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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on Competition
Message-ID: <1017@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Sep-83 01:48:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1017
Posted: Thu Sep  8 01:48:25 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Sep-83 03:59:44 EDT
References: <198@houxu.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 58

I have been going to job interviews lately. I spent 2 hours on the phone
to a person who is working with a person who described a job to me that
i think that I would like. Unfortunately, i could not get the name of
the company out of the Body-broker -- I truly believe that he did not
know.

He is very new to the boby-broking business, and was going to do a miserable
job of selling me to the perspective company (which is why i spent so
much time with him).  After clearing up some fundamental misconceptions
with him ( I had to break off a conversation to write(1) to someone,
telling him that I was busy, and the BB was astonished that I would
have a terminal at home -- and thought that was a gross break of security!,
and I had to explain to him that compiler writing was not a gift from
some deity so that i had not thought to write "I CAN WRITE COMPILERS"
in 96 point on my resume, and I had to explain to him the difference between
a 32 bit machine and a 16 bit machine, and that there were more 32bit
machines than just the 68000... you get the picture)

After leaving technical issues, he began to ask the sort of questions
that can be described as 'are you a jerk to work with'. He was absolutely
astonished (still, I think he found the 2 hours very astonishing given
that every other sentence he said got a 'well, you can't quite say that'
or a 'well that does not logically follow') when I corrected him when
he said "besides helping people, what else are you in this business for?".

I had not mentioned helping people, and in fact, it is not particularily
important to me. it is nice when what I do helps people, and it generally
*does* help them, but these days very few people are saying "oh you
wonderful person, you found out that it was the Memory Bus, not the
first Meg of memory that was broken", or anything of that sort. Most
of the things I do are never noticed, which is fine by me.

I am interested in what I do out of the sheer joy and power of it.

I am exulted when I can get a piece of hardware which nobody has ever
seen before and nobody is likely to see again working. This exultation
is not based on a sense of 'oh boy, all these users will get a new
disk to use' but on the sheer power -- I wanted this done, and look,
i did it. 

i found that this concept boggled the poor BBs mind. He said that i
was the first woman he had met whose expressed purpose in life was
something other than 'helping people'. (I can believe this. 4 years
ago the Ontario government did a survey of high school students and
what their career expectations were and more than 80% of the girls
listed 'helping people' as one of their career aims.)

it occurs to me that i may have stumbled on the destinction between a
'hacker' and a 'computer professional'. A hacker works for the joy of
it.

Now, of course, one must ask where do all the women get the idea that
they ought to spend their lives helping people -- and why did i not
get it? perhaps it was because a lot of people were very nasty to me
as a kid...

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura