On the off-chance that you Mac users haven’t yet purchased Fusion (what’s keeping you?!), we’re offering a Macworld special. Through Saturday, there’s a 20% discount on Fusion. Through March 15, there’s a $30 rebate. Combine the two by Saturday, and the final price for Fusion is $33.99.
Monthly Archives: January 2011
software engineering for women
I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer. All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes!
I had been programming for years. My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.1 My parents didn’t make any comments about girls and computers, and they always encouraged me to do whatever I could. I didn’t run into condescension until I took my first real CS course in high school. At that point, I could program circles around most of my classmates, so I didn’t let it bother me.
When college time came around, like Hsu, I didn’t consider CS. I was planning on a dual major in biology and English, both classes in which I’d done well in high school. I took a CS course during my freshman year to fulfill a requirement, and I was taking the standard Calculus course for the same reason. Hsu says this about changing majors:
It was a sort of revelation for me–I was pretty good at most subjects, but here was the thing I could stand to work on (and enjoy) for 10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night.
My biology homework didn’t keep me up at night, and my English homework certainly didn’t, but my CS homework did. I had the same thing happen to me later during my CS degree. I was enjoying my math classes, and was well on my way to a math minor. But then the head of the department collared me in the hallway one day and asked why I wasn’t majoring in math. He dragged me back to his office and showed me that it would only take an extra semester for me to get the second degree. I did it, and I loved every second of those courses.
Hsu also points out how bloody condescending some men, who are our fellow geeks, can be. Knowing the deep innards of *nix isn’t appealing to me. I can still bash together2 some sed and awk, but it doesn’t excite me. Software engineering is exciting to me because there are hard problems to solve, and I can solve them through logic. Knowing the fine details of a given language (or OS, or vi, or whatever else a given geek want to rathole on) doesn’t make you a better software engineer than I am. It’s a big field, and there’s plenty of room for both a type of deep love for C hacking as there is for my particular software engineering skillset.
Sadly, as you might expect, the comments thread on Hsu’s blog post is rather obnoxious, and just as condescending as Hsu was pointing out from some of her CS counterparts. It starts off with someone who is spouting some nonsense about what evolution “proves”, having no idea that this theory has long since been debunked.
Hsu’s anecdotes about being a woman in software engineering, and my own experiences, match up neatly with much of the research that’s been done about the gender disparity across engineering and mathematics. The most recent report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, “demonstrates the effects of societal beliefs and the learning environment on girls’ achievements and interest in science and math”3. Relatedly, xkcd has a great comic about how it works.
Oh, and a note to my parents: Thanks for getting that TS1000, and for giving me the right environment so that I could get where I am today.
- I wrote a longer post about this on my old MSDN blog: Q&A: How did you get into software? ↩
- Pun intended. Sorry. ↩
- The report is 84 pages, so settle in for a long read. ↩
when you’re anonymous and when you’re not
I noticed a piece on CNN about tracking down my online haters. Jeff Pearlman, the author of this piece and a writer for Sports Illustrated, decided to go meet a couple of the people who slung insults at him.
Pearlman acknowledges that “insults come with the turf”. He says that this happens when you write about sports for a living. It’s just as true for those of us in technology, and I daresay that it’s not just sportswriters and geeks who have experienced this. A friend who is a pediatrician once shared with me some of the comments that he deletes from his blog, and they’re no nicer than the ones that I’ve deleted from mine.
Pearlman quotes another sportswriter, a New York Times columnist, who says this:
People believe no one’s listening; they think we’re not people, they think there are these giant monoliths controlling thought. Then when they realize someone is listening, they rediscover their manners.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced this. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been told that I should be sexually assaulted, I’ve been told that I have no ethics. And then the person behind the comments meets me in person, and suddenly they realise that I’m actually human too. And, of course, this happens towards companies as well. How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of, “everyone who works at [somewhere] is an idiot”?
One of my favourite experiences at Macworld Expo came while working in the Microsoft booth. Rick Schaut, who is one of the nicest and smartest guys on Earth, was working in the booth that day too. Someone came into the booth with a bone to pick about Word:Mac. The guy swore and said that we’re all “jack-booted morons”. Rick sat down with him, let the guy vent for a couple of minutes, and then walked him through all of the technical decisions that led to the thing that the guy didn’t like. The conversation lasted for about a half-hour. At the end, the guy apologised for what he said, and said that while he didn’t like the outcome, he understood how we got there.
I think that the reasons behind the insults are twofold. The first is, as the NYT columnist notes above, conveniently forgetting that there’s other people in this world too. The second is an assumption that there must be sinister motives behind something that you don’t like. When you hide behind a keyboard and a veil of anonymity, it’s easier to spew vitriol that you would never say face-to-face.
the early days of VMware
I’ve been looking for more information, both internal and external, about VMware the company. Today, I came across a post from an early VMware employee about what it’s like working as an engineer at VMware. The post explains some of what I’ve observed here. It’s on Quora, a place where I didn’t expect to find such information, and certainly not with footnotes!
