Programmers have always been a hot search for physique, staying up late, bald, 996, and more gold. Female programmers are one of the rarest species. Even for large companies like Alibaba, the proportion of female programmers is only around 10%. Among the 17 programmers in the Alibaba Cloud website building department, only Luling (a flower name) is a woman typing code.
As a program lady, Lu Ling squeezed into the narrow door no matter from which dimension it was viewed. At the same time, she did not have a professional background, but moved to Alibaba with her passion. And behind this is the story of her entering Dachang by overcoming insecurity.
01. The female programmer from the big factory who walked out of the small town is anxious at the age of 30, afraid that she will get nothing after her efforts
How difficult is it for a big female program to come out of a small town? Probably no less than a Harvard graduate from a city. Since Luling's high school, people in the small town kept blowing in the ears of Luling's mother, "Why do girls read so many books? You work so hard, and you are not going to get married in the end."
People in small towns like to watch other people's failed jokes, but don't like special and successful existence. Later, Lu Ling also failed many times. She always remembered the dinner on the first day of the college entrance examination. Lu Ling told her father, "I feel I didn't do well in the exam, and I didn't know the big questions later." Her father's reaction was particularly fierce and overturned. The table, the dishes and the plates are all broken. The father exclaimed, "Then don't take the exam, it's useless anyway."
Lu Ling's tears fell, and she stared blankly at her father not knowing what to do, and then there was chaos in the whole family. Mother started crying, sister started crying, and younger brother was in the corner afraid and afraid speak. Luling, who hadn't slept all night, went directly to Lizong the next day.
After finishing his grades, he almost failed the exam, and was transferred to a second normal school physics major. The family began to look forward to Lu Ling's graduation as a physics teacher. But later, this matter always lay between her and her father. "I have been weird, but now there is no way to blame him." Mom told Lu Ling and said to his father: "Sometimes he wakes up suddenly when he sleeps, and then he hammers his head, feeling that he shouldn't be that way."
They reconciled, reconciled with irrelevant and calm words. Dad said, "Hey, don't mention it, I was wrong." And Lu Ling said, "I didn't blame you, it would be nice." But no one dared to restore the details of the time without mentioning a word. It is the consensus of this family.
Luling can't blame her parents, because they are supporting her to continue studying anyway, under the pressure of tongue and financial pressure. Later, Luling had almost no contact with the town. This part of the connection was taken by her parents, who had always been a wall that blocked the malicious world.
She concentrated on studying and living on campus, followed by the postgraduate entrance examination, and once again missed the ideal college and was transferred to the physics department of a 211 college. In Luling's memory, she has not done a thing that meets her own standards, so that even in the big Ali factory, she still can't overcome her insecurities. Because hard work has no gain, hard work cannot change the environment, this is her deep-rooted subconscious perception.
In the eyes of outsiders, the front-end is easy to get started, and the back-end is even more disdainful of front-end code. Luling knows very well that front-end programmers have always been the bottom end of the programmer's contempt chain, while female front-ends are even lower. "I want to be a big front-end that understands both front-end and back-end, so I have been learning back-end code."
This is the anxiety about failure, and it is also the anxiety unique to the program. Lu Ling has already felt the pressure of 30 years old. For example, the attitude of his superiors to female programmers in the future is "There are almost no female CTOs, and it is impossible to become a management", and the team boss's transfer suggestion, "Should I become a product manager? ."
But she likes code, and she is afraid that hard work will not pay off. Because it is normal for them not to do it, and they have never had the luck to be a "minority".
02. Can I return to the code post if I have a baby?
Luling, who was born in 93 and 27 years old, said, "When will you have a baby?" The question revolves around Luling. She can clearly perceive that "Once you have a baby, you will leave the programmer industry."
Luling's sister just gave birth to her first child. Her pressure eased, and her parents no longer urged her to marry and have children as they did in graduate school. At the same time, because of what happened to her mother and sister, the family also hoped that she would have the right to reproductive freedom.
The younger sister gave birth to a girl, and the younger sister’s in-laws desperately wanted a boy. Lu Ling saw how her sister was shocked by the emotions around her, "If you dare not talk about it, you will cry." Having a girl means the darkest moment in the family.
The elders of Luling's mother even took her mother's hand on her deathbed and said: "We must give birth to a boy for our family." And his father just kept silent. In the age of family planning, under the pressure of illegality, he gave birth to two more children until his younger brother was born.
After that, Lu Ling's mother spent almost all of her time explaining, "Don't blame your mother for giving birth to a younger brother, and their powerlessness with your younger brother living in Beijing." Nowadays, women seem to be free and liberated. But in the family, there is still no ability to refuse. Women have little autonomy in childbirth, only they should. Once requested and controlled by the man’s parents, there is no way to refuse.
