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Girl and Computer: Reflecting on the journey that got me to where I am today
- 2rsf 6y agoA somewhat unrelated question- what is an Engineering Manager? is it a glorious title for a team leader?
- indigodaddy 6y agoSo you have an Engineering team or group, and there is this manager(s) who oversees the engineering things that they do..
- 2rsf 6y ago> team or group There's a big difference there, managing a few people is what I know as a Team Lead while managing a group means managing a few teams with their team leads.
- indigodaddy 6y agoI said team or group to highlight there could be multiple engineering managers, typically, yes, with a team of 8-12 (perhaps 15 in some orgs/companies) members..
- bencoder 6y agoYes, everywhere I've worked (UK), the EM manages a group of teams, each with their own team lead.
- nicoburns 6y agoJob titles are all a bit fuzzy in general, but generally I would expect a "team leader" to be someone who manages a small team and is also part of that team as an individual contributor and may way be lead technically too. An engineering manager is not an engineer at all (although they may have been in the past): they only do management (of a team of engineers). The idea being that they remove that burden from the rest of the team. A team with an engineering manager would usually have a separate tech lead who lead on technical decisions.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>An engineering manager is not an engineer at all // I thought the "ing" made the role specifically one for engineers. The idea being that engineers could continue to work doing engineering whilst moving into management. An engineering manager would be a senior engineer who also manages people: particularly those people's engineering activity. But, I don't have much experience of this, so I might be wrong.
- sokoloff 6y agoGenerally not the case (and where it is, it’s probably a title or an employee being abused). Engineering is being used here as a categorical rather than descriptive adjective. This person is a manager; the category of people they’re managing is engineering. If they were happy and you described them as a smiling engineering manager, smiling is descriptive (and used as you were surmising) and engineering is categorical.
- foota 6y agoIn my experience this role is referred to as a TLM, a tech lead/manager.
- vishnugupta 6y agoThe responsibilities vary significantly across companies of different sizes. What follows is typical responsibilities of EMs in Amazon/Uber/Google type of orgs. 1. Project manage your team's deliverables. 2. Interface with other teams/EMs to unblock your team's progress. 3. Interface with product manager/owner to plan for the upcoming quarter/half. 4. Represent/sell/market your team in appropriate forums so that you keep getting high impacting projects/work. 5. Keep an eye on inter-person dynamics within the team. Address them early. 6. Hiring. For your and other teams. 7. Plan for your team member's career growth within the org. Promoting someone takes active participation of the manager with a plan in place. 8. Keep abreast of the tech-architecture that team owns. You don't want to accumulate too much of tech debt. Typically, a "team leader" works mostly within the team; infrequently interfacing with other tams; I'd say it's 80-20 split between within team outside team focus. EM on there other hand spend about 60-70% of their time interfacing and interacting with people outside of their team. Of course, exceptions exist but this is how it's been in my experience.
- fatnoah 6y agoAs an Engineering Manager vs. team lead or Principal Engineer, the main difference is your #7 (growth and performance). That's the thing I list as #1 in terms of what an Engineering Manager does. You'll play a big role in all of the others as you progress in seniority, but if you don't love the growth and planning, it's hard to success as a Manager. Related, you're also the one that has to make the hard decision when it's time to part ways with someone who's not working out.
- k__ 6y agoTeam lead(er) always seems to me like the attempt to make a manager look unimportant.
- AdrianB1 6y agoThere is no definition for it, in every company that uses this name it has their own meaning.
- YesThatTom2 6y agoMy plainspoken definition: An engineering manager manages engineers. They understand the technical work about as well as the people they manage, so that they can give relevant coaching. They also understand management principles that make engineering projects successful (WIP counts, release process pros and cons, etc). In other words they know how to structure work flows.
