Women in Tech a case study: My girlfriend.
They’re everywhere, we just choose not to see them.
Note: This is an elaborate love letter to my girlfriend and is largely intended to be tongue-in-cheek :)
It’s a sunny Thursday afternoon in South East London, while sitting in the kitchen doing fuck all because I’m “funemployed” my Very Geeky Girlfriend (VGGF) comes down for her lunch. She’s been working from home and has a slightly frustrated look on her face. “What’s the matter?”, I ask. “That copy-and-paste macro we made the other day didn’t work”, she replies coldly. I’m confused, no line of code I’ve ever been involved in has simply “not worked”, even if it is VBA. As anyone who has ever worked with me will tell you, I practically shit programmatic gold.
I stay composed, not showing any of the rage building inside me. “What happened?” I say. “It couldn’t find the destination worksheet when I put in its name”, she says. “Did the worksheet’s name have spaces in it?”, I had a feeling I knew what the problem was. “Yeah, but I mean they all do”, she responds in a tone suggesting she doesn’t understand the relevance of the question. “Ah, well you need to put single quotes around the name for it to work when the name has spaces in it”, I’ve started to calm down now, my gold-shitting status is still intact. “Doesn’t Excel automatically put double quotes around it though?” she quizzes. “Yeah, but Excel glitches out when there are spaces in the name so you have to put single quotes around it”. “Well that’s dumb” she concludes. “I know.”, I say trying to hide my smugness at the expense of the voiceless Excel program running upstairs on her work computer.
All is well in the world again as we carry on as normal, enjoying the sun and eating our lunch. When we’re finished, she goes back to work and I go back to doing fuck all.
What’s all this about? For that, let’s rewind a bit.
I’ve been lucky enough to be in a geeky pairing with VGGF for the last eleven years. After thousands of hours of Darwinian observation (some call it “hanging out”), today is the day I present my findings to the world: Women in Tech are everywhere but a lot of the time they don’t realise that they’re hackers and we (traditional tech community) don’t acknowledge them as such.
Before delving any deeper, I’ll first present our test subject’s stat sheet, VGGF is a fashion merchandiser, currently working in the womenswear department at a large multinational store you’ve heard of. As customary of any self-respecting geeky unit, we need some gamer representation and in our unit, she’s the gamer half. She plays Animal Crossing and Zelda on the Switch but more importantly, for this very scientific study, she plays Sims 4 on PC (I don’t play games if you’re wondering). Through these two seemingly unrelated and untechnical examples I will show that she, and millions of other women like her, are indeed hackers, in the classic sense of the word, not the Hollywood version of it.
While I’ve set this up like a magic trick, I assure you I’ve rigorously used the scientific method to verify my findings, I promise.
Work
“Morning, VGGF! I’ve just been made aware that our new Super-Fancy-Skirts(SFS) from last season didn’t reach the sales targets, could you please present a few slides explaining what happened?”, says VGGF’s manager in an ever so slightly condescending tone.
Ok, so what does that mean and what does it have to do with hacking?
To get to that, let’s first answer the question, What does a fashion merchandiser do? Simply put Merchandisers, along with buyers (depending on the size of the company these can be the same) decide what products are going to be sold, in what stores, and at what time.
This work ranges from going to runways and trade shows analysing current and upcoming trends, using historical sales data to predict future sales, dealing with factories and wholesalers to optimise product processing pipelines and delivery lead times, deciding on how much of each product to buy (there are budgets!) and much more.
A merchandiser might be responsible for whole sections of products, like womenswear, menswear or categories of products like jackets or dresses. They may be responsible for large geographic regions like MENA, EU or the US meaning they need to take into consideration geography, and weather to create custom logistics processes to ensure timely product delivery for their regions of concern.
Furthermore, merchandisers tend to work in large multidisciplinary teams. For example, VGGF’s team is made up of buyers and merchandisers, designers (fashion, not digital) and technicians who deal with the technical aspects of a garment like sizing and fit for different body types, while also conforming to sizing conventions of both the company and the geographic region of concern. Very serious stuff.
Interestingly, answering the question posed by the manager above involves a strategy that’s very similar to debugging an erroneous program or system. Firstly, VGGF has to take the question and break it down into small workable chunks, she needs to figure out each chunk on its own and then combine them back together to build a bigger picture of the situation. It’s a forensic investigation.
How many SFS’s did we buy? Was this SFS’s first run or have we had it in store before? What was the target and did it match targets for similar products we stock in my region? Did it miss its target across all of my region or was it only in set stores? Who authorized the target?
These questions allow her to build a hypothesis as to why SFS’s didn’t reach the expected targets.
Once she has all this information she can start to figure out the story the data is telling. She might see that there was a delay in sending SFS to a collection of stores at the start of the new season meaning it missed a peak shopping period (say summer) leading to its failure to reach its target. In the short term, she may recommend the reallocation SFS’s to stores in her region where they sold out, while also putting them on sale in the underperforming stores. In the longer term, she may recommend ordering the product earlier from slow/bottleneck factories to avoid similar problems from occurring again.
The interesting point here is how VGGF gets the answers to her investigative questioning. Well, if you imagine merchandising “systems” as microservices, where each factory and step in the process are a service, merchandisers have their version of observability. Emails act as tracing, sales reports act as metrics, receipts act as logs and it is all backed by an Excel “database”.
Using Excel as your database means they can run VBA or Power Query to query and clean the data, Power Pivot to create models andPower BI to visualise them. They have huge worksheets containing every single unit of product sold each day, week, month and year. Many companies also use SAP which gives access to data in a slightly more structured way.
