I had an interesting Facebook conversation last night with Storagezilla (a fellow EMC blogger, and one of the biggest geeks I know). He’s at a big EMC internal conference, and he had a conversation with folks at the conference about the lack of women present. He made a pretty familiar comment:

.. talking earlier as to how we could change that mix (men to women at the conference) but we can’t hire what isn’t there.

This is what started the conversation. Zilla is sincere in wanting to see more women, but there do not seem to be women available with the proper skillset, so how can more women be hired? So a woman asked him about his job, in particular how much it paid, and he basically told her how hard the job is.

I thought it was weird he’d complain about no women to hire, and tell a woman who asked about pay how sucky the job is. To be far, zilla is an extremely strait shooter, doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t sugar his responses about anything (and that is why I like him!). So he was just being honest about what the job requires, and he’s a geek not an recruiting rep. He’s not the only person that describes jobs in our industry in that straight-forward way, and lets be honest there is a tremendous amount of work and stress that comes with many of our roles. But shouldn’t we sell the good parts first, tell about the challenges of the role, and let the individual decide if they want to risk it? Maybe this is one of the problems the industry has?

Another lady jumped in and reminded us about the study of young girls to find out why they don’t want to go into technology. Reasons: girls think that computers and engineering are “boring” , “filled with nerds” and “you are stuck to a desk all day” and most strangely that “there is no money in it”.

This got me thinking – how the heck did I get into, and stay in technology if all the job descriptions suck? I’ll tell my story, and ladies, please tell yours!

I have always loved to break things to figure out how they work. I’ve written before about how I grew up very poor, so the only time I got to figure out how things work was when one of my dad’s best friends, who was a garbage collector, would bring me broken transistor radios. I loved tearing things apart.

I went to community college as a non-trad, and they first tried to put me in business school. I said nope, I want to do Electronics. I mostly wanted to take the EET curriculum to find out how sound and video ACTUALLY went over the air waves. I was so happy when we finally got to that. :)

I could have stopped there, but I had started to teach myself (and my instructors) how to do HTML and had been taking programming courses. This was in 1999, and some of my brother’s friends we finishing their CS degrees, and were telling me how much money I could make with a Bachelor’s degree. So I decided to risk it and transferred to Florida State.

So what was my motivation? My kids. I wanted a steady job, with insurance. When I found out I could have that as well as make enough money to try and make up for all the years I lived under the poverty level, not to mention doing work I was very interested in, I was sold. That mother’s instinct to care for her family should not be underestimated. I’ve put up with all sorts of nonsense to provide for my kids. I would even have considered the job description ‘zilla gave.

So what is your story? What motivated you to become a technologist, and what has kept you in the field? Maybe we can start telling stories about how all the nonsense of the jobs are worth it, and convince more women to make the move to work with us. Leave a comment here, or write a post linking back here. And spread the word!