- rickspencer3 6y agoI answer this question a lot. For me, a summary version of my model is as follows: EM is a technical role in the sense it includes managing technical projects. However, it is not an engineering role. I hold Engineering Managers accountable for the following three things: 1. People Management. You are the line manager. You must deal with hiring and firing. You should know the intrinsic motivations of everyone on your team and be able to feed those motivations. There are rote parts of the job as well, such as signing expense reports, vacation requests, and performance reviews. 2. Project Management. You are responsible for your team's delivery. If the team is blocked by something external, you need to resolve that. 3. Program Management. You should "own" your area. You should understand why the company is investing in your area and you have an opinion and a view for how your area can best accomplish the company's goals. You should understand your users/customers as well as or better than anyone. Even if you can code, as an Engineering Manager you should not take work items for your team. If you need to switch your focus to interviewing a candidate, or a valuable team member is getting poached, or you need to talk to a customer, etc... your team needs you to take care of these things. If you have to make a choice between doing your EM job and keeping your team unblocked by delivering code, you messed up. That's a very brief overview of how I treat the role. I know many folks disagree, so YMMV.
- dcminter 6y agoThat was an enjoyable read. The author got started on the US version of the British ZX81 computer. Horrible keyboard and version of Basic, but cutting all those corners to get the price down made an opportunity for a lot of people to get into computers at just the right moment!
- elvis70 6y agoAt least the US version had 2K of RAM.
- billti 6y agoIt was the device I started on. I think the limitation was part of its value. At age 11 I felt like I mastered it. I remembered the manual front to back. I could write assembly by “POKE”ing the OpCodes directly into memory. It gave me a sense of accomplishment and a desire to keep learning computers at an early age. Where to start and what to learn these days is almost overwhelming. It’s a good and a bad thing there is so much that is so accessible now.
- dcminter 6y agoOh don't get me wrong; I got my start on that machine too. I still have the manual on my bookshelf - and as a matter of fact I'm having this print framed at the moment: http://www.alisoneldred.com/john-harris/fine-art-prints-1/science-fiction-3/2508-zx81-sinclair-manual-cover/ http://www.alisoneldred.com/john-harris/fine-art-prints-1/sc... Just as you say, it feels as if I'd need another lifetime to get a comprehensive understanding of a single modern machine.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoI thought this was going to be about the sexism she had faced in the software industry. I was very pleasantly surprised. I had a very similar background (bartending and all!) and it put me in awe to think of my own path. We need more positive stories like this.
- groby_b 6y agoIf we'd have less sexism, maybe we'd see more positive stories.
- kitd 6y agoGreat article. I can barely remember a time when computers weren’t a part of my life, but I know with certainty that that time existed, and that when computers first entered my life, they were exceptional and special. I can distinctly remember the moment computers came into my life. It was around 1980. My school had just received a simple desktop computer which ran Basic (I forget the make/model). I remember being dumbstruck that a machine, a machine, could understand what you were typing at the keyboard. What is barely noticed now was completely alien and futuristic then. I think that was when I started really wanting to get into computing.
- bitwize 6y agoI can remember mine too. I was four years old and VERY interested in calculators. My dad, an engineer, had bought a new calculator-like device: a Radio Shack PC-1, a badge-engineered version of the Sharp PC-1211, which see: http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_pc1211-tandy_trs80_pc1.html http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_pc1211-tandy_tr... He showed me how he wrote programs on it. One of them was a math quiz game. Later that same year he bought a "real" computer: a TRS-80 Model 16, an absolute beast which could do high (for the time) resolution graphics and even, with a hard disk option, run Unix. He wrote a program in BASIC which plotted the mechanical advantage curve of a piston acting on a crankshaft while simultaneously displaying a crude, 0.5fps animation of the piston assembly. I was hooked. To keep my grubby mitts off his expensive machine, he got me a Commodore VIC-20 for my fifth birthday.
- aparsons 6y agoLovely article indeed . I loved the attached photographs. I probably predate you and the author by a decade, but growing up in the 70s in rural Michigan, I did not even know what a computer was until my late teens (and by a stroke of luck at that). When our town got a second TV, it was a huge deal and I still remember that day! I started documenting my journey at [0] but have not written follow ups in the last 2 months as I’ve had to deal with some health issues. [0] https://romlane.substack.com/p/from-sawnwood-to-software https://romlane.substack.com/p/from-sawnwood-to-software
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- supert56 6y agoThe is a really nice reflective article. We need more of these on HN.
- theobeers 6y agoWhat a beautiful story. I’m a decade younger than the author, but still, I was flooded with nostalgia. Please do give this a read, if you’re unsure what to expect based on the title.