Fortunately, Luling met a man's family who didn't care about boys and girls. But at the age of 27, he is about to have a baby. Being able to give birth to only one does not mean not having a baby. How to go through this stage and what to do after giving birth? These are all entangled with Lu Ling, "It's really impossible. I will be a code lecturer."
Regardless of whether women or men, by the age of 35, either lead a team or transfer jobs, this is the status quo of the industry. The 35-year-old's pressure does not distinguish between men and women, but women have an extra layer of fertility and lactation.
For Luling, family is very important. When he was a child, Luling didn't have too much material lack, but was not accompanied by his parents. At the age of 5, she was forced to separate from her parents. Her parents were making money in Beijing. She was at a relative's house. The most impressive thing is when she was 6 years old: "I want to eat apples. I have to wait for everyone to sleep and sneak in to get them in the dark. "The feeling under the fence occupied all her memory at the beginning of her life.
At the same time, the premature separation from her parents also became the reason for her coming to Beijing. She likes Beijing because all the company of her parents is in Beijing. Came to Beijing, "eat ice cream, KFC, and wear beautiful clothes."
She still remembers the trampoline in Yuetan Park, which brought sunshine to her entire childhood. And Beijing has always been her spiritual home, and she can't feel the feeling of being neglected here.
Because of this lack, she eagerly hopes that her children will not have this lack of feeling in the future. How to choose career and family? Luling can only take one step at a time. For her, happiness = family + code.
In this industry, you can’t see a way forward, and you can’t be confident in looking back. It seems that my life is like a mist of ten miles, and I can only move forward steadily and try not to think too much.
03. Are women really not interested in the IT industry? Love code should not stop me
To become a female programmer nowadays, the masculine traits are already in resonance. But the so-called masculinity is nothing but a hidden emotion. corresponding. The lack and separation of Lu Ling's childhood caused Lu Ling to lose her feelings and emotions ahead of time. To protect her heart from harm, she must forcibly grow out of armor.
"Gang" and "ruthless" are labels given to her by others, nicknamed "Big Sister Big" and the stigma "Tigress". But in fact, all of this is not like a boy, but just doesn't show emotions, don't cry or make trouble. .
It seems that she is a qualified woman with masculine qualities, but in reality, the first programmer in the world is a woman, Edda Lovelace. Between 1842 and 1843, Edda spent 9 months translating the Italian mathematician Luigi Minabia's paper about Charles Babbage's computer analysis machine.
After the translation, she added a lot of notes, explaining in detail the method of calculating Bernoulli number with this machine, which is considered to be the first computer program in the world. Edda’s article created many new ideas that Babbage hadn’t even mentioned. For example Edda predicted: “This machine can be used for typesetting, arranging music, or more complex purposes in the future.”
During the Second World War, the rising tide of programmers was also dominated by women. Even computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper once said, "Programming is'like planning a dinner.' You must plan everything in advance. This way it is ready when you need it, so women are'born' when it comes to computer programming."
But why did women step by step withdraw from the stage of history? It’s not that managers of the past respect women more than they do now. They just think that computer programming is as easy as typing or filing. Therefore, women write software and programming.
But with the rapid advancement of the computer revolution, the difficulty of software development has gradually been widely recognized. A major event led to this incident. Some media reported that the Mariner 1 Venus probe was destroyed due to its departure from its course. Although it is difficult to have evidence that the mistake is directly related to programming, similar stories reinforce this perception. Programming is so error-prone, you must hire the most skilled programmers to do the job better.
But the problem is that no business owner can really understand what kind of skills this new industry needs. They just panic about the "mistakes" and know that they need to recruit good programmers. Therefore, from the 1970s, the recruitment test of manufacturers such as IBM and System Development Corporation (SDC) became the qualitative beginning of this industry.
These benchmarking companies use ability tests and psychological characteristics to identify programmers, but most of these tests emphasize mathematical skills (although there is little evidence that these skills are important in data processing). In terms of psychological analysis, a group of slightly paradoxical studies found that programmers, regardless of whether they are male or female, show the trait of "not interested in people".
Brenda Frank, a scholar of race and gender at Stanford University, explained to people how this type of test leads to sexism, so that "computer men" successfully replaced "computer girls": "Men recognize that this industry can The huge benefits it brought them, they wanted to separate this job from the'female job', so they established professional associations to prevent hiring women. Advertising began to associate female employees with errors and inefficiencies. They Set up math puzzles for recruitment, let men who have taken math classes take advantage of them, and set up a personality test aimed at finding ideal programmers."
And women, in this new normal environment, are gradually regarded as special cases or marginal existences, from the initial central role of the IT industry, step by step withdraw from the stage of history.
