Hello all! A quick introduction before I respond: This is the first time I've posted to this group. I am not an OSS developer (yet; I really do want to see my name "in lights" in a patch note at some point, but I just haven't done it yet), but I was fairly active on debian-user for a while, trying to help out. I got a bit burned out on that and haven't been doing much in that world lately.
I'm a software developer, currently working on flight software in the aerospace industry, using lots of yucky proprietary tools that I wish I could drop-kick right out of my life! Before that I worked on Java applications for a government contractor, and before that I was a comp sci student with a minor in philosophy. Phew! Anyway, on with the discussion ... On 2005-02-19, Helen Faulkner penned: > Amaya wrote: >> http://news.com.com/Opening+doors+for+women+in+computing/2100-1022_3-5557311.html > > That's a really interesting article Amaya. Thanks for posting it. > > I wonder how many other people here experienced a similar thing to what the > woman interviewed relates: namely that the apparent level of programming > expertise of the men in her course, before the course even started, was so > high that she felt incompetant by comparison and was discouraged from > pursuing it further. I never dropped comp sci, but I did feel that I was way out of my league sometimes. I actually went to college with the expectation of being an International Studies major, but that kind of fell flat and I started looking around for something else. Mom wanted me to take a business class, while my brother suggested a comp sci class; I figured working with computers would be more interesting and get my family off my back, so I took CS141, the intro comp sci class. Somewhere around there, I visited campus tech support with some questions, and the questions were astute enough that I was offered a job (yay for sub-minimum-wage college jobs with no training!). Anyway, I quickly fell in love with programming; it waS a real rush, like I was creating my own world with every program I wrote. And my grades were great. But I still felt like I was behind the curve. The other guys, and actually girls, in the class were far more experienced than I was. I remember one guy talked about falling asleep on his laptop screen in high school, logged onto IRC, something I'd never even heard of, and about hacking into systems when he was younger. I'll admit that I honestly thought I was screwed; there was no way, as an adult, that I could take the risk of learning to hack (I guess we'd say crack these days), and I figured I'd never learn enough about computers to be good without that kind of illicit experience. Another guy friend of mine wrote DOS assembly programs for fun. And one of my female friends had been taught to program (or something) as a small child, because her dad was a programmer! Hrm, I should point out, though, that as usual, I was comparing myself to the best students in the class. I know there were other kids there who were just as inexperienced as I was, and a lot of kids had more trouble than I did, but it would never occur to me to compare myself to people starting from scratch like I did. Maybe in the end my skewed perspective actually worked out well for me, though, because I worked my butt off to learn everything I could about all things computer. I learned at least as much, probably more, through my own exploration and my tech support job as/than I did through school. Oh, I started college in 1995. I was never discouraged from Comp Sci by any of my Comp Sci professors. The only disparaging remark I got was from a math professor, who used to teach some CS courses. He claimed that I was bad at math (bzzt, wrong!) and tried to point out to me which courses, like Finite Automata (one of my favorites, actually) I would supposedly find difficult because I was bad at logic (bzzat, wrong again, thanks for playing!). When I told my CS advisor about that experience, he just shook his head about that professor. Apparently it wasn't the first stupid remark he'd made. -- monique Ask smart questions, get good answers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
