women, but rather that engineering needs to be done in a more emotionally connected and social way, for example with pair programming.