Thoughts About PyCon

I spent the last week and a half at PyCon. I have a lot of things to say about it - too many, really, to form a coherent narrative. So here are some scattered thoughts.

The conference itself was excellent, although more than a few of the talks went over my head. Thankfully PyCon puts all their videos online, so I’ll be able to re-watch at my own speed, looking up references and concepts I don’t understand. My favorite talk, Awesome Big Data Algorithms, is for some reason not there, but you can find it on the speaker’s website. While you’re there check out Software Carpentry, an organization the speaker helps run, which teaches programming skills to scientists. There’s a bootcamp in Boston coming up in a few months.

After the conference I sprinted with the Center for Open Science. I didn’t get very much accomplished, since I was also helping out with the OpenHatch sprint and since I spent a lot of time dealing with hardware issues. (Guess what? I’ve got a new computer!) But I was able to test out a few javascript frameworks for the site, and I wrote some demos showing the functionality of my favorite one. And now when someone asks me, “What did you do at PyCon?” I can answer, “Learned how to program in Javascript!”

Skipping back to Sunday, which had a job fair in the morning. At the encouragement of some friends, I decided to go to each of the booths and ask if they offered part time positions (the only type of position I’m currently interested in.) All but one company said they didn’t. The exception was a small, new start up that shrugged and said they’d never considered it. There were a variety of different reasons cited: the cost of health benefits; difficulty evaluating programmers’ work; company loyalty; company culture; difficulty maintaining good communication between part timers and their full-time coworkers and managers.

I had a long conversation with a representative from Twitter about how many of those reasons are valid and inherent and inescapable - and how many could be handled by good management. The representative - also a manager - said I’d given him a lot to think about, which was maybe bull, but he seemed sincere. On the flip side, one not-to-be-named company admitted that they were looking for people to work time and a half - not half time. Which is so frustrating to hear. I’d love to work as a developer but not at the price of the volunteer work and side projects that are so meaningful to me. Not to mention how difficult it would be to have a family. The casual expectation of time and a half (a friend referred to his 50-hour work week as “light”) can’t be helping to retain women developers - or male developers who want to buck the national trend and do more than half the amount of housework that women do.

And, speaking of sexism in the tech industry - and oh! How sad is it that I can segue with “speaking of sexism in the tech industry”…

I can’t post about PyCon and not say that I’m pretty furious on behalf of Adria Richards. I’m not mad at the PyCon organizers, who I think handled the situation pretty well, or at the original jokers. Their comments were tame and the response of the person who was fired was more empathetic and reasonable than I expected. No, I’m furious at the many members of the tech community who have decided to throw sexist and racist insults Adria’s way, including rape and death threats. Those are the people who deserve to have been fired - not Adria. The next time somebody asks, “Where are all the women in tech?” I hope they’ll at least consider the possible answers: “Fired for speaking out about an uncomfortable situation” or “Being told they should get raped on Hacker News and Facebook.”