Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

nerdess.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 271 posts

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#4

Post by atomical »

"This is a bit of a delicate topic. Quite often I am the only female person in the team and have to be careful not to take advantage of the perks that come with it. Guys are fascinated and scared by girls who roll up their sleeves and take on a job that society labels as “men’s work”. If you’ve ever drilled a hole, skinned a rabbit, or changed a tyre you know what I mean.

As I mentioned earlier, guys will definitely put you to the test and as a girl it will be hard to get their respect. On the other hand, you can get away with a lot of things just by fluttering your eyelashes and being a bit cheeky, which is a habit that is so easy to get into. I have to confess I’ve done it myself because if you are surrounded by guys all day you quickly feel powerful. However, with great power comes great responsibility so don’t take (too much, hehe) advantage of the nerds treating you like a princess just because they finally get to work with a girl."

Never experienced this. Sounds like an alternate reality. All the so called nerds I worked with had girlfriends or wives and didn't wear pocket protectors and stutter around females when talking to them.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#5

Post by nickporter »

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields.

For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software.

I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different types of work.

It's something I have noticed for a while now, not only with your article.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#9

Post by unimpressive »

nickporter wrote: post #5

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields. For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software. I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different type…

Because people as a general rule abstract anything related to computers or computing into one lump object. This vague, ossified amber of the interwingled nature of computer media causes problems with understanding computers.

That and the sort of person who does development ends up doing some IT and Vice versa.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#10

Post by zh »

nickporter wrote: post #5

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields. For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software. I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different type…

It's not like this any more. That's why recently there are so many "software engineers" - you write your Ruby code, install and configure NginX, Passenger etc., even support a cluster of machines (LB, DB, Apps), maybe with a little help for Chef.
Post reply on HN