I especially like that I’m seeing a lot of very forward-thinking work happening, explained here as a “willingness to tackle research problems”. VMware seems willing to try things out and let the chips fall where they may. I’m starting research on one of these areas soon. And while I’m only a few weeks in, I see the people around me working reasonable hours, which is a significant (and significantly positive) change from what I’d become used to.
While I’m sure that things have changed since the author of this post left the company, my observations say that several things have stayed the same.
Q&A: moving from software engineering to user experience
Via email, I received the following question:
I am interested to know how you made the transition from being a software engineer to UX researcher?
My background is a technical one. I have a BS in mathematics and another in computer science. I’ve been a developer, including some VAX assembler. I’m reasonably comfortable in Xcode, even though I don’t really code these days.
I don’t think that moving from a development role to a user experience role is a difficult change to make. As with any kind of job hunting, it’s about finding the right team that will value the skillset that you have. Not all teams will find such a background useful, but there are many that will. I think that there are several unique skills that someone who is currently a developer can bring to the table.
Technical skills are quite useful when you’re considering the user experience and brainstorming potential solutions to issues. Your potential solutions will consider what’s possible and thus have an increased probability of having an impact on the product.
Having technical skills and user experience skills can help bridge a communication gap. UX professionals sometimes don’t have a technical background, and developers sometimes don’t have a UX background. Being able to speak both languages is a positive asset. I’ve seen several cases where the UX team and the development team were both talking about the same thing, but getting frustrated with each other because they didn’t realise they were doing so.
There are a lot of UX problems to be solved on applications that are complex and deeply technical. They might not be as sexy as working on the new social media hotness1, but they do have an impact on a lot of people and a lot of multi-billion-dollar corporations. In my opinion, technical skills help in getting up-to-speed on deeply technical applications. For example, I worked on DB2. Understanding databases and knowing SQL helped me immeasurably in that position, and meant that I could hit the ground running.
Another potential positive aspect of being a developer is having experience in shipping applications and continuing to support them after their release. Understanding the software development lifecycle from deep in the trenches means that you have a great understanding of when various types of research will have the greatest impact on the application. This helps you formulate the right research plan to answer the right questions at the right time. A development background isn’t the only way to reach this understanding, but it’s a great way to get there.
It goes without saying that having development skills isn’t sufficient to move to a UX position. You need to be familiar with UX methodologies, and ideally you would have examples of applying such methodologies in your development work. You also need to display excellent communications skills, since so much of UX isn’t so much about applying the right methodologies as it is about communicating with the application teams and influencing them to make changes based on your research and recommendations.
As a developer, you can set yourself apart from the competition if you can show product impact, and discuss how your unique skillset of both CS+UX helped you have a significant impact on your product. Changing roles within the software industry happens frequently; I think it’s to be expected that people in many disciplines within software engineering will want to try out new things. As I was thinking about this question, I came across an article about moving from engineering to product management; a fair amount of the advice in there is applicable to a move from engineering to UX too.
In other words, if you want to make a change, get out there and find the right position for you. I don’t think that finding the right position in this case is any harder than finding the right position for anyone who is looking for a software engineering position that is outside the norm. After all, there are many more web developer jobs than there are UX jobs. You’ll also find that, within UX, there are more design jobs than researcher jobs. It’s rewarding once you find the right job, but getting there can be frustrating and time-consuming.
the silent installation of Growl
I know plenty of other Mac geeks love Growl, but I’ve never liked it. To be more accurate, I dislike any kind of notification system; it’s just that Growl is the most visible example of it. I find notifications to be disruptive. I don’t mind an Adium window appearing when I get a new instant message. Beyond that, though, I prefer not to be interrupted from whatever I’m doing. This isn’t to say that other people shouldn’t like Growl. Everyone works differently. If it works for you, I’m perfectly happy for you. It’s just not welcome on my Macs.
Today, Macworld published an article about the mystery of spontaneously installed Growl. This is one of the things that drives me crazy: other applications which install Growl without notifying me. Adium gives me the option of installing it (and I thank them for that option), but Adobe CS5 doesn’t. This is an especially frustrating user experience, given that I did a custom installation of CS5 and so have an expectation that it shouldn’t install anything other than what I selected during that custom installation.
I really appreciate that one of the developers for Growl said this in their interview with Macworld:
We hate it when people install software—any software, including ours—on other people’s systems without permission.
That’s pretty classy. An official comment from Growl is a great thing, even though Growl has no way to enforce it. It’s something that I hope that software developers take to heart. If your software is going to install something else that’s not advertised as part of your software on my system, then you’ve got to both tell me about it and let me opt out of it.
disconnect
One of the strange things about doing user experience work on software is that there’s often a considerable lead time. The disconnect felt odd when I was working at Microsoft and I had finished my work on Office:Mac and had moved on to future releases long before the new version actually hit store shelves. And, of course, I knew intellectually that it would happen when I left Microsoft to join VMware. I knew what I was working on, and I knew all of release plans at that time, so I knew that my work wouldn’t see the light of day for some time. Even so, knowing that it would happen doesn’t make the disconnect feel strange when there’s no-one around to share the joy.
book review – “Bit Literacy”
As someone who is a geek, and as someone who has done extensive research into how people manage their time (with a focus on how various electronic devices fit into their time management practices), it’s fair to assume that I’m not the target audience for this book. But I’d heard good things about Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst, and I got a free copy somewhere, so I figured I’d give it a go. What a mistake.
