job description

Typically, I evaluate what hardware and software is needed to complete a task. The customer that I'm assigned to full-time today has full computer systems that include hardware and software. They'll have machines that run Windows, Unix [a computer operating system like Windows] machines of various flavors, and mainframes. All of these components are connected by a network, and they'll have software running on them to complete a task. These machines actually have to work together to complete that task, which means there has to be sufficient hardware on them to run at full volume. That isn't always as obvious as it could be. So I help them to say, "We need to add this into our environment [system that the new programs are running on or hardware is operating in], replace pieces of our environment, take some pieces out like a surgeon and replace it with newer or better technology and then retrofit THAT into some of these systems you need to make work with this newer piece." They'll say that the pieces of hardware or software work together, but then you'll find out they don't in exactly the way you hope that they did. Happens all the time.

Yes. One of the things I do for my company is create innovative solutions that might not exist yet in a software/hardware combination. In my position, I know a lot about technology that may not yet be productized or is available in research, and I match that up to a customer problem. Or, I may find a really close match in something that I think we could offer to customers like mine on a wider basis. Then I go about trying to convince company executives to fund that work, develop a prototype, and think about creating it as a product.

I work in teams. What we do is described as a T model. The top of the T is very wide, which means you have skills in a broad spectrum. The vertical piece of the T is deep, and signifies the fields in which you are a recognized leader. For me, that's database performance and capacity planning. It's impossible in the T model to cover every particular topic. Nowadays, people are so specialized in certain things and technology is moving so fast, that to stay up on technology in any particular field is a chore in itself. To keep up with technology in all these different fields is very difficult. So you'll find that people, even in something as clean-cut as a database, are database administrators, systems administrators for databases, data architects, people who do the SQL [a database computer language] to pull the data out of a database - there are four jobs that center around one database.

education & career path

When I went to school, they were offering computer science degrees in some colleges, but not the one that I attended. I was a math and econ double major, and I got a job in the Federal Reserve board after I graduated. That job in the Federal Reserve board actually required me to maintain some data analysis programs, because I was a research assistant to an economist. I realized that I was having much more fun maintaining the data analysis programs than I was in the rest of my job, so I decided to try to move over to the data programming side of the Federal Reserve board. That's when I went back to school to take some computer courses. At that time, we were just making the transition from punch cards to electronic terminals. I was required to go and get training, so I had to take structured programming courses, Assembler [very basic programming language] courses, and flow-diagram courses at a community college.

Since I started out programming in the Federal Reserve and then the bank, I got hired in the middle of my career. When my career began in 1989, I had spent two years doing non-computer related things. So I had about 12 years of computer background in the programming field. I programmed for about six years, then moved into database administration for another four years and worked in systems administration for about two years. Then I started with my current company.

In my career, I've been a coder, a systems administrator, a database administrator, and a capacity planner. My first job in IBM was actually with people who write books about their software and new versions of software to describe the relevant technical features for your company or job, and explain how to use them. Then, I went around the world and taught that new course to instructors in different countries. So what that did was forced me into a position where I had to get more comfortable with standing up in front of huge groups of people, which I think is a huge development milestone.

my day

There's no such thing as a typical day, but as far as that goes I'll recount one from recently. I get up at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., depending on whether I have an early meeting. I log onto our corporate network from home while I'm getting ready. The first thing I do is go downstairs and make coffee, and while I'm making coffee I check and see if I have any messages. I write out a reply if I need to, and if I'm having a meeting early in the morning, I'll make sure we're synced up on logistics. All of this happens via wireless technology, either on my PC before I go to work, or on my Blackberry on my way in to work. I read the newspaper and try not to do anything work-related on the train, although I will check my email messages from my Blackberry on the way to the city.

I get into Penn Station and take a subway over to my client's offices or to one of our corporate offices, but typically I go to the customer's site if I can, and then I start making phone calls. I spend a LOT of time on the phone, either with customers who might be in Chicago, Dallas, Boston, or Wilmington, Delaware or here in New York, or with colleagues. The ratio of customer meetings to company meetings is probably 1:3. We like to make sure the whole team is involved in our projects.

I eat breakfast while I'm dialing into a phone call. Then, I'm on the phone and getting ready for meetings. I'll leave my PC and belongings where they are, go for a meeting with the customer as I just described, come back from that meeting, make more phone calls, do more cajoling of people to do what I want them to do (both customers and colleagues) and typically eat lunch at my desk. I'll run out, grab something to eat, eat while I'm reading my mail and answering mail, and getting ready for the next phone call.

salary & lifestyle

In the Federal Reserve, the first job I had, I made $11,000 a year. But that was 1976. In today's market, that would be something like $33,000 a year. I think that people in computer science majors would get a job for easily $55,000 a year doing pretty much whatever they wanted to do. Today, I make a six-figure income.

