My career in STEM and why Mr Groves can go and get stuffed

My career is in STEM (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths). It’s long and involved and goes back to the late 80s – think acid wash, think giant glasses, think “big hair”.

Wait, why think, when I can show?

I am not, and never have been, cool. Just saying in case this photo makes it in any way unclear.

I’ve talked about career a lot and what I am looking for and in the last few months I’m really noticing one thing that has been propelling me to a painful conclusion.

YOU CANNOT GO BACK, ONLY FORWARD.

I inevitably get to this conclusion when I’m uncertain about what to do next even though I tend to fight it – and I’ve never regretted the painful steps one takes to move forward after I’ve moved. It’s hard at the time though.

Anyway. My career in retrospect looks pretty fancy schmancy and impressive on my resume. It’s really a complete hash-up of misdirection, direction, side-steps, blockers, decisions  based on opportunity, paths of least resistance, paths of challenge, time out in denial, and periods of helpless meandering.

This is a long article, I’m warning you. Strap in.

Education

After doing the generic ‘try everything’ at high school, by the end of year 10, I knew I had two areas of interest and competence:  art and science. I chose the path where I would more likely be employable – science.  Can’t say I blame parents for ‘influencing’ me on this. After all; I’m still an artist. Just one with another career for now.

So, in year 11 I dropped art and went into STEM stream-  except in the 1980s in melbourne it was called ‘group A subjects’.  These were academic subjects where the marks went into your Anderson’s/uni entrance score.  My school did not offer computers as anything other than a ‘group B subject’ – which meant the marks did not count towards a uni degree. People like me who wanted to go to uni never took them. I never studied computers at high school. I can’t remember it being offered or anyone doing it. Computers was what you played Ultima IV on, right?

In year 11 my subjects were

• Maths A (calculus/geometry)
• Maths B (computing maths)
• Physics
• Biology
• Chemistry
• English

In year 12 I dropped Maths B and Physics and instead picked up a history subject by correspondence (a big mistake, but eh).

Maths B and Physics were taught by a man called Mr Groves. The other subjects were taught by a variety of teachers of varying competencies.

I dropped Maths B and Physics after a year of painful struggling to understand it.

I did not understand a lot of Maths A and Chem, too. Maths A I had excellent teachers in year 11 and 12, who would come over and show me where I was getting things wrong. I was pushed and taxed to try better. This is what teachers should do.

Chemistry involved stoichiometry, which baffled me for a long time, too. I finally (with help of the teacher) worked out that it was just algebra. The teacher wasn’t great (was her first year teaching) but she went to monumental effort to help me try and figure it out. In year 12 she even organised a weekend study session for people having issues.

Mr Groves year 11 Physics/Maths B classes had three girls, the rest boys. He almost totally ignored the girls. My confusion and difficulty with matrices was ignored.  I recall taking my book to him once, saying I didn’t understand and him explaining it the same way he just did, and when i didn’t get it he gave me back my book and shrugged, he waved me off and sent me back to my seat baffled. . He could not be bothered going through it with me, had no interest in helping. I was frustrated, upset, and I gave up.

He did spend a lot of time helping the boys in the class, though.

I had literally never given up on a unit of study before (and that includes band – and I was pretty shit at playing clarinet).

It didn’t occur to me until years later:

I dropped two science subjects when I was 16  years old because the teacher was a misogynist.

=====>THIS IS ONE REASON WHY GIRLS DON’T CONTINUE WITH STEM SUBJECTS AT CO ED SCHOOLS<=======

This guy who had fluffy hair (earning him a) nickname ‘sponge head’) or who stood behind the desk and sort of gyrated against it (earning him the b) nickname ‘desk fucker’ ), really fucked me up in regards to my attitude to physics and computing maths. I felt rage and helplessness at the time and that continued – despite being really good at other science subjects.

So in year 12, doing biology, english, chemistry, maths A and 18th century history, I got the marks for my preferred uni course: Bachelor of Science.

University

In first year I took chemistry, maths (calculus), biology and geography. I scraped by with a pass mark in chemistry (a provisional pass in first semester as long as i made up those marks over 50 % in second – which i did). Chemistry in uni I fundamentally hated -it was all about long pracs and titration –  but i thought I wanted to do biochemistry and it was a requisite. I liked the long biology pracs.

I failed maths semester one it was taught very differently to school. It was taught like Mr Groves taught it. A bunch of dudes who got it not really helping me who was struggling to understand. I did try, I asked, I went to the tutes, but they were pointless. I just didn’t get it and no one gave a shit. But I know at uni the onus is on the student to get the help they need – no blame there. I just didn’t understand it, and it’s the days before the internet and I had no money for tutors.

