She’s going
Antonella Pavese is leaving IT. She explains why:
What I found frustrating is not so much the exclusion from the boy’s club–although there is definitely some of that–but rather the excessive emphasis on speed rather than quality (for a different take on this issue, see Alan Key on the disappointing lack of new and revolutionary programming languages; via Andrew), on execution rather than strategy, and the disregard for the human and caring aspects of building applications (e.g., the quality of the user experience rather than the quality of the code).
I know it isn’t what you want to hear, Antonella, but that’s they way it is in almost every company, and the tendency increases with size. I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, not an IT company, and the attitude was prevalent all over the place. There wasn’t an emphasis on quality, despite the lip service. There was an emphasis on speed, and if quality was in the way, it quite often became a casualty (point of clarification: quality issues that could physically harm someone were not casualties, but quality issues which resulted in poorer performance or confused customers often were).
Company executives want numbers, why do you think the recent accounting problems happened in the first place? They want good numbers and don’t have a great interest in how they get them. That’s why we see support functions and call desks being outrsourced to cheap, often less qualified, labor. The bottom line is the goal, and so nothing warm and fuzzy, such as training, such as usability studies, that cannot have a directly justifiable dollar gain gets their interest. (Yes, I know full well that these things improve the workforce and the product. The problem comes when the executive asks “how much?” And then the executive whose funding will be cut to fund those items asks for a detailed justification of those numbers. It’s not always possible to come up with firm numbers that will pass scrutiny, and even if you can, the first time you’re wrong you lose every future discussion about the same issues.)
She cites some of the usual gender-hostile reasons, but I’m pleased to note they aren’t her main reason, because many of those same issues are problems for the men in this field as well; men are conditioned since birth, however, not to complain about things like that, so you don’t hear much from our side of the gender fence, I’m afraid. I know every time I thought about those issues I heard a voice in my head say “that’s why they call it “work,” dummy.”
The problem is that the corporate mindset has milked America until it’s getting pretty dry, and soon they’ll be moving on to fresher pastures, and a workforce that won’t complain as loudly or be able to choose another path. It’s already happened in the world of textiles, is happening now in computers and electronics. Won’t be long until the only jobs over here will be sales, marketing, and service. Antonella apparently won’t find that too bad, as she’s looking forward to moving into marketing, but for hands-on folsk like me, that would simply be another form of death. On the bright side, I’ll be retired before that happens.
You make a lot of good points.
Quality can be ignored outside of IT, too. But the fact that disregarding quality is a frequent practice doesn’t make it right, does it? Of course if your company has behaviors that border on the unethical, what are you supposed to do? Leave? Close your eyes? I think the idea that the end justify the means is insulting not only for the customers, but also for the employees.
I actually was not complaining for this type of behavior, but for a milder form of disregard for quality. My senior management is very concerned about online security for example, and want to make sure that our client’s accounts are safe. They just have a hard time making the leap to considering the quality of the user interface a piece of the equation.
You talk about men being as unhappy as women in an environment that doesn’t value and/or respect them. I could I disagree? I do think, though, that women are often more vulnerable to this environment, for whatever reason.
I didn’t say it was right, only that it was widespread. You came across sounding a bit like the Lone Ranger, and I wanted to let you know it’s like that all over the place. You’re probably in the majority, or if not, at least in a very large minority.
To my own shame, I stayed with my company for far too long. After the parting, I realized it was something that should have happened at least 5 years earlier. But such is the cost of lethargy; at my age, I didn’t relish venturing out into the job market. Employers don’t think of 40+ (or 50+) workers in the IT field; they expect to hire twenty-somethings. (I remember one young manager who looked at my resume, which included “old school” stuff like ALGOL as well as java, and couldn’t get past the old languages, telling me it looked like I hadn’t kept my skills up to date! I guess the idea of a codger like me learning java and ASP was just too much for him to understand; only young people are supposed to have those skills, I guess.)
Women could indeed be more vulnerable to that kind of environment, for a couple of reasons. There’s lots of social conditioning on the male side that tells us that we have to shut up and take it, because work isn’t supposed to be easy or friendly, it’s just supposed to be done. In my admittedly limited experience, women tend to have higher expectations from a job/career, which is a double-edged sword. The up side is it prompts them to push harder to find or create something better; the down side is they feel more pressure when life doesn’t meet their expectations.
Anyway, I wish you luck and fun in your new career; may it live up to your expectations.