32wattle_park

Hi Michael, as a tech person, I'm not articulate enough to sell my ideas (and I have lots of them :)) or explain problems that need to be solved. Does YC sees that articulate founders (speech & presentation/looks) is a pre-requisite? Looking back at recent YC allumni, there have been 'easy' problems solutions (eg, tea bot, uber condom, smart mattress etc). I have a feeling that it was not easy for Mark Z to explain what Facebook all about. I understand that founders need to be able to sell ideas to VC. How can YC help companies with not-so-articulate founders? Thank you.

omg, remind me of uni days... I liked turbo pascal.

Hi, I was a female engineer many moons ago. I stopped doing CS related for a while but now am back in the industry. Here are my answers: 1. Short answer no. CS industry has grown very fast, faster than the human to catch up. In the early day, lots of companies employee anyone with any tech skills (no matter how little experiences they have) just to keep up with the growth. So in the beginning, someone (usually men) who worked as a field tech (eg. putting cables in someone's home) could land a job in the CS with higher salary. Where women tend to enter CS after they graduated from universities. These men used to work with other men and not used to work with women. So they created a very tough environment for women to enter. I had good experiences with younger co-workers who also graduated from universities. We could talk the same lingo and had civilised discussion. But the older men were harder to work with, they had different work ethics too. For them it was a politic games, not getting the job done. I also find that workers from India are gender bias. There are few Australian companies that have Indian managers or even higher, and there are no female tech engineers in their teams. 2. Based on my experiences, the older ones (in the 90s) were hired because for their gender. The yonger male co-workers who graduated from universities had more opportunities to get better pay, better projects (more interesting and technical), more training. These might answer why Australia is still behind in the tech world. Australia has not capitalized on the other 50% of the population. Australian companies would rather hire someone from overseas (places like India) than an Australian female CS graduate. The foreign workers may be cheaper and could fill the positions faster, but they are not necessarily better at doing the job. I believe Australia's universities have higher quality CS education than India's universities. 3. No, I never felt uncomfortable being the only female. My explanation would be that she came from different culture.

Hi, I got my CS degree from a university in Australia back in the early 90s. It was hard to find a job after I graduated, lots of companies prefer guys to work for them. So I had to start from a very bottom position, data entry. After a year, I managed to find a position as a junior programmer. I had the lowest salary in the team. I liked technical challenges, but hardly got any because all the interesting projects went to the male (junior mostly) programmers. Younger male programmers were more ambitious, in terms of getting somewhere. So they didn't stay in the company for long. One day, we received a job for a big government project (multi millions dollars) and there was only me, the manager and the project manager left. So I was sent to do the project with no prior experience or knowledge for this particular software. Long story short, I managed to complete the project, by myself within the time frame. I built the hardware (cards, screws, motherboard etc) by myself, installed, configured and programmed the whole thing. During the project, I was never invited to a technical meeting. I believed I was the first female in Australia to build this particular system.

Then I moved to another job, with higher salary. It was hell. The bullying was obvious, even in front of the customer. It was very stressful time for me. Then I got pregnant. After 3 months, I notified my manager that I was pregnant. I was made redundant few weeks later.

The whole experiences were very stressful for me. It was a brutal environment. IT industry is not kind to female staff. I did not enjoy sitting and coding for hours/days/weeks. I enjoyed building the hardware, writing code to make it work etc. The commitment to long hours also discouraging. I know a few female around my age that have CS degree and were doing IT stuff but gave it up because the environment were too toxic. Most of them gave it up after having kids or switch to other non technical job. Having lots of overseas workers coming to do the job also bringing in a different set of culture into the tech world. They provide cheap labour, but it does not mean they solve the problem of gender diversity in the long run. In fact they might contribute to the current problem. What I can see, employee would hire foreign workers (graduated in foreign countries) first instead of giving Australian female graduates the position. my2c.