Interview No1 - with aunt Eileen (the tech savy digital nomad).
I had to cut it into three parts because the file was too big for the horse.
Part 1 - Interview_Eileen_Part_01.mp3 (14,30 mb)
Part 2 - Interview_Eileen_Part_02.mp3 (10,45 mb)
Part 3 - Interview_Eileen_Part_03.mp3 (6,17 mb)
Find the transcript below:
How long have you been working as a computer technology professional?
For about 30 years, maybe 25 years?
What was it like when you first started?
Working in the field, when I first started, there were majority male in the environment. And they were a little condescending that I would have enough skill to be able to be in that role. And I also didn't have the the degree yet. So I was still going to school at night. And I was hired, even though I had not finished my degree. So there was a frustration from my teammates, that I didn't deserve the job or shouldn't have gotten the job. And so there was a little frustration. And I had to work very, very hard to build rapport with people who would be willing to help me and spend time with me and teach me and build a reputation and and get my degree done at the same time.
Is it still like that, then men are a little bit degrading towards you, in your job or not anymore?
No, ha, because I have a long career with a proven track record of doing very well in my work. So and I'm older, and so there's an so with that comes a little bit higher title, and you get a little bit more respect when you move into new roles.
Okay, that's quite sad, but you need the degree to be respected. Escpecially as a woman.
Well, I think it says a man to give you think about it. Because if you're in a room full of a bunch of engineers, in spaces where it's dominantly, male, there's a little bit more of competitiveness of the testosterone or, or bravado, when especially if you're talking about men who are in their 20s, or 30s, I noticed that as men get older, they don't have as much of that need to prove themselves.
And so I think even without having a female in that room, there's still that bravado amongst young men to show off or to show I'm smarter than or I'm better at something than the other. And I think that just comes with a lot of the global culture around men and competitiveness. So it's kind of something that just is kind of, it's there is right?
For a female into the mix of it who Mote for the most part, aren't raised with this as much competitiveness importance than it really makes it a little more difficult for women to be in that space.
Since we're talking about genders and the quality, how, how important do you think it is that more women enter male dominated industries?
I think it's incredibly important because there are many examples of the way products are designed. If it is all men designing products, they aren't. And a lot of products are used predominantly by women. There's many examples of poor design because of that, like washing machine tubs that are so deep that an average height woman can't even reach the bottom of the washing machine tub to pull the products out.
Or a very old example is crash Car, car crash test dummies, they only used male bodies, and in those tests, and then women were getting more severely injured until they started changing the size of the crash test dummy to include women and youth. And there's all kinds of kitchen appliances and other household designs that are not built with a woman's body size or hand size in mind. So it's really important that there's more women in the, in the business in the industries and even software, look at all the gaming products.
Like if there were more young women designing gaming products, we would have more gaming programs that were interesting to women. Right now. You know, the majority of gaming is violence and sexualized females. And if you had women designing, they'd be very different. Right and more women would be participating in that space.
Yeah. How do you think can we interest more women in that space?
It's very important to start very young studies have shown that young girls will decide if they're good at math or science by the age of eight to ten years old. So it's critical that we're putting the right opportunities in front of these young girls at that young age, when we constantly put feminine oriented games and toys in front of young girls, and mechanical and engineering oriented games, and toys in front of boys, we miss the window of engaging young girls into those spaces.
And so the more that we recognize that we need to have unisex games and opportunities, and that we're making sure girls are given the opportunity to play with electronics, or learning how to code or all kinds of Android building opportunities at that young age, like really important to get it in front of them between eight and 10. And to also educate educators Because oftentimes, if you listen to women being interviewed, they'll tell you that they quit trying to be good at math or science, because their teachers told them, that's not the role of girls.
That's the boys role and the girls role, you don't need to worry about being good at math, you don't need to worry about being good at science. So we also look at the educators language, the parents language, and the and the putting the right games and tools in front of the youth so that they can get engaged and find out they are good at math and science. And this will definitely increase the amount of young girls who get interested in those spaces and become technologists.
I also think that it would be important. In Switzerland, we have something like a Career Day, where we have to learn about different jobs, I think it would also be important to market more to women.
Yes, we have in the United States, the Girl Scouts. And the Girl Scouts, once a year have a STEM career day. And at those STEM career days, they have about 40 or 50 different stations that the girls can go through. And they're all math and science related careers that the kids can talk to other young, you talk to women that are doing those jobs, or they also bring in hands on activities that the girls can touch and play with.
So I usually bring big servers, and I take the lids off the servers and I have the young girls touch and hold and learn about hard drives and memory sticks and power supply. So they can actually get familiar with how computers are built and see that they can they can learn that and it may be interesting to some of them.
