Grace Hopper Con

[catherineldf]

I went to my first ever Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing this week. For context on my comments here, I had to go on my own dime so I only made it to one day out of 4. A wasp stung my hand the day beforehand, resulting in lots of swelling and ouch and I developed a migraine as the day wore on. So, crabby. 

Let me start by saying that I love the idea of a 4 day conference on women in tech. It think that the emphasis on mentorship and on getting more young women in IT careers is splendid. I liked the keynote that I heard by Megan Smith from Google, formerly of Planet OUT and other places. Very inspirational, very worthwhile.

After that, things took something of a turn. I attended a presentation on what was supposed to be a new statistical model for predicting defects (this is part of what I do in my day job). And it was a perfectly nice model. But I think I can figure out that large file with numerous recent changes generate the most bugs, after 13 years in the field, without needing to code a new tool in Python to tell me that. Assuming that this presentation was geared toward more folks earlier in their IT careers, I toddled off to the exhibits room to meet up with my friend Betsy and chat with a recruiter from a very large company who had reached out to me earlier. She impressed me and said all the right things so she gets a resume and we see what happens. It would involve epic life changes, so feeling really cautious around that discussion. We'll see what happens.

Betsy and I then hied our way off to the LGBT luncheon to compare notes. She had mentioned that all the recruiting/exhibits were geared toward the college and younger and that out of the 160 or so orgs represented, none were looking for experienced pros at this event. I had already noted that only 2 local companies had shown up and only one of the local universities (not the one with the largest IT department) was there. I proved Betsy's point later when, after the luncheon, I went looking for the company that sponsored it to learn more about them. I found a table staffed  by two young women handing out yo-yos and very junior-level positions. No other info about the company. No real interest in approaching older pros in the field. The kicker: amongst the products they offer is mainframe management. Laugh your asses off, experienced IT people. They don't teach mainframe coding/testing, etc. in IT programs anymore; you can't find anyone who's really good with mainframe code  under the age of 45, with rare exceptions. Most of them, gonna be unimpressed with yo-yos.

It wasn't clear to me whether the problem was lack of outreach - I know I didn't know about the convention until a few weeks ago and no one else I knew in IT knew about it either, Betsy being the one exception - or lack of interest on the part of local companies. But it did send the message that as older women in IT, we were there to "mentor," to "lean in," "to manage." Not to do better testing, more coding, learn new tech...or talk to recruiters. So more crabby.

The luncheon was nice and we had fun chatting with people. I had some problems with it when it got turned into an encounter session about the repeal of DOMA and coming out - not necessarily at work. I was hoping for more real networking, discussions on how to make your workplace better for LGBTQ people, etc., and this wasn't that forum.
After that, I had the encounter described above, then I went  on to a session on "Big Data" which seemed to rely heavily on one woman's experience of data coding healthcare information, rather than storage and analysis, which is what I needed. I gave them a half hour, then moved to a panel on staying on the tech track instead of getting shunted off into management. That turned out to focus on climbing your way further up into management. And my final panel of the day, "Velocity vs. Quality" didn't involved QA at all, focusing instead on developers rushing code out to prod and having customers beta test it. Needless to say, it did not fill me with joy, so I opted to head home.

On the whole, very mixed bag. Would I attend it again? Maybe, if someone else was paying for it. It is a new conference and it does move around the country though, so if you're thinking of going to wherever it is in 2014, you might have a very different experience. It also might have been a more balanced experience if I'd been able to go for all 4 days. In any case, if they expect experiences pros to show up and pay full price for this, they'll need to make some changes based on how this one went.