Female programmers: rose in the storm

The IT session will be crowded at the job fair. Wu finally squeezed into a booth and quickly browsed the recruitment information. He was glad that he met the conditions of the software developers and suddenly saw the last line of the requirement information saying "Gender, male ", I felt very frustrated. In this way, I turned around a few times and did not see the recruitment of female developers. It was hard to find a company to recruit female programmers familiar with Oracle and Java, only when asked, I knew that I would not participate in development and programming. Instead, I Would Do System promotion and training.

[Blocked Advertisements] when the night is deep, there are not many people and cars on the road, and the street lights are even more silent and peaceful. After joining her class, Lin Jiangnan followed her husband to ride a bicycle home. Most of the time of the day has been reserved for the company, and only two people can talk together in the evening. The two were so happy that they didn't notice that the two cars were too close. They screwed them together and fell out of the car. Looking at her husband's broken knees, she thought that she was not at ease going home so late. She came to the company every day and waited for her to complete the work. Lin Jiangnan felt a burst of emotion and tears.

This is a true portrayal of the work and life of female programmers. Starting from job hunting, female programmers are more difficult than male programmers, so there are very few women working in software companies, and fewer women working in front-line coding. Even in a large company like IBM that respects women, only 17% of women are engaged in technical work. However, after being hired as a female programmer, the road is not smooth and facing pressure from various aspects.

Rose in the storm

For female programmers, the most common stress is overtime. Nearly 50% of female programmers need to work overtime every week for several days or even the whole week. The number of overtime hours varies. The number of employees who work overtime for one to four hours accounts for 63.89% of the total number of respondents. The number of overtime hours is 5% to 10% more than that of other professional female employees. This means that female programmers need to make more efforts in the workplace, including sacrificing some private time. Compared with other professional women, they spend less time shopping, less makeup and dressing themselves. As a result, female programmers are a simple and low-profile Group in most people's eyes, even though they are relatively rare in male-dominated development teams.

Female programmers are facing more pressure than that. Most male Programmers think that women are not suitable for programmers. Women are at a disadvantage in this respect because of their high development requirements and high intensity. In terms of work arrangements, 43% of people think that the project manager will tend to make female programmers do auxiliary work or develop edge features such as interfaces. Miss Qian Meng (not her real name) encountered such a problem. Miss Qian graduated from a search engine development company last year. In the project team, "generally (project managers) think that the attitude or initiative of (female programmers) is not as high as that of boys. In addition, at the seminar, the thinking of male programmers will be very active, while the ideas of female members are generally very conventional. In this way, he feels that female programmers lack creativity. Therefore, when assigning tasks, the core code in the background is monopolized by male programmers, while several of our female programmers can only develop applications and interfaces ." Miss Qian was unwilling to only apply for applications. She repeatedly applied to the project manager for background R & D, but the project manager said in the first sentence, "this is quite tiring. You didn't see how hard they were doing when creating a new algorithm. If something went wrong, you had to rewrite the previous one. For development related to applications and interfaces, if there is an error, you only need to make a small change, so you don't have to make it all over again ."

One of the consequences of being unvalued at work is that promotions are restricted or blocked. Indeed, men in software companies are more likely to have high-level technical or management positions, and only a few women with outstanding performance can be promoted to project managers, architects, or CTO. Cynthia has been working in China's largest tax software company for the fourth year. Now it has finally become a group leader and needs to train and lead three new users to complete a project module. However, this is a far cry from the ideal she had just entered into the company, and she had hoped to become a project manager. She was a top graduate of a prestigious school. She was confident in her own technology, business understanding, and ability to get along with others, and her three years of work was not short. Unfortunately, "we chose to leave the game. At that time, I felt very uncomfortable. But later I thought it was reasonable for him to make such a choice. One of the three of us is a boy. That's enough. The other is a female, but she is a master's degree. So even if I have better abilities, companies are willing to take them as training objects." However, for female programmers, it is easier to promote to a middle-level management position such as project manager. For example, about 25% of project managers in BoYan technology are women. However, women with higher levels of employment (such as CTO) are rare. According to statistics from Tailai headhunting, about 2% of ctos in Beijing are women.