I never did maths again, picked up other subjects instead. Dropped Chem too when I found out I hated biochem and I didn’t need it for evolutionary biology.  My two majors in third year were botany and zoology. I went on to do a fourth honors year in in paleontology, graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Hons).

I never worked in science – graduating during the recession sure didn’t fucking help. I tried but all I found was nothing. And I didn’t like research enough to go on and do masters or a phd. So I was out and wondering – what now?

Career – Business Analysis life

I started my career in tech as a business analyst.  While in a customer service job that was going no-where, I got graduate certificate in professional writing (1 year part time study), which got me into financial services as a business analyst.

The work there was about 60% technical, 40% communications/analysis/delivery of project work. The technical stuff was doing markups of standard letters on the mainframe system -sort of bespoke stuff, in a language based on VB. I learned if/then, loops, go to, that sort of thing. I kind of knew it was technical but I didn’t understand it was programming, not for ages after that.

After a few years I was ready to move on. The role I was in was part of the customer services department and the jobs I wanted next were in IT. I was told by everyone concerned that I needed an IT qualification to get into IT.

I went and did a grad cert part time. Subjects were:

• Computing (which included hardware, software, unix)
• Databases – learned about relational databases and sql, served me well
• Process mapping and design – BA work, basically
• Introduction to programming, the language used was C++

The only problem I had (other than gaining a massive amount of weight as all I did for a year was work and study) was C++.

The lectures in programming were dreadful. The tutes were slighty better, we got to practice. Practice involved typing out examples and compiling them to see how they ran. If you didn’t just ‘get’ it you were stumped.
I understood it  from my work – lots of the tutes I was in, I was helping some of the other people understand the basics ofvariables, loops, if/thens, complicated logic.  I found the exacting asshole nature of the C++ language to be tedious and horrible but I coped. I could kind of understand functions – passing in arguments, boolean stuff was cool, I got it.

Then we hit arrays.

You know what an array is? An array is a matrix.

Remember that thing I didn’t understand from year 11 that Mr Deskfucker left me helpless on, 10 years earlier. Well we hit them again and at that point my brain threw up a giant blocker and went “YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T DO THIS, DON’T YOU?” I freaked out.

I passed the subject with what I did know – but I didn’t progress on any further once we hit  arrays. I kind of shut down all further information going in – not hard as it was all about ‘object oriented programming’ and I never managed to learn what an object was. I don’t think this was my fault  though – the whole class was baffled.

With this qualification I moved internally into a job as a BA for a superannuation application – small changes, bug fixes. I was doing back end stuff – lots of sqls, using vi and unix commands, bunches more technical stuff. The application was in COBOL and I got good at reading it to the point where I could pinpoint where things were going wrong, if not WHY things were going wrong. It was a good job, and it all ended when every support person was made redundant on the same day. It was the mid 2000s and we’d been outsourced to an overseas company.

I however was in a small elite group of people who knew the application well and we almost all ended up working for another financial institution as BAs. Except it became clear after a while there, I was not a BA, I was a tester.

And then I was suddenly a tester

I never meant to be a tester but I found I liked it. I’m critical and forward thinking and logical and creative. Perfect for trying to come up with new shit to break things with. I had tested as part of releases, etc, but it was pretty informal intially. I’d drawn on my days of science: you have a hypothesis, and you come up with ways to try to prove it’s robust. That worked pretty well. Testing formally was a lot of procedures and processes that I didn’t understand why the necessity and so I did a lot of lip service to the ‘documentation of scripts’ and did a lot more exploratory testing.

I tested for the super application; internally at that company I went to another team and tested banking software. The Global Financial Crisis hit and contracts were being cancelled all over the shop. I made the leap over into an industry super fund as a software tester.

I had the ability to break difficult, complex, and complicated things into simpler things, and I had the ability to see a system as a whole and consider outcomes. I agitated a lot of improvements and support. I used a lot of previous knowledge :processing, sql, reading the code (again, up to a point),etc

My role as a tester gathered all the previous roles into a bucket, shook them, and then spilled them out in various combinations. Sometimes it was pure communications, sometimes physically testing, but mostly it was working out how to do stuff and working out to cut corners on replication of this. I did a tiny bit of early automated testing with QTP – tools that were not fit for purpose and were implemented poorly by people who didn’t understand that.

I saw the rise of automation testing – saw demos of selenium, performance, etc, and thought:

“Wow. Imagine being able to do that. But I can’t code. Not for me. SHRUG”

In this time too I went on an excel course that shows how you can use programming to get better results. But one day was not enough to overcome my inability to code, and I never really got anything other than frustration out of it. 
My ideas on my inability to code was from the Mr Groves time, which fed into the C++ time.