- FpUser 6y ago>"...I swipe at the pages of a printed book, and wonder why they don’t turn..." I once got into elevator, pressed wrong floor and then found myself staring at the rows of buttons looking for the one marked "Esc". I was overworked at the time.
- grahamburger 6y agoOften when I make a mistake on a whiteboard or on paper I have an instinctive urge to Cmd-Z.
- clairity 6y agoi've sometimes absentmindedly expected to use a search interface to find stuff in my home, both physical stuff and (non-digital) content.
- drewzero1 6y agoCtrl-f glasses! I also have sometimes wished I could use an Internet Archive-like interface to see places at different times in the past, before buildings were torn down/new ones built/etc. Google Street View does this to an extent, but limited by what could be seen from a camera driving by.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI was looking at a building, wondering when it was built, and thought that I should click on Help/About and look for the copyright date...
- vishnugupta 6y agoPinch and zoom physical book/papers. I do it regularly.
- p0d 6y agoGood read, paints a clear picture in the mind. I think my moment of awakening was in 1995 when I watched someone send an email from Liverpool to their son working in Africa. Just couldn't get my head around it.
- CapitalistCartr 6y agoI recall my wonder that emails were delivered overnight, which was typical at the time.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoInternet killed the (ham) radio star....
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI used to have dreams of setting breakpoints in my children, to figure out their objectionable behavior. Very strange.
- falcor84 6y agoWow, that's an awesome concept for a story/film!
- rmb177 6y agoMy junior year in college, I had a semester from hell where I took AI, Distributed Programming, Operating Systems, and a 400-level Math class all together. One morning as I washed my hair in the shower, still in a state of sleep-deprivation from a long night in the lab, I kept thinking to myself that if I didn't setq my hair (or was it setf?), then it wouldn't really stay washed. When I finally woke up and came to, it was a mix of laughter at how out of it I was and worry that I was slowly going mad.
- foobarian 6y agoSimilar, but after a long week building a parser. I dreamt I was sitting under a tree, and falling asleep such that first my torso fell asleep, then my limbs and head, then my fingers/toes/ears etc. etc. Woke up laughing uncontrollably.
- solarengineer 6y ago
- 3l3ktr4 6y agoWhat a cute story and great writing! <3 Thank you for sharing
- eplanit 6y agoWe're certainly the heroes of our own stories, this demonstrates.
- williesleg 6y agoOh great we're all equal but I'm an attention whore girl, look at me!!!!! I'll tell you what, if you truly want gender and race neutrality, just ignore it and don't write shit like that. Get to work and do great things.
- agomez314 6y ago"In 2020, I brought home more in a month than I earned in my first year at the newspaper, adjusted for inflation. I didn’t work particularly harder in 2020 than I did in say, 1997, and in so many ways the work I did—making there be a local newspaper, full of local news, every day, no matter what—was so much more important than the work I did to, uh, increase the velocity and quality of frontend development at <insert company here>." This is so important, as we seem to have become a society engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers technology
- m463 6y agoyou could say the same of many industries. mathematicians fall to wall street. Artists to Advertising. Engineers to silicon valley. and even in nice jobs, all of us succumb to the pace.
- throwaway894345 6y ago> This is so important, as we seem to have become a society engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers technology I would rather say that we're a society that is engineered by the market, and that the market is engineered by lobbyists. And one particular consequence is that the price of our work is determined largely by its value to those whom the lobbyists serve. The verbiage evokes a sense of conspiracy theory, but I think it's not only true but perhaps even eminently intuitive.
- ddingus 6y agoHow we value things and our priorities as a nation are impacted. Frankly, there is no need for conspiracy implications. Deliberate policy steps were taken down this road to where we are now. The simple truth is the outcome does not match needs, many legitimate expectations. We can also take a no blame, no shame path to a better overall scenario and should.
- 908B64B197 6y agoWas it really more important? A lot of local news, and news in general, really is clickbait aimed at attention-grabbing or paid pieces. > This is so important, as we seem to have become a society engineered by technology, rather than a society that engineers technology It's still people behind tech. It's just that they can reach much farther today than they ever did. But phrasing it like that sounds like yet another attempt of the humanities to demonize something they can't understand (or control). Like regimes pushing for internet censorship.
