I was pointed to this very nice interview with Patricia Torvalds, daughter of the famous Linus. I was impressed. I can also say that Linus Torvalds seem to have had roughly similar parenting styles.
I do think genuine interest is important, though. If my dad had sat me down in front of the computer and told me to configure a webserver when I was 12, I don’t think I’d be interested in computer science. Instead, my parents gave me a lot of free reign to do what I wanted, which was mostly coding terrible little HTML sites for my Neopets. Neither of my younger sisters are interested in engineering or computer science, and my parents don’t care. I’m really lucky my parents have given me and my sisters the encouragement and resources to explore our interests.
Still, I grew up saying my future career would be “like my dad’s”—even when I didn’t know what he did. He has a pretty cool job. Also, one time when I was in middle school, I told him that and he got a little choked up and said I wouldn’t think that in high school. So I guess that motivated me a bit.
We did the same thing: no pressure on our kids to follow particular career paths, but rather to do what made them happy. Unlike Torvalds, though, none of my kids decided to follow my particular career, not one. No biologists among my children. But they are being themselves and doing what interests them, which is what matters.
But it was this quote that made me happy — someone really gets it.
I also think that some community leaders just don’t value diversity. It’s really easy to argue that tech is a meritocracy, and the reason there are so few marginalized people in tech is just that they aren’t interested, and that the problem comes from earlier on in the pipeline. They argue that if someone is good enough at their job, their gender or race or sexual orientation doesn’t matter. That’s the easy argument. But I was raised not to make excuses for mistakes. And I think the lack of diversity is a mistake, and that we should be taking responsibility for it and actively trying to make it better.
I see a lot of that. The easy path is to ignore the problem, or pretend it’s someone else’s fault, and pretend that you can ignore it all.
Of course, the other phenomenon I see is a lot of people blaming the victims and actively fighting hard to oppose improvements in the situation.
I never went into my mother’s personal favorite job (health care), and my sister did. I know that it means she and my sister have a lot more in common, but I suspect similar job choices is an effect of that, not a cause. And I know my mother is a lot happier supporting me as the best astronomer and physics teacher I can be, than to force me to be a sub-par nurse or physician or psychologist. She herself admits that dealing with sick people (in her case, elderly people in various levels of needing someone to assist them) takes someone with the right temperament, and getting someone with the wrong state of mind is not the best option.
(And, well, I learned a lot of lessons from my mother that make me a better teacher, even if I followed in my dad’s footsteps.)
Wow, she sure took her father’s principles to wildly different conclusions. Linus Torvalds is the EPITOME of those “meritocracy”-idolizing tech leaders. I wonder how that dynamic works between them…
@2, I think it’s more that he GPLd his offspring and let them go whichever way they wanted. Meritocracy, maybe in the way that her merits (like his own, I would presume from that snarky nutjob) speak for themselves as to who she is.
The friends of my father (a mechanical engineer), were always amazed that both of his kids went into the sciences (me in mathematics, my sister in chemistry) as none of their kids did.
But, I did rebel a bit. The original plan was for me to be a music major until my father told me that I could do that if I wanted, but he wouldn’t pay for college if that were my major. So I went through the list…English? Nah, too much writing (little did I know…it’s all writing, just different styles). Engineering? Nah, I don’t want to be just like Dad. Psychology? Nah, that’s Mom. Chemistry? My sister. Physics? Physics is the evil spawn of Satan. You know those rides where you stand against the wall, the room spins around, the floor drops out, and everybody sticks to the wall? I go down with the floor. Physics and I seem to have an agreement: It doesn’t work with me and I don’t work with it.
Math? Well, I did get through second-year calculus by the time I graduated high school, so maybe I have a thing for math. Turns out that no, I have a thing for calculus and there’s more to math than that. Barbie was right. Math is hard.
But, I went to Harvey Mudd so in addition to that degree in Math, I was going to minor in Music (since you have to minor in the Arts or Humanities at Mudd)…only to find that the Theatre class I took to satisfy the Arts distribution requirement beyond the minor was just too good to pass up.
Ended up graduating with more credits in my minor than in my major and went on for my MFA in Musical Theater.
I’m still the science geek. I do tech support…but there was a time when I was making rounds all afternoon….
@3,teejaykay
Given the things that Richard Stallman has admitted about the GPL — just as one example, he has admitted that the language used to describe the use of GPL-based code as a precompiled library in a non-GPL project was deliberately made vague in the hopes that closed-source programmers would “fall for it”, use GPL libraries, and then he and his buddies in the FSF could sue them into making their work GPL* — GPL-ing your offspring would actually be steering them into a very particular and not very honest way of life.
*And before you say “nobody would do that”: the reason GPL code is forbidden on the Apple store is not because Apple hates the GPL particularly but because some open-source people did exactly that and Apple had to kick out every single program which used GPL code or risk a legal minefield. Open source is fine; the GPL is demonic.
Richard Stallman must have pissed in your Cherrios, Vicar. That’s the only explanation for all the ridiculous GPL rants you post to a website almost, but not completely, uninvolved in technology. Your made up allegations about the language around precompiled libraries is inane conspiracy theory. And GPL software isn’t allowed in the Apple store because Apple imposes distribution restrictions on apps in the store, and those restrictions violate the rules that the GPL provides to protect users.