When I went to the Federal Reserve and I was working in the capital markets section for an economist, they told me to go back to graduate school and get some courses that I'd never taken about economic theory. I went ahead and did that, and it really took a lot of time. I had just gotten married and I was trying to do everything: the washing, the cooking, the grocery shopping, the ironing (we did ironing back then), and all of the housework, and I was going to graduate school and working full time. So one day my husband, Rennie, said , "You don't have time for me." And I told him that I didn't have time for him because I was doing all these other things, so he stood up and said "Then I should take over half of it". So he started doing things around the house to free up more time for us to spend together. Without his full support, I wouldn't be where I am today.

We were living in Seattle. The bank that I was working for was acquired by another bank. It became very obvious that we were the smaller of the two banks, and prevailing wisdom said that the group I worked for would be absorbed by the acquiring bank. And I really wasn't interested in waiting until the last minute to see how things worked out, so I made the jump over to an aeronautical corporation. So then I was given an offer by my current company, but in the job was in California, which meant that we would have to pick up our family and move south. Rennie was working full-time in the mortgage business, running a computer lab. When I got this job offer down in California, we talked about it, and he said, "It seems to be something you really want to do, but I don't know what kind of job I can get or when I can get it, so if we do this, you become the primary breadwinner." And it seemed like such a logical thing to do, because the corporate computer industry is much more lucrative than teaching or even operating a computer department, as he pointed out. So that's what we did.

pros, cons & trends

I don't get bored. I've had jobs that were incredibly boring, like the one in the Federal Reserve where I was gathering up lots and lots of statistical information. If someone asked you to go and pick up all of the hourly numbers from the Dow Jones index from 1920 to present and type it all into a system, you can see how much fun that would be. Once you have a job or two like that, you never want to have another one again.

I would say that there are just as many women programming today as there are men. But, as you move up the career ladder in non-managerial positions, you find fewer and fewer women, so there still is a glass ceiling to some extent. That's a big concern that large companies like ours have today. There's a big emphasis on trying to recruit women. They find that many women drop out of science or technical areas around 7th and 8th grade, when they start to really notice boys and they assume for some reason that boys aren't into really smart girls, especially in a competitive environment. Either the girls themselves don't enjoy the competition, or they may decide that boys don't pay attention to them in a competitive environment. So, they lean towards social environments where boys see them as girls rather than competition or colleagues.

Computer programming is the least secure from a globalization point of view. It's really affected this industry. Say a company could hire a really good programmer for $50,000-$60,000 a year in the United States, and they can a part-time employee of the same caliber for $20 an hour in India. They don't have to pay for that person in India to have a desk, a computer, and a network, and they don't have to pay them health insurance or any other kind of benefits. It's much more economical for a big company to outsource pieces of their day-to-day activities that are important, but don't require the highest level of skill and don't deal with very sensitive issues like security or intellectual property. That's pretty much changing the dynamics of the marketplace. So those are exactly the kinds of jobs that are being taken overseas. In general, companies take that information and outsource first to India, China, Vietnam, or Brazil. That's where the industry term BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] comes in, because that's where most of the outsourcing happens these days. Help desk jobs typically go closer to U.S. time zones in locations like Manila, Mexico or Brazil. After the outsourcing of lower-level jobs is successful, companies can evaluate what other jobs might be eligible for outsourcing. Maintenance of programs typically goes next. We've been testing overseas for years, and they've probably been doing the maintenance of programs for the last few years and now they're actually considering moving development of new programs overseas.

advice

I'd say to anybody, go do what you love to do. In today's world, with fewer and fewer companies giving pensions and health insurance to their people, you can't depend on a company to take care of you. It's important to find a job that you really, really love. And all jobs are going to change. Anyone in today's world that doesn't like change or can't easily adapt is going to have a hard time doing any job for very long.

I think it's very difficult to get into computer science jobs unless you have a computer science background, because there's just too much competition. When I came into it, computer science was a new field. People were just starting to offer courses in it, so none of the people I knew were actually trained for computer science. But today, people in every nation are being trained in computer science, so you have a completely different group of people you're competing against for those entry level jobs and I think it's absolutely mandatory that you have the right educational background to remain competitive.

I would say there are a lot of opportunities to do outside work in this field. The more outside opportunities you have to get real experience, the better off you're going to be. So make sure that you look for those opportunities, aggressively go after them, and take them. Practical experience is how you differentiate yourself in a highly competitive world.

Moving up the food chain is all about good oral and written communication skills, about having good ideas and taking risks. You have to take those risks in a manner that allows you to show real business results. All of that is related to maturity level; it's not just education. It's having the right set of opportunities so that you can build up your foundation, and so that you can have that kind of 'T-model' I described, and use that to boost you into something that you really want to do.

Find a mentor. Better yet, find multiple mentors. I think the biggest mistake that people make is thinking that mentors are there to basically pull them up. That's completely untrue and inaccurate. Mentors are there for you to ask questions, to determine what kinds of opportunities are out there and to assist in networking. As far as the real action, the risk-taking, it's up to you to drive your own career, because nobody's going to do it for you.