Awesome. That's cool. Yeah, I wish that we had done in Switzerland.
You can do it. You just need to talk to some businesses about getting a few old servers from their data centers when they're upgrading their servers. And then learn the basics. And I can even send you the the sheet where I have built it in terminology that you can understand and easily reteach. So it's it's not as hard as it sounds.
Okay. Well, that would be actually quite interesting. Because in my apprenticeship, I had the chance to look at servers, and I even managed to open hard disks and look at everything.
Exactly. And even old old desktops, like maybe talk to a school and ask them Do they have any old desktops because those desktop computers, usually, especially if they're Dell, they're super easy to open, they just have like little green buttons that you press and you can pull the whole thing apart without any tools at all. And you can use those just as easily to teach the components of the hardware and I can send you a PDF on that, that you could use.
That would be awesome. Yeah. Um, another question is actually, again, regarding the quality. If you could change something like within a snap of your fingers, what would it be?
I think teaching emotional intelligence is really important because emotional intelligence are the scuffs, the soft skills that we bring compassion and empathy and creating safe spaces for people to be in and emotional intelligence is critical to help with leveling the playing field.
I will now move to the more technical questions. Can you share a little bit about what you currently work as and how your day to day life looks like in your job?
Sure. So right now I am working at 757 colab in Virginia, and in the US, and we provide training to technical startups, so founders who are trying to build tech businesses, and they may come in With a good idea, but they need a little bit of help. Because if you're a founder and you're building a new business, you have to wear many, many hats. So you have to learn how to be good at building product. So there's engineering requirements.
And then you have to know how to market the product, sell the product, and then hire How do I become a good HR person and hire good people? How do I use social media to the best of my abilities? What are the legal ramifications? What kind of legal documents do I need to file? How do I file a patent to protect my intellectual property? So imagine, like you, you have this brilliant idea, but you only know one thing, right? You know how to code and you can build that product. But there's all these other things that you have to learn. And so bases like ours, they're they're called accelerators.
So there's incubators and accelerators. And in the incubators, you can come in with your idea at Idea face. And the incubator starts introducing some of the basic trainings to help you turn that idea into a business. And then once you have a business that's up and running, and you've delivered prototypes, you can move into an accelerator and an accelerator helps you accelerate the business to speed up that growth and, and customer traction, and get you ready to where you can actually pitch to investors. And so I've been working in this space for several years and really enjoy it, I get to spend a lot of time with technologists who are trying to build businesses.
I just started in this role two months ago, and before that, I was doing it in Iraq. So I was living in Iraq and helping to deliver training for the technologists and startup all over the country in Iraq. So it's, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's good work.
So as I as far as I understood, you're traveling quite a lot for your job. So it's almost like you're living as a digital nomad, right?
I did. So when I took the job in Iraq, I was living in California, and the time difference was 11 hours. So if I, it was too far apart, so that means I would have to work all night and then sleep during the day. And so I wanted to get closer to the timezone of Iraq, but I wasn't going directly into Iraq, because their COVID count was very, very high. So I moved close to Iraq. So I lived in Croatia for three, three months, and work remotely like a digital nomad.
And then I moved to Turkey for a couple of months. And then I moved into a rock for nine months. And then I moved to Spain for a month and I moved to Portugal for a month. And then I and then that finished, like my 18 month commitment on that job. And then I just recently moved to Virginia. So the last few years, I have moved a lot.
But it's an interesting experience, right?
Oh, it's fabulous. I'm so glad I did it. It's it's hard. It's very, very hard. Especially if you're like changing homes every two weeks, like every one or two weeks, I would move because I wanted to see different parts of the countries that I was in. So imagine that every weekend, you're in a brand new space, and you don't speak the local language. And you need to find where's the food? Where do I get my food? And you're in a brand new home?
And you need to figure out how does the stove work? How does the washing machine work? How does this work? And everything on the devices is not an English language. So it's all in somebody else's language for all of the the dials and everything. So like every week, start over. Okay, where's the food? How do I use utensils? How do I you know, find the safe places to walk around? What are the fun things to explore in this new location?
And then how do I find a bus ticket to move to the next spot so that it's a lot of street work on top of working full time? It's a lot of extra work in sometimes it can be exhausting. And sometimes I would just add another week to where I was so I wouldn't have to you know, yeah, but it's definitely worth it. I recommend trying it.
Well, I'm thinking about actually doing something similar, in German we call it "Freiwilligenarbeit". You go somewhere and you do it for free, actually work for free in order to just do something good.
Yeah, yeah. I think any opportunity that you can find that where you can get out and explore the world. I think the more that we explore the world, better humans we become.
