Kamala Harris, campaigning in Iowa, tells 'em to 'learn to code'

American Thinker ^ | Oct 9, 2019 | Monica Showalter

[roadcat]

To continue your post, you also have to be willing to re-invent yourself.

Same here. I got bored with some jobs, and moved on to other things. Started out with assembly programming, switched to high-level like FORTRAN and COBOL, then back to assembly on mainframes and system engineer work. IBM JES2 and CICS management. From there to networking, managing WANs and LANs, being a router manager. In the early days had to disassemble Cisco routers and swap chips for upgrades. Did integration between micro, mini and mainframes. Had major roles in building computer sites, including spec'ing out power requirements for data cabinets and then building same and populating with servers. Then on to Novell Netware, email servers, and NT & Windows servers management. Also did database management, Oracle, Tivoli, etc. Unless you move around, you will stagnate. Lot of co-workers didn't move around, doing the same thing for 35 years. Yuck.

[roadcat]

There are plenty of female programmers, outstanding ones in fact, but it’s still a field dominated by men in my experience.

My experience matches, a field dominated by men. The women didn't want to get their hands dirty. Not true of all; I've worked alongside a few women who didn't mind crawling thru dirty tunnels to string cabling between buildings, or lift heavy servers into data racks. I knew a couple women who were outstanding on troubleshooting mainframe problems. But many are weak in logic skills. It bugged me to see women brought into a job that couldn't hack it, asking me to cover for them or do what they were supposed to know. Equal pay for equal work, but shouldn't be paid for not doing the work that men do.