Okay, I suppose it's time someone put their money where their good
intentions are. I'd like to offer an example of how a lack of imagination
nearly resulted in yet another all-male development group:
I was moaning to a female friend of mine last night about the trouble I've
been having finding someone to fill a position in our company.
The problem, I told her, is that we're too small to afford a someone who
merely shovels bits from one digital bucket to another. We need someone
who's going to get equal enjoyment out of dealing with clients, talking on a
high level at one moment, but who's capable of digging in between lines of
code and working out the toughest problems. Someone who's not going to throw
her/his ego around, or hide in a cubicle (not that we have any), emerging
only to get another slice of pizza and a coke. We need, in short, to
distinguish ourselves from the crowd, by offering a better quality of
service, and better approaches, than the bit-shovellers of the world.
My friend asked me where I'd been looking. That's when I wanted to kick
myself. I said, "I could, uh, post a notice to linuxchix, I guess...." It's
a good thing this woman was my friend. I think she would have done the
kicking for me, otherwise. The look on her face made it clear that she was
wondering why that hadn't been the first place I looked, for all the good
I'd had to say about it.
I like to consider myself a fairly open-minded, prejudice-free kind of
person, but I found that even I was perfectly willing to sit back and let
the traditional machinery of IT staffing send me the same people again and
again, without once considering that making a better workplace -- for myself
and others -- actually required a little more effort than that.
So here it is. I'll be posting a job opening shortly on the ottawa linuxchix
mailing list. While I won't guarantee that anyone but the best available
person will get the job, I will actively encourage women in this area (or
who are willing to relocate to Ottawa) to apply. And between you and you and
you (etc.) and me and the wall, I suspect that those traits which might have
kept a woman out of other high tech positions will favour them in this:
We need someone who has a strong sympathy for the human factors, whose
intelligence isn't limited to the world of bits, but who can go there when
they need to. I'm really not looking for a skill-set so much as someone with
a hunger to learn the tools required to bring context and meaning to
document management. I'll offer more particulars in the ottawa mailing list
message, if any of you are interested.
So: congratulations to all of you who've participated in this discussion.
Some of it actually sifted through the protective mesh we men carry around!
Regards,
--
Dan McGarry
http://www.moodindigo.com/
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
