February 16, 2007 at 4:41 am
Ginger,
If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only woman who works that way. #s 1 and 2 describe me as well. And while I do work with one man who will admit he doesn't know everything (of course, he's a single father of 2, so that explains that. @=), the rest of the developers have a tendancy to plow full steam ahead with everything, at least with their tech toys at home.
Oddly enough, as much as I agree with part of your post, our worst problem with "jumping on new technologies" and "not saying I don't know" seems to be coming more from our VP and our business unit than with our IT department. They keep trying to push us into things before we've had a chance to hear more than the synopsis of an idea. Which in turn encourages the developers to rush ahead, if only because we're all too busy trying to fight the customer "fires" than we are to actually plan for future development. We're trying to push back, but it's hard when the business unit doesn't see the value of a high-paid IT department who keeps saying "No" or "Hold on a moment, let us catch our breath".
September 22, 2014 at 6:06 am
It felt so good to come across this forum. I was really looking forward to talk to someone about (women+IT+DBA) 😀 and their challenges.
I am a female DBA with around 7 years in this field. The career happened to me by chance when i was inducted into a DBA team as a graduate trainee in my first job.
What Atieh says sums up my experience in my job very well. As per me, this is not at all sexist nonsense. It is an important discussion for women in this kind of role. As women we play a lot of roles in our lives and our job is also a very important role for us. It obviously depends from person to person.
As a DBA I’ve been surrounded by men all the time. In the beginning years this really used to bother me as i would feel like i am not a part of the crowd. Their topics won’t interest me nor would their jokes make me laugh. Not spending time with the men would mean not getting to know a lot of inside important stuff about your current job/team/boss/company in general. Even after spending 7 yrs in this line I haven’t turned into a 'boyish girl' (or whatever it requires me to be), hanging out with them, chilling with them or drinking with them after work. But yes, I’ve learnt to ignore most of the things which would annoy me earlier. I’ve accepted that i am different from them. I even hang out with them much more than earlier (for career benefit mostly ;-)).
But there are still a few constant challenges. I’ll list them here.
- I like my core technical field of work and the potential it offers to learn new technologies. I am much better than many of my male colleagues. But my ability to pick up new things related to my technology once I am outside office is limited. At home I take care of many more tasks which many of these men don’t do. I am an Indian and maybe the functioning of Indian society also comes into play a little here.
- At my job we are required to provide 24 x 7 oncall support. Sometimes, the calls get so frequent that the entire week of oncall I barely get any sleep. Recently I’ve started seeing the impact of taking this stress on my body and health. I am not even a mother yet and the way my body behaves at times scares me.
- The Men in team are more proactive when it comes to things like doing a 'Night Shift' or working odd hours in office (e.g. 3AM). Recently a guy in my team worked in office from 3AM to 930PM on an issue. That too after returning home at 10 in the night previous day. Looking at them I ask myself can I take that much stress? And I don’t get a positive answer from myself. Safety is a concern in my city. Being a woman, being all out alone at 3AM isn’t the best thing to do.
In general Men are much more flexible when it comes to odd hours. And not being able to do as much always makes me feel inferior, left behind and as if I cant compete with the men in my team. I worry this will also affect my growth in this career stream.
These are just my thoughts. I know many women are much more capable of dealing with such situations. Welcome any suggestions and thoughts. 🙂
September 22, 2014 at 6:20 am
Just because the men volunteer work the odd shifts, doesn't mean their bodies aren't reacting to the stress. It just means they're ignoring it. It's also the product of an old culture (think 40s and 50s) when people (men) spent their entire careers at one company. Such loyalty and effort was expected of them, and they were eventually rewarded with a pension, etc. But it killed their ability to balance work and life.
If the men on your team grew up during that era, it would go a long way to explaining that work habit. If they are younger than that... Then I'm not sure they know what they are doing to themselves.
I do on call work, but I make sure to balance it with my need for sleep and other activities. It's not always easy, but our small team has worked out an informal share system where different people cover different times and needs.
And sometimes it just needs to wait until regular business hours.
September 22, 2014 at 6:45 am
Hi Brandie,
Good to hear from you.
Night shifts and weird working hours are a common practice in Indian outsourced locations of big companies.
Job roles like DBA and other IT infrastructure roles are filled with night shifts and Oncall support responsibilities. You may not find any job which doesn't require you to carry these responsibilities.
We here work on an oncall rota where we get the oncall support once a month for a week. Only one person supports the oncall at a time unless the workload is too much on that person. He/She needs to carry the oncall phone all the time and is expected to respond within 15 minutes to any issue else the call gets escalated. Thats how it works for most companies.
Regards,
Ekta
September 22, 2014 at 10:41 am
Ah. I assumed you were in a U.S. company. My bad.
I understand the strange working hours better now, though. I assume most of the companies you do work for are in the Western hemisphere?
The best you can do is take care of yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. Don't let weird hours destroy your sanity, drink plenty of clean water, and get plenty of sleep.
September 23, 2014 at 7:47 am
If all those men can talk about is sports, they should lose their geek card. 😎
Here's an interesting article about women still being treated differently at work, from a different angle.
I attended some talks by one of the Detroit chapter people from Girl Develop It [/url]at Penguicon. They seem to be into app-development at this point, but maybe they could use some database design sessions with one of the open-source SQLs...
September 23, 2014 at 8:19 am
Thanks for that link, Paul. It's an interesting article with a very good point.
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