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I know four women with CS degrees who all realized that they hated programming for a living less than two years into their careers. Two of them were done after

by xor1 9y ago

I know four women with CS degrees who all realized that they hated programming for a living less than two years into their careers. Two of them were done after their first internship, before they'd graduated and started looking for their first full-time job. All four of them switched to design, and they're all Photoshop/Sketch experts now. They're extremely happy with their decisions. They stayed in tech, and still work/interact with the "culture" on a daily basis. I wonder how many people just assume they were driven out when they find out that they did CS but didn't pursue a career in software development/engineering, when in reality they just didn't like it and wanted to do something else.

jschwartzi 9y ago
I wonder how much of it is how they were managed. I'm a man working in a technical field, but I tend to be more emotional/intuitive than other people I find in Engineering roles(yes, even women). But other engineers tend to assume that I'm motivated by the same things they are when that's patently false. I gravitate to the kinds of roles that your four examples gravitate to because there's more room for intuition and more opportunities to connect with people there than in software engineering. The best manager I ever had was a woman, because she managed by connecting and by learning about me. Contrast this with the male engineer managers that I've had, who've all been average or sub-par because they assume that the only correct way to motivate me is to give me more money, and they assume that all I want to do is work on "interesting" problems. In short, they don't take the time to actually learn who I am or to connect with me, they just assume that I work exactly like them. It's a very cookie-cutter approach to management that fails to create diversity. If your friends' management is similar then it doesn't surprise me that they left the field. The job I'm leaving made me question on a weekly basis whether I belonged in software engineering despite management telling me I was a good engineer repeatedly. And I'm a lot more interested in the types of problems UI/UX designers solve than I am in solving traditional software problems. Luckily I'm moving to a company where management is less "technical" and more intuitive/connected. If it pans out I'll stay in the field.

by xor1 9y ago

jschwartzi 9y ago

I wonder how much of it is how they were managed. I'm a man working in a technical field, but I tend to be more emotional/intuitive than other people I find in Engineering roles(yes, even women). But other engineers tend to assume that I'm motivated by the same things they are when that's patently false. I gravitate to the kinds of roles that your four examples gravitate to because there's more room for intuition and more opportunities to connect with people there than in software engineering. The best manager I ever had was a woman, because she managed by connecting and by learning about me. Contrast this with the male engineer managers that I've had, who've all been average or sub-par because they assume that the only correct way to motivate me is to give me more money, and they assume that all I want to do is work on "interesting" problems. In short, they don't take the time to actually learn who I am or to connect with me, they just assume that I work exactly like them. It's a very cookie-cutter approach to management that fails to create diversity. If your friends' management is similar then it doesn't surprise me that they left the field. The job I'm leaving made me question on a weekly basis whether I belonged in software engineering despite management telling me I was a good engineer repeatedly. And I'm a lot more interested in the types of problems UI/UX designers solve than I am in solving traditional software problems. Luckily I'm moving to a company where management is less "technical" and more intuitive/connected. If it pans out I'll stay in the field.