That's an interesting aspect. Yeah. And it actually does help you grow.
Yeah, you grow Your emotional intelligence increases your compassion, your empathy, your understanding of other cultures, your exposure to other lifestyles and food and how people do their day to day. It's really important. It really just expands who we are. And we come away from these experiences with a lot more compassion and understanding of the world instead of just our little space.
I mean, I've been traveling alone. Only one time. Yeah, that was so it was a huge amount of freedom at that moment.
Yeah. And you can start small, you don't have to just jump out of the country, right? You can just practice small and just go go camping, you know, for two or three days and try different experiences alone and see how it goes and build your courage as you go. And maybe you just take the train to another city, you know, a four hour train ride and stay at an Airbnb for two nights and come home like you can practice with small steps to get get the confidence.
Yeah, maybe I will try them. Yes. Once I get out of that education, I'm in the moment.
Right, exactly. Exactly. Get the degrees.
Ha Ha, get them while you can. So um, in terms of degrees, did you already know, from a young age that you wanted to study computer science was that you wanted to do something in tech?
No, I did not. In fact, when I was younger, I was very attracted to art and interior design, and much more an artistic path. And then it was my older sister who introduced me to technology. And she's the one that had invited me into that space and gave me my first job in technology. And then I started recognizing I really enjoy this career path and started taking the right courses so that I could finish a bachelor's in information technology.
Interesting, because I had a chat with dad about grandma. He told me, it was she who was one of the first ones in your families who worked with computers. So I thought maybe she had some influence on you as well.
Not for me directly. But I think for my older siblings, I know like for my sister and ECS, she had an influence on her. So imagine in the 70s, in our dining room, we had a large IBM punchcard computer in the dining room, and these boxes would come in with the blank punch cards, and my mom would do the programming, and then these cards would slide through the machine and they would get all the right punch holes in them.
And then they would get shipped back to the business that hired her. And they would use those punch cards and insert them to get all of digitalize all of the reporting that they were doing. And then it advanced to the next device in our dining room was it an atom computer, but not the apple atom, a different atom. And the hard drive was this big brown disk like this big around, it was huge. The hard drive fit into the top of the desk, you would screw it in and then you would screw it out. And so she would put that in and then just do data entry. So they would deliver paper reports.
And she would just do all that data entry to turn it into digital reports. And then ship these hard disks back and forth. So she would say work remote worker working from home full time in the dining room while we were going through high school and she put herself into community college in the 70s and started learning programming and really pushed herself into a very successful career doing that type of work. And you know, she was older and older female taking courses many times the only female in her class and and coming home and raising kids at the same time. Six kids no less.
Oh my gosh. I totally forgot.
Right? Imagine, right? It's just it's it's amazing. If you think about it, what was happening in the 70s and 80s. It was so early in technology. And she was right there in the middle of it.
And she was doing her best.
Exactly, exactly. Just do a little bit each day and just push yourself.
You visited courses for programming, right? Were you also one of the few females in that class or were there more?
Yes. There were more, I think, when I was taking computer programming courses, I want to think maybe 25% of them were female.
Oh, that does not sound like much.
But actually it's big, compared to generations before.
I think I remember that dad even told me that you traveled. I'm not sure where it was, but you traveled to teach women how to code. He was quite proud of you for that.
Thanks. I have traveled to probably, I don't know I don't know, 12 or 15 countries. And while in those countries, I would not just not do teach coding, but I would bring a hard drive, you know, when I was talking before about the servers. So when I travel, I just bring the motherboards. So I literally have a suitcase full of motherboards. And I would put the motherboards out on the tables and teach young kids about all the components on the motherboards to remove their fear and increase their confidence around technology.
And then I also have spent a lot of time doing presentations and workshops with university students like all over Africa, and Middle East and Central Asia, just to really encourage them to pursue technology careers and entrepreneurship careers. Because sometimes kids don't get enough exposure. So they think all engineering jobs are all STEM jobs, or just coding. Being able to explain to them, there's, you know, like 100 different jobs inside of the word stem, the acronym stem, there's easily 100 different jobs. So just introducing them to some of those other ways that they could be in a STEM career without just having to be a coder.
And I would guess that in the different countries that you went to the stereotypes about coding would have been difficult to handle?
Right, exactly. Right. And those cases, there's usually just one or two girls per class. So yeah, and it depends on the schools, like, how advanced are the schools? How much are they encouraging girls to take those courses? So I have met with a lot of leaders of the schools as well to really introduce ways and ideas for them to get more girls into the business.
And may I ask, what were some of the ideas that you came up with?