For Lu Ling, who entered the programmer industry, "I just didn't like physics, and then I liked typing code." When studying physics, "the teacher said that I asked me questions, but I can't ask them." When doing experiments, there was nothing. No sense of accomplishment. What is a positron? What is the plasma state? Theoretical simulation research is also needed to calculate the distribution of particles that can be produced by the interaction between the strong laser and the target through the particle transport program, and then calculate whether this curve is what you expected. In short, no fun.
But the code makes Luling find a point of excitement. Every time he learns a new language, Luling will eagerly share it with her boyfriend, "Do you know? This can be achieved in this way." The most talked about every day is that this code is really interesting, that is really interesting. It's fun, and it can be achieved like this. He even went so far as to eat with friends and talk about the page logic and design of the menu.
But there is no work experience upon graduation, Dachang can only be a dream. Relying on the website DEMO I wrote, I interviewed a technology company and was responsible for the front-end of the company's website. When asked "Carousel diagram, how is this achieved?" Luling easily talked about native js. And what better way to achieve, "JQuery, BootStrap, Swiper, can be more simplified."
This is something that Luling likes very much when studying, find a reasonable and quick way to achieve it. While doing simple website maintenance, Luling learned Vue and front-end logic by himself. From maintaining a small front end of the website, to the Aliyun website building team, acting as the front end of the SAAS network website building tool.
At present, Luling has done a complex one-click domain name resolution function, and has recently continued to learn the back-end code, nodejs. Today, Luling still feels that his code ability is weak and he is still working hard. In a group of male colleagues, everyone was joking with each other. After writing a BUG, they would ridicule: "Are you writing a BUG?" In the group of Alibaba Cloud, Luling received a recognition that "you do After the self-test, I'm relieved."
The problems of working overtime are also good for Luling. "When you are on duty, you may have to stay up late. If the test is early, 11 or 12 o'clock, the problem may be 1 or 2 o'clock. If there are front-end problems, change the front-end, if not, you can basically withdraw."
But right now, there are many problems, and the interactive experience is getting more and more complicated. The SAAS project itself is also relatively complicated, and the integration of multiple projects makes data storage and recall difficult. In addition, browser compatibility issues and mobile phone models are extremely difficult to deal with. If it is overtime, it is because of the urgent need for functional iteration of Sumei and cloud enterprises, rather than a code-level problem.
But like control forms and mouse hover effects, the front end must be well controlled from the code level. As Lu Ling said, she believes that "front-end is an art, not mechanical code. It requires you to have the ability to substitute, think about the scene from the user's corner and then debug. The product is only the foundation, and the user is the core."
As for the front-end logic of the current Alibaba Cloud website, Luling feels that he still can't figure it out and can only use the logic encapsulated by the team leader. In short, "The road is hindered and long. Only by continuous learning can you be safe."
04. Should women enter the male'industry' more? Love knows no boundaries
From the development history of programmers, programmers have their own characteristics of girls, which completely rationalizes Alibaba's claim to train 1 million female programmers last year.
But some people say that only the more women entering the IT industry can break the prejudice. But in fact, Lu Ling doesn't care about prejudice or prejudice, because for her, she is already in this industry.
And working around a group of men, although there will be a little embarrassment when coming to the aunt, "I will secretly take the aunt's towel, and I can't hold it in my hand to the toilet particularly calmly." But I will calmly say to my colleagues " Don’t mess with me these days."
Today, Luling is still working on the AI smart site construction project, relying on the interface data returned from the Dharma Academy to work hard to be the front end of this system. No more money, and working overtime is fine. Occasionally, her boyfriend will cook a table full of food for Luling when he is free. Although I am afraid of getting fat, I still enjoy food and life is still good for Luling.
Regarding whether the effort can be rewarded. Lu Ling relied on his love for Wu Xin and saw how her efforts were rewarded in this world and confirmed: "Efforts will be rewarded." After all, she is already the one who entered the narrow door.
After listening to Lu Ling’s experience, one can reflect on the fact that personal efforts that are not worth mentioning in the fate of the times have already promoted changes in this era. It is not the people on the cusp that change the tide, but every individual who, like a deer bell, has focused on the path under his feet and tried his best to reach the position he loves.
The picture comes from the Internet, and the infringement is deleted
I hope that today’s sharing will be helpful to your career. If you have questions about cloud computing and website building, you can privately trust me. I am Bei Ke, a master's degree in CS (Computer Science) from Cornell University, and a serial entrepreneur. I am currently working in the Alibaba Cloud website construction technology research and development team as a senior algorithm engineer and incubating AI intelligent website construction tools. Welcome to follow.