- wilsynet 6y agoIn the early 80s, my mom read in newspapers that computers were going to be the future. So she spent much of our meager savings on what was then a very expensive Apple IIe. Because she wanted opportunity for her children that she never had. That was quite a bet. Thanks Mom.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI don't know what compelled my dad to get our first PC in 1989 other than that it'd be cool, but he did it and plopped me behind it with a joystick and Paratrooper. I think he did a good there. (he may have been involved with computers before, iirc he mentioned MSX and the like, but that was before my time)
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYeah, the U.K. saw what was happening across the pond and made the right call with the BBC Micro. It's both sweet and sad to me to read this woman's account of her childhood where the best thing to come into her families living room was a $99 Timex Sinclair. What a fortuitous decision her parents made while the rest of the neighborhood jumped on the cable TV bandwagon with their disposable income. (I suppose I should be sad for her neighbor kids instead.) I guess what I really want is for every child to have the same access to opportunities that this one (only barely) realized.
- throwaway894345 6y agoOn the other hand, it seems sad that UK (as well as continental Europe for that matter) software industry wages seem to pale in comparison to wages in the US. I'm not really sure why that would be, even after accounting for things like healthcare and other social services. A bummer for American software professionals who are interested in moving abroad.
- AdrianB1 6y agoI saw a lot of people in Europe with the mentality "I am not paying the cable guy that much money", even if the "cable guy" was a highly skilled software engineer that was building the core of the company. Europe is also more egalitarian, doctors are also paid less and progressive income taxes and other factors are shaming people into earning less.
- jimbokun 6y agoMy family never bought a programmable computer, but my high school bought a few Apple IIe's. I would spend every study hall, and any other time I could manage, teaching myself to write BASIC programs. At night, I would write out BASIC programs in pencil in my school tablet, to type in the next day. I tried writing a basketball program that would generate a court in ASCII, with X's and O's representing players. I typed in NBA stats from USA today, to model various players field goal percentages and other attributes. I tried writing a fantasy game with a generated map. I remember drawing a meandering river, randomly plotting the direction of the next pixel within certain parameters. Needless to say, I was hooked, and have been programming computers for decades since.
- sixothree 6y agoI made a "driving" game on my trs-80 when I was maybe 11 or 12. It would accept joystick input and draw the road accordingly. It ran at about 1 FPS. If I would have had better mentors, I might have been able to make a career of computing a lot earlier than I eventually did. I look at so many of the things I learned on my own and how if I just had access to even a tiny bit more knowledge things could have been so different. But I am extremely happy with my capabilities today. I build incredible things. And I got to experience moore's law from pong to today.
- caeril 6y agoSimilar experience, here. I wonder what it's like for those born after 1990 or so. Is the opportunity for this type of magic still available? How do the younger generations develop our level of love and passion for computing without these experiences?
- kevincox 6y agoFor sure. I was born in 1994 and the details are different but the magic is the same. I started fooling around on the family computer (some of my earliest "programming" was actually scripted PowerPoint). Eventually I got my own laptop and was off to the races. I wrote scripts to do everything, websites for fun, little games. I started making AIs to play bridge and loads of terminal games. That desire to make things has never stopped. Sure, sometimes I slow down and sometimes I speed up but I am constantly making these small fun projects that are 99% for my own enjoyment of the writing. I don't think this will ever change. Creativity will always find a way out whether that is building in Minecraft or writing Minecraft mods in Java. Sure, it's a bit more "luxurious" with a computer at home or even a personal device and JavaScript rather than BASIC but at the end of the day nothing fundamental has changed.
- dang 6y agoThe author mentions a 2012 version of this post. It was discussed here: Girls and Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757796 - March 2012 (84 comments) and is at https://web.archive.org/web/20120328175728/http://rmurphey.com/blog/2012/03/25/girls-and-computers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120328175728/http://rmurphey.c...
- jskrablin 6y agoThis strikes close to home - in a good way. While details are a bit different (excluding the college drop out part) I guess the best investment my parents made was when they bought me an i386... it sure took me places and then some. Being 40 soon computers had been a part of my life for well over 1/2 of it and I still enjoy the grind :)
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- ddingus 6y agoThanks for a nice read. It has been an amazing journey! I myself typed stuff on a machine in the early 80's and was hooked. Good times.