So, one is that introducing technology in ways that's not just male oriented, so think about if you're want to even let's talk about something basic, like build a house. Like if you're going to teach both boys and girls, how to build a house, look at it, not just from the construction part, but from the aesthetics part, like find ways that make it pleasing that young girls want to be involved in that. Right, and just also, look at every teaching tool that you're bringing into the classroom and make sure that it's not male oriented. Because a lot of the games or the lessons, listen to the language that's used in the lesson, look at the examples, because oftentimes, the examples are very male oriented, and girls just aren't attracted to how to how to do something that's very male oriented, I'm trying to think of a good example.
But like the games that I mean, just look at the games, they're so male oriented. And so there's ways that you can introduce change the language and change some of the tools and the examples and the games that you bring in the classrooms, to make them more gender neutral, so that more people are interested in them. And then there's also ways to ensure that children are given the opportunity to do critical thinking and problem solving and team building at a young age. So even if you're in history class, instead of just reading about the history, provide hands on activities for the kids to get in small teams and build a replica of something that was being taught in that history class. So maybe there was a major event that happened and you want to build some replica from that major event.
Most schools are just still teaching lecture memory tests, lecture memory tests, lecture memory. But if you stop in the middle of those and say now build something, get in a team and build something. We're teaching them critical thinking problem solving team building equally for boys and girls. It will really increase the confidence of both the boys and like and especially the girls But they can do these things, they can build things, they can do problem solving, they can do critical thinking, they don't have to be silent and look to the male in the room and say you do this, I don't know how to do this.
If you give them equal opportunities, you'll see something else that I noticed as well is when I bring in activities for the students won't make a won't make a team that's both male and female. Because what will happen, those females will automatically defer to the boy and let the boy have the lead.
Starting at a very young age, it's really shocking to watch, like, and if you separate them and put all boys at this table, and all girls at this table, those girls will all interact with each other, they will all try to solve the problem, they will all contribute. But if you put boys and girls at the same table, the girls will be quiet and step back and let the boys do everything and lead. It's just astounding. And I'm talking like seven, eight years old already.
Yeah, they probably learn that from their parents, right?
Exactly. And other role modeling. So it's really important to notice those things, when you're delivering new education, right? And to pay attention to that and admit that this happens, and do it set up the rooms a little bit differently so that the girls learn how to find their voice and speak up and be a contributor.
I think that's very important nowadays. Not only nowadays, but yes, very important. Because the funny thing is recently in school, we had the voting rights for women. And Switzerland was one of the last countries that gave women Wow, wow, that was like 60 years ago.
I think, wow. It's another amazing when you think about it, it's just always astonishing to me how recent, those laws changed.
It's quite scary, actually. Like, do I want to live here?
Right? And it's the same everywhere, right? If you look at all different countries, like it's not very long ago, that women got their rights in a most countries. And it's precarious. Like in the US right now. There's a lot of laws where they're trying to really push back those rights and take them away. It's a word, we don't get the opportunity to move forward, when we have to spend all of our energy fighting for what we already won. A very deliberate and it's very frustrating.
Yeah, I can imagine. And I have teachers that even say, What do women want? Why do they want more, they already have enough. And I'm like, you're taking away stuff from us that we are to have. We want that. And we want, right?
We just want to equal we want an equal playing field, we want to equal opportunities will pay an equal playing field. And it just is it's frustrating. How hard it is to get that in here and keep it?
I mean, finding a job after school was quite frustrating as well, because there was no, it was I was interested in some male dominated professions, for example, it and they were like, we can take you on in the apprenticeship. Just because you're a woman, we need a better quota in office, and that was like that did not sit right with me.
Right, right, exactly. In the US, they will do the same thing. But they won't tell you. That's why they won't admit it. They can't say that's why they're doing it. But they will. They will. And so it's just about again, it goes back to that emotional intelligence of those who are doing the hiring is the ability to look at all candidates and choose those that are best skilled for the job, regardless of the gender. And if you create that space, you will put more women into those positions, because they're just as skilled or better skilled at the job's not because who they are.
Exactly, yeah. I even had that in a female dominated profession, like design. I didn't get a design job because they wanted a man.
Oh, my gosh, how funny.
Yeah, it was. Right. It goes both ways.
It does go both ways and look at like men who want to be nurses, right. I think it's really important that they learn those skills and given the safe space to be nurses without being harassed. Right. It just it goes both ways. I think it's really important that we create safe spaces for anybody to pursue any position that they want.
I think when people talk about equality, they don't really understand that equality goes both ways. I find that quite frustrating.
We all get an opportunity, like we have to listen to how we speak, how we interact, how we react, and all of these topics. And see, are we contributing to solution? Or are we holding back our male counterparts to pursue something they're passionate about?