RE: Case study for interviewing Oracle DBA

>I find it hard to agree with the statemen that learning to work the=20
>system can you take you above. (A woman could have worked real hard=20
>about 30 years ago - I dont think it would have taken her anywhere=20
>here in US. No way she could have 'worked' the system back then).

Wow! Well, in case you missed my little postings before, I'm back on the List, and Steve was good enough to let me post, so I might as well jump in with both feet on this one, because nothing gets the old blood thumping more than some nice misinformed sexism. =20

Just to be painfully clear, I wasn't in computing 30 years ago... I got in a mere 28 years ago, but I hope you'll find me qualified nonetheless. In the meantime, let me tell you what the "system" was back then. =20

Back in the Dark Ages of computing the "system" such as it was, was a bunch of companies and universities spending big bucks to put in hardware in the hopes that it would someday pay for itself. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a CS degree. I was in a National Science Foundation study for young engineers, and, if you wanted to go into CS, there were two ways to go: via Mathematics or via Electrical Engineering. Oh, and there was a third way: not getting a degree. The vast majority of really good CS people back then didn't have one, and a lot of the old geeks still don't. What they were, what *we* were, was clever with an insatiable appetite for driving the technology to do more, go further, faster, better, than it was able to. =20

The "system" then was simply proving to these companies and universities, oh, and the government itself, that degree or no, math or EE or music or history, if you were clever, bright and had a love of technology, you were a good investment in their company/university/Department... Because *someone* had to make those machines work, and it was the clever bright people who were best able to do it.

And, while we're at it, if you want to go further back than that, the vast majority of the earliest programmers were women. In The War, women were the ones who were hard coding the machines to do things, not men, who were carrying rifles in Normandy. And, it was the women, as keypunch girls or whatever, who took the designs the engineers did for the early space program and put it into computers. If you want to go into people with 50 years or more experience in computers, you will find far more women there than men.

In case you're interested.

Bambi.

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