Happy International Women’s Day 2024! (Belated — I meant to post this yesterday.)
So many girls and women who’ve been a joy to work with as students, colleagues, teachers, mentors. I wish I could relive every moment with you. If you think you may be in that group, you probably are. If you’re not sure, message me and I’ll tell you. 🙂
I think I remember women better because there haven’t been as many of them. I work in software engineering. Women are underrepresented in software engineering. You may have heard.
Women and men are different so it doesn’t seem surprising that they choose to do different things with their lives.
Software engineering has been a good career for me because I like solving problems and building things, so I’ve been able to make a living doing, for the most part, things that I like and things that (I think) I’m good at.
On the flip side, I’ve also spent most of my life sitting alone in a room or cubicle staring at a computer screen. Not everyone wants to do that. So there are pros and cons just like any other job.
Having said this, if you’re a woman and you want to be a software engineer, do it! Do it because you love it! You may have heard that software engineering is not a welcoming profession for women. That is false. It’s a knowledge-based profession. If you know more than the other person and you can solve problems that they can’t solve, you are the queen of the programming jungle.
And as Holden Caulfield used to say, “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while.”
You may have heard that male software engineers behave boorishly. In what profession do men not behave boorishly? Yes, I’ve seen bad things happen to female engineers: missing out on raises or promotions, not getting the project they really wanted, losing their job. All that stuff happens to men too. It’s happened to me. I’ve been out of work plenty of times and I’m as manly as you can get.
Enjoy your day. Follow your dreams.