However, being unvalued at work is not the only reason why the promotion is blocked. The psychological factors of female programmers also play a very important role in the process of being promoted. Asked about future plans, Cynthia said she no longer dreamed of being a project manager. The promotion is frustrated on the one hand; on the other hand, after a long period of observation on how other people are working as project managers, Cynthia thinks that being a project manager is much harder than imagined, to manage a project, you must not only be familiar with the business and technology, but also coordinate the relationship with the technical personnel. You must also communicate with your superiors a lot. However, the company's interpersonal relationships are very complex, this is especially exhausting. In addition, programmers have a high level of work intensity, which can easily make female programmers feel tired and automatically stop the idea of being promoted. When you don't even have the idea of being promoted, there may be much less chance of being promoted. In fact, this phenomenon is not exclusive to female programmers, as are most women in other industries. In a special survey of white-collar women in foreign companies in China that most want the company to offer, only 10% of the people who want the company to offer a promotion opportunity.

Emotion Spectrum

"Female programmers are the treasure of the Development Department," says Mustang. He is a male programmer. His Development Department has only one male and only one female programmer. Therefore, when the task is not tight, his colleagues are very willing to chat with this female programmer, she is playing with her sister just like she does. Mustang said, "If you are looking for a girlfriend, I 'd like to select a female programmer. People who work with machines all day are naive and straightforward ." However, not all male Programmers think so highly of female programmers. "Female programmers have many dinosaurs, and their thinking is stylized. They lack the fashion and romance of Liberal Arts girls. But they are also quite pitiful. There is a girl in our technical department who doesn't feel like she stays there and faces the computer when she goes to work. There is no one talking around her ."

In the face of comments from male peers, what are male programmers in the eyes of female programmers? "Eight out of ten male programmers are workaholics. I know this is a little exaggerated. In fact, I really appreciate the professionalism of the male colleagues around me ." Neadia said, "however, I hate some male programmers who haven't seen them change sweaters and coats all winter !" Compared with the absence of margin, female programmers do not like male manism of male programmers. Lisa, who works as a financial report software company, talked about male programmers and said, "To be honest, everyone is a programmer and no one is better than anyone else, but some male Programmers think they are amazing. Sometimes I have a problem with the program and ask him, but the other party is always dismissive, which makes his self-esteem very unbearable ".

Regardless of how male and female programmers evaluate each other, there is a unique phenomenon in the female programmer circle: Most people's boyfriends or husbands are also programmers, and single female programmers are also biased towards finding male programmers as lovers. Lisa believes that this principle is very simple. "Since being a programmer, there are very few opportunities to interact with people. Most of the time, they are used to accompany ABC. People who have never been involved in the IT industry do not know much about what programmers do, so they can find a programmer boyfriend who can understand themselves ." "Speaking of falling in love, I always think that only engineering boys can appreciate it and can endure it," said Viola, a netizen. I was originally a classmate with him. After graduation, I spent a long time chatting on QQ in different cities. QQ is actually the biggest matchmaker of our programmers, several colleagues found the other half through it."

When talking about marriage, what female programmers worry most about is not whether their husbands complain about their work, but whether they can continue to work after being pregnant or having children, and whether they can fully work after having children. In China, there are more than the IT industry. In other industries, women are at risk of being dismissed by the company after being pregnant. Some scholars have also proposed the concept of "Periodic unemployment. Tracey has encountered similar problems. I once worked as a programmer in Japan for five years. Now I am the Tracey of the Japanese development department manager of BoYan. "My husband loves children very much. I went out to play with him. When I saw a child, he made a joke, smile. Therefore, if you get married, the first thing is to have children ." In Japan, women may leave their jobs and return home to work as full-time wives, whether they want to give birth to children. Even if they like work very much, they will not go back to work until their children go to kindergarten or elementary school. However, Tracey thinks that Chinese women are much more fortunate. Because Japanese children are expensive, many women have to take care of their children, in China, many people can replace their parents. She said that during the many years of being pregnant at home, it was not a complete delay. At this time, she was able to completely calm down and learn something to prepare for the next stage.

The story of every female programmer touched us. They devote their enthusiasm and youth to this industry, whether they are left behind or looking for a happy future, whether they are "mysterious" smart beauty or the dinosaur in "Gossip, they will always be a beautiful landscape in the fast-changing and highly competitive IT industry.