Open Source is a wishy washy giveaway to corporations who want to leverage free software as a leg up against their competitors but then wall off access. Naturally it’s the choice of glibertarians like ESR. GPL is actual free software; protecting in perpetuity the rights of users to examine, modify, and redistribute software.
Tech is totally a meritocracy. That’s why my technical team has ended up being all women. The men just don’t seem to apply.
Sounds like the way that we raised our five kids.
Daughter number 1 wanted to be like Dad and went for engineering and Biology degrees. He went for the tech and computer engineering, but she went with the Biology and became a neurobiologist and made use of the engineering skills in her research.
Daughter number 2 became an executive for a Fortune 500 insurance and banking company.
Only son followed his Dad into the computer world and is a software designer.
Daughter number 3 followed me into teaching and was a damn good preschool teacher. However, as a single mother, she needed a better paying job with more opportunities, so she followed her sister into the insurance business.
Daughter number 4 followed her passionate love of animals to become an animal trainer, a groomer and a vet tech. She’s finishing up her business degree now so that she can either open her own animal-related business or go for a corporate job in an animal-related company.
They are all extremely different people with wildly different interests. We always encouraged them to follow their passions.
Thanks for the link. I’m a techie and I recently ran across a link to another stance on this issue by Eric S. Raymond (ESR). Apparently he thinks feminists are trying to booby trap him and other male leaders in tech fields by getting them alone and then falsely accuse them of sexual assault. Because of course when one random, anonymous paranoid guy on the internet thinks the womenfolk are out to get him and tells someone whose name you’ve heard of about it, it’s obviously time to go witch hunting.
Virtually any response to women in tech is better than seeing grown men devolve into gradeschool bullies screaming at the top of their lungs that girls have cooties. But after that, reading about how Patricia gets it on minorities in tech and promoting the idea of children going into what interests them restored my faith in humanity. Or at least helped distract me from wondering if all of my male colleagues in tech fields are secretly misogynistic imbecils.
Ack. Didn’t see the post just before this one about ESR. Caught that ridiculous blog post link from another site.
@#6, gmcard
5 November 2015 at 6:13 pm
Oh, really? Stallman said exactly what I attributed to him in an interview with Byte Magazine. The GPL is deliberately intended to actively harm anyone who touches stuff licensed with it but who doesn’t want to use it personally — and the FSF will sue over violations even if the original coders want to waive the requirements.
Nope. GPL software was originally permitted on the Apple store. It all had to be purged because someone posted a port of the GPL-ed program VLC. They had the source code available on their own website, but one of the GPL nitwits, Rémi Denis-Courmont, sued not the developer but Apple, and insisted in his filing that the only way Apple could be in compliance with the GPL was to force every single developer with programs in the store to make their code public. And so Apple started kicking GPL-licenced code off the store. The issue wasn’t with Apple, it was with GPL zealots.
In practice, GPL software like Linux is a huge giveaway to big corporations who not only want to leverage other people’s work without paying for it but does not actually stop big companies from walling off their software. Two quick (and big) examples: IBM and Google. IBM switched their service customers to Linux from their own AIX. They did this because the AIX developers were older employees with high salaries and benefits, and they could hire fresh-out-of-college Linux hackers who were paid — relatively speaking — peanuts. They can do this because what they were (and are) selling is not an OS but services; their own software, which provides those services, runs on top of Linux and does not have to be GPLed (and never will be, because it would lose a major revenue stream). Google, on the other hand, runs it servers using a purely internal fork of the Linux kernel. It is frequently out of date because they have optimized it so heavily that it takes effort to move the customizations to new versions of the kernel. These optimizations are never “given back” because it would lose a competitive advantage — and the GPL can’t be used to force them to do it because, like IBM, they aren’t redistributing the kernel, merely giving away the output of programs running on top of it.
What the GPL does do is make it effectively impossible for a good programmer to make a living by writing good code without joining up with a large corporation. Both the Mac and Windows used to have lots and lots of really excellent shareware. The programmers were able to make a living by charging small fees, in the $10 to $50 range, for code which was well-written and well-documented. The GPL, by requiring that code is published, means that a programmer cannot realistically expect to make a living by publishing code — anyone can simply take the source code and make their own version for free, or sell the original developer’s work at a lower price.
GPL advocates try to pretend that programmers can make a living with GPL code by claiming that developers should charge for support (or t-shirts, or other non-necessities), but this not only creates a perverse incentive for the programmer to make their program worse (in order to drive up usage of the paid support services which do generate income — all the old shareware I used to run, back before the Open Source movement basically killed shareware, was well-written enough that I never needed support!) but also means that the programmer has to spend a much larger amount of time and effort doing things other than programming than they would otherwise do. Since technical support uses a different skillset than programming, this means that good programmers would often end up wasting time doing work they aren’t good at — and the whole world is the loser.
Actual good programming, the kind where good documentation and UI design make the software easy to use, therefore becomes something which only the already-rich can do as a hobby or which can only be done by joining up with an organization large enough to hire separate staff for those support-for-pay operations (and other things). GPL will never succeed in killing off huge corporate products like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, in other words, but it has already largely succeeded in killing off the little guys with a mountain of poorly-writting projects. Way to go, team.
Just read a great article about the mindset of programmers and how it can prevent them from understanding the problems around diversity in tech. Thought I’d share; nothing groundbreaking for those who already care about social justice, but still a good read (I really like this blogger). Great links, too.