Forty Years of Coding In a Man's World

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

Self-improvement, Tech, Note, Npr, Education, Public, Wnyc, Manoush, York, To, New, Self, Radio, Business, Technology, Relationships, City, Society & Culture, Zomorodi, Newtechcity

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2017

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Silicon Valley is still a man's world. And Ellen Ullman, who started programming in 1978, thinks it's high time for the rest of us to infiltrate.

Ellen's new book, Life in Code, is full of great and awful stories. Her love of the work. The joys of hunting down a bug. But also, the client who would rub her back while she tried to fix his system. The party full of young men drinking beer, where she turned down a job offer from Larry Page. Ellen has watched tech-bro culture take over everything. Now, she says, we have to grab our angry dignity and fight back.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm not an optimistic person. If you read the book, you know I'm basically a little gloomy.
0:05.6	I'm a gloomy person. Yeah. I do have fun.
0:13.5	Ellen Alman may be gloomy, but she is also supremely cool. And if you recognize her name,
0:19.0	well, two points for you, because I was not nearly aware of the impact she has had as a pioneering
0:25.6	computer programmer who taught herself to code over 40 years ago.
0:31.4	She's also an author who has written numerous novels and critiques about the very tech industry
0:36.7	that she was working in. And I thought, gee, I've got to get out of this culture.
0:42.6	I'm a new summer outie and note to self. New problems are just reincarnations of old ones.
0:50.0	And there has been a lot of news recently about that old problem of tech culture and women.
0:58.4	The internal memo that was written by a since fired Google engineer who claimed hiring
1:02.9	women to write code was going to bring down the company. The CEO of Uber ousted after Susan
1:10.1	Fowler, an engineer there, wrote a manifesto describing just how bad the culture of sexism
1:15.6	and harassment was and tell little the company did about it.
1:20.4	Another CEO gone just last week. This time for allegations of sexual misconduct at the
1:25.6	lending startup SoFi, a company that has advertised here on this very podcast.
1:32.0	And out this month, a tell all memoir from the venture capitalist who sued her firm for sexism.
1:37.7	Ellen Powell. My favorite anecdote in the book is the one where a partner hands around
1:42.8	homemade cookies at the table, but he just skips over the women like they're invisible. They don't
1:48.3	exist. Anyway, lots of talk about how women get treated in the tech world today. And so we decided
1:59.4	to go to Ellen Alman for some perspective. Her new book is called Life in Code. It is a wonderful
2:05.7	compilation of essays that she's written over the years. And she chronicles what it was like to
2:11.2	be a woman in the early days of Silicon Valley. The client with pendulous earlobe who had a sweaty
	...

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