There is a mantra of “automate, automate, automate” in the industry because analysing this kind of data manually might be feasible once but not when you have a random request coming on a morning you have five other things you need to do. I’ve seen her spend weekends and evenings fine-tuning her VBA macros so they can be more general and useful across a wider variety of scenarios. I’ve seen her creating power query rules, in its query language M, to automate generating weekly reports and emailing them to any necessary stakeholders.
It gets better, this is all on top of truly abysmal IT systems run by outsourced workers who are unresponsive at best and, dare I say, incompetent at worst. Tools are crashing all the time; while saving data, transferring data, running a transformation, generating a report, the list goes on. When you’re working on top of unreliable systems everything is done with defensiveness in mind. Everything autosaves once every few keystrokes, she knows which browsers have the lowest probability of crashing for each tool and there are various hacks written by others in documentation and in what we programmers would call runbooks.
And it’s not just her, there are thousands of women just like her, at her company, and across the industry. They spend every day automating and hacking their tools. I genuinely believe if you gave the woman in her company management over the IT systems, while they wouldn’t be able to set up the network topology required for VPN access, they could very quickly create systems that are a lot more reliable for their uses than what they currently put up with because they so uniquely understand their bottlenecks and issues.
Games
It’s midmorning on a Sunday and VGGF is on a mission to find and fix the mod that’s broken her game. Sims 4 has just had an update and there is at least one mod that has not updated gracefully which means she needs to do some debugging to figure out what’s going on. With her cat-eyed glasses on, coffee in one hand and mouse in the other, there is a stern look of concentration in her eyes. For the observer, if you want to be in the room you have to be silent because she’s got work in the morning and wants to get this out of the way as quickly as possible because it stops her from actually playing the game.
As I mentioned, VGGF is the resident gamer of our geeky pairing. Her main game of choice is Sims 4. It’s worth noting that the majority of Sims players and community is made up of people who identify as women. Sims 4 was released nearly 10 years ago and has a large modding and custom content community. Modders have created everything from more natural-looking hair-styles to realistic ovulation cycles to your dream pair of Louboutin heels.
So, how does she fix the problem? There is a meta-mod made by the community called BetterExceptions which is a debugging tool. It’s a GUI that allows you to enter the path to your mods folder and then checks if there are any version conflicts between any of your mods. The tool then spits out an HTML report with the stack trace explaining if there is a conflict and a likely candidate. In the best case, you can just remove the conflicting mod and go about your day.
What if the base game has had an update and everything breaks? In that case, the debugger tool isn’t going to be particularly useful. There is a hierarchy of mods (mods build on other mods), so if the base game receives an update and one of the base mods hasen’t been updated along with it then you’re fucked.
Luckily, there are massive Discord servers and Tumblr blogs dedicated to building mods with the game’s very active community regularly reporting bugs on different OSs, creating patches and how-to’s to get around any catastrophic breakages. The big modders, usually the base mod creators, have dedicated servers where they keep the community informed on update progress and any likely breakages. It’s no different to the FOSS community but instead of living on GitHub, it all lives on Discord and Tumblr.
Once you’ve gone through this pain, players usually learn to check for a green light from the community before updating the base game. I have seen one occasion where VGGF’s game got accidentally auto-updated. To figure out what was breaking, she made a clone of her mods folder and deleted all the mods from the main directory. She then proceeded to put each mod back in one by one running the game each time to see if and how it broke. She then reported back any bugs she found to the community, exactly how I would if a package broke my code!
Any programmer who’s been on the frontlines long enough can already see what this is: dependencies. And with dependencies comes dependency management and resolution. I always jokingly tell her, “You’re like a programmer, just doing all the shit bits“.
As someone who has never been into games, I never understood the gamer-to-techy pipeline but after watching VGGF I appreciate how the problem-solving aspects of games (both in and around the game) can be useful in programming. And that’s not to mention the hardware knowledge that comes with the territory, knowledge of graphics cards, bits rates, refresh rates, mechanical keyboards etc (all of which she has significantly more knowledge of than myself).
Results
Now we’ve fleshed that all out we can circle back to our test subjects stat sheet, VGGF works in a multidisciplinary team where her day-to-day job involves taking large abstract problems and breaking them down into smaller more manageable chunks. She then uses automation, in the form of rules or actual code, to automate any menial or repetitive tasks allowing her to solve those smaller problems. She works in an environment where people have created countless how-to’s and hacks to get around terribly unreliable systems. In her spare time, she engages with a community of hackers to make her gaming experience more enjoyable for herself and others like her. She resolves dependency conflicts, reports bugs and supports others in the community with her experience and knowledge.
If that isn’t a hacker, then I don’t know what is.
And VGGF isn’t alone. There are millions of women like her sharing our offices and playing the same games we play. I think it’s an example of the incredible creativity these women have that they manage to do so much with so little while being mostly left out in the cold. On the other hand, I think it’s an indictment on our community, as programmers, that we’ve not acknowledged these women. I often think how much more they could do if we introduced them to the FOSS community/ideals and maybe helped them build tools to make their lives easier. I dunno, I don’t have the solutions but it gets me thinking.
A few years ago, getting everyone to learn to code was all the rage but what coding meant seemed to be very narrowly defined for most people, learning to code meant you had to work in software writing using “real” programming languages. However, there are many many more people who would benefit from knowing just a little code or thinking programmatically than those who are interested in becoming “programmers”.