My role in practice and continuous improvement – back to analysis

From my first job in customer service on the trains, I would put forward suggestions to managers about improvements (I recently found a copy of a letter I submitted to the roster managers  in 1997 about how to do something better – which was ignored, but shows I always did this).

Practice was about me doing a bunch of analysis on usage, reviews, coming up with ways to DO the usage and assessments for risk based testing – analysis I’d never seen done before. And then implementing changes. This is stuff that change management is all about and which I didn’t have a name for until recently. I basically did root cause analysis on ‘what do we do and why’ and worked on a bunch of initiatives to push the test team along into something a bit clearer.

Before I had a manger turn up, though, the suggestion from my temp manager was that I ‘get into automated testing’ and ‘learn selenium’. It was suggested I teach myself Java. Ok, I thought, and downloaded the selenium IDE and went through the start of a the basic java course.  Java was enough like C++ to be familiar but it seemed less like a total prick to use. I did a fair bit of playing around and getting things to work.

And then at the point i hit arrays around the same time as a manager change, who put me onto pure analysis work, so I went and did other things. I dropped the Java thankfully and I never went back.

I also did some stuff with powershell for a proof of concept. But I had to rely on the devs to write the stuff for me as I couldn’t write the code. Powershell seemed useful but also there was a structure there on how it worked that I didn’t understand and never bothered. It was coding, after all.

The CI role was where I took a bunch of work and threw it at the automation testers and got them to automate stuff. I gave them requirements. I learned BDD and feature files, cucumber. All that stuff.

What I didn’t learn because I wasn’t interested was the framework and the code. They used C#. I didn’t care – I didn’t code.

And then my role became redundant and I left.

Forwards or backwards?

My dilemma since February this year  has been this: what do I want to do next?

I did a pure BA stint, and it was fine. I mean, some stuff about the place was not fine, but the WORK was fine. I was challenged,  I pulled it off. If I keep going down that path I’d get better.
But I’m fundamentally not interested –  and I know this because of my complete lack of enthusiasm at looking at jobs and doing applications.  It’s been showing. I was offered one BA role and turned it down. I would have taken another job (it was offered to an ex workmate and I’m so happy he got that!) – in retrospect I’d have stifled there.

The problem is that doing pure BA work is going backwards for me. I’ve done it. I have already moved on once from it.

I looked at change analysis, but I just don’t have the experience to GET a job in that, despite the fact I have huge chunks of the skill set. I’m interested in product ownership, but the same deal. I’ve done a version of that role for a few months but it was unofficial and I don’t’ have the experience to land a role.

The other thing I want: I don’t want to work in corporate. I’m done. The sorts of companies I want to work in don’t hire straight BAs.

And then, a role came up that I didn’t look for, that I didn’t’ expect to want, and which I put actual effort into responding to. A spark of light came on in my brain and the spark went “THIS”. That role was as a quality analyst. And they want automation testing.

I NEED TO LEARN AUTOMATION TESTING FOR THE NEXT STEP IN MY CAREER.

To be able to switch industries and get into the sort of environment I will thrive in,  I need automation. Which means, coding.

Which, as I’ve described here, is a major fucking blocker in my life. I’ve been in denial about this for ages.

My partner recently did a career change. He threw in a microbiology PHD that was going nowhere very slowly, and taught himself Ruby with the help of a few friends; it took him over a year but he’s now working in a really good place as a software engineer. He knows what it’s like to be learning this stuff – and he’s also got a lot of years of demonstrating behind him, so he can teach really well.

And so….he has been teaching me Ruby. And I have been getting explanations of things that have always baffled me that I never understood before, in a way that I can parse them.

INCLUDING ARRAYS (matrices!)

I hit a point the other day where I started to panic give up, the same way I always have since the 80s. And he pushed me through it, pointing out I was pretty intelligent and logical in the right way and I could do this.

Oh. I guess so.

I did some mindfulness therapy on what my reactions were (panic, anxiety, and fear) – and I got back on the horse and am progressing and actually UNDERSTANDING what I’m doing.

I’m doing ruby so I can do automation testing for ruby. I will learn frameworks/structure for automation when I have context and when I can do basic coding. Rspec and Selenium are coming up. If I don’t end up getting this job I will keep going.

I went to a meetup the other day and all the people there confirmed, this is a thing you have to do to stay on in testing. I have come out of wilderness wandering and into learning and it’s going quite well. But it’s such a change – however I’m going forwards not backwards, and it’s the right step.

I have been unraveling my past and it’s been a little traumatic ; thinking back to those times Mr Groves gave his asshole smirk,   clearly thinking to himself “why bother teaching maths and physics to a girl” and he walked away and helped a boy instead – and what that did to my poor teenage mind that had implications for later career choices.

This is why he can go and get stuffed.