Bit Literacy is a self-help book, and it feels like it. It spends the first few chapters trying to convince you that you have a problem and that only this self-help book can solve it. With some minor search-and-replace, I bet I could take any Dr Phil book and turn those first few chapters into the first few chapters here. The tone for the rest of the book is just as preachy, and just as arrogant.
The book is both unoriginal and misguided. The email chapter is nothing more than an overview of getting to Inbox Zero, a concept that isn’t his but the author doesn’t give credit where it’s due. The to-do list chapter is an seemingly-endless ad for the author’s website for to-do management (an issue which mars the rest of the book, although not as completely as in this chapter). The chapter on file management was so misguided as to make me laugh out loud. Likewise, the author’s statement that we should use a service like delicious.com to manage bookmarks because it’s somehow open is obviously bunk, given the Sturm und Drang associated with Yahoo!’s decision to cut support for it1.
I was surprised at the author’s pervasive anti-Microsoft stance. I’m (obviously) a Mac girl myself, and I have no skin in the Windows/Mac game at this point in my life. I haven’t used Windows in any appreciable manner in something like 15 years. But the constant digs were both needless and inaccurate. For example, there’s a cheap shot at Outlook 2007 for Windows that whinges that the help file for how to create a new to-do is too long. Sure it is, since it lists every single step, including both changing to the task list view and all of the optional steps in the process (like setting a due date and changing the reminders). Go document your own process to that level of detail and see what that looks like.
What really annoyed me was that the author obviously came to write this book with no understanding of why people manage their time the way they do. This fault firmly puts it in the camp of many self-help books: no understanding of the underlying causes, but a layman who is convinced that their arbitrary solution is actually The One True Solution. In this regard, I view Bit Literacy as being rather too similar to books that propose cabbage soup diets as weight-loss methods.
The single piece of advice that I found useful in the book was the admonishment to take lots of pictures, and then delete not just the bad ones but also the ones that are only mediocre. If you take a lot of pictures of a given event, then you’re more likely to get some really great ones. Then you keep only the really great ones. It’s hard to get over the hump of deleting good-but-not-great pictures, but he is right that there’s little need to keep them.
As someone who has extensively researched time management, I think that any given person’s solution is going to be tailored to their usage. As a result, when considering the various approaches out there, you have to consider their underlying principles and not just the methods that they use to try to implement those principles. In reading books like Getting Things Done, while some of the specific tools haven’t been useful to me, the principle has been useful. For example, I’ve got my own way of getting to Inbox Zero, and I find that concept to be essential in how I manage my digital life. I didn’t feel like Bit Literacy had an underlying principle other than “do things my way”.
As I was writing this, I half-remembered something from Hurst, years ago. It was a discussion of The Page Paradigm, in which Hurst takes a simplistic view of how websites should be designed. Peter Merholz did an excellent job of responding to this in The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst. The comments thread is a good read too, and has further discussion about where Hurst went off-track. In the comments thread, Merholz says this:
All that said, Mark’s argument ends up being flip and facile, an effort to grab attention without addressing some of the very real complexities at stake.
… which, I think, is an excellent description of this book, too.
- I am a Delicious user, but not for things that I care about. I mostly use it to keep track of recipes that I intend to try. ↩
junior user experience researcher wanted
Are you interested in a job as a UX researcher? My team is looking for a junior researcher. This is a great position for someone who has just graduated (or is just about to graduate) from a UX, HCI, or similar degree programme, or someone who has a year or two of experience. We’ve just started looking, so I don’t have a job description to link to yet.
We have some other user experience openings, including:
If you’re interested, email me with your resume, and tell me which position you’re interested in and why you’d like to join me at VMware. And, of course, you can email me if you have any questions, too.
iPhone notifications and time zones
Before I went on vacation, I cleaned up my calendar. I declined meetings organised by others that I wouldn’t be attending, and I deleted my own events that no longer applied. This was mostly to remind others that I was on vacation, but also to ensure that my iPhone calendar only had stuff relevant to my vacation on it.
I missed one event, which is my team’s weekly meeting. This led me to notice a not-entirely-unexpected display bug with the notifications on my iPhone. The event on my calendar is in my home time zone (PST, GMT-8), and I was in another time zone (AEDT; GMT+11). The event fired at the right time, adjusting for time zone.
The notification itself has an error in the display: it shows the time for the meeting as being “yesterday”. Which it kinda is: the meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 4pm, but it is Friday at 9am in the time zone that I was in. The notification system should be smart enough to tell me when the meeting is in my time zone. I’m not necessarily near my phone with the notification sounds off, so I can’t tell just by glancing at the notification when the meeting is. The notification looks like it’s firing a day after the event, but it’s actually firing at the right time.
Notifications are only useful if I know what they’re notifying me of and what action I should take. By showing “yesterday” when an event is actually occurring now, I think that I’ve missed a meeting when I haven’t.