I've not written a signature Sunday Talk Soup commentary in my miscellany format post in a while. My podcast subscription queues had been piling up as I focused on other topics. Yesterday I finally played my stack of Meet the Press videos and unsurprisingly David Gregory had a segment focusing on female career comments made by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. I winced as outnumbered token male guest 2008 McCain campaign executive Steve Schmidt defensively started out by pointing out he wanted his two daughters to have broad career options.
Can we please get past the notion that there's some vast male conspiracy against female advancement? It's so preposterous and stereotypical; do we really need to be lectured to by yet another third-tier thinker about a ticking demographic time bomb for companies failing to enact feminist policies? Ideology is predictable, boring, annoying and ineffective. I'm particularly annoyed by laughably absurd talking points like women have to work twice as hard as a man to get noticed or its variants. Most guys are very competitive and don't look to conspiracy; in my experience, it becomes a catch-all, an ideological crutch; if you ever push back on an unreasonable request, it's like female bosses resort to an intellectually shallow "it's because I'm a woman, isn't it?" mindset.
I once had to deal with an IT VP client (for a prominent chain of airport retailers whom had fired my female predecessor after just 2 weeks). There were a couple of incidents that stood out; dealing with her was like pulling teeth. In the first case, I had traced an Oracle patching problem with an ERP database to the fact the company had used a contractor whom had migrated the database by recreating it. In recreating it, he did not specify the correct character set but allowed it to use Oracle's default. I thoroughly documented the problem, Oracle's recommended solution, etc. (I even had copies of the DBA's migration script to prove my point.) It wasn't enough: I got called to a meeting where she had pulled down information that Oracle, of course, supported its default character set! I once again explained that it was the ERP software's requirement that the database use a non-default character set. I wouldn't necessarily say it was a gender-based difference, but I usually didn't get the same type of argumentative pushback from my male clients.
In the second case, there was a turf battle going on between the company's accountants and HR personnel. The HR department pushed though licensing for Oracle's HR product. Oracle at the time was transitioning from "green screen" character mode to a GUI interface; when Oracle released its HR application, it required the GUI interface. The client had hired some trouble-making contractors whom falsely told the accountants that adding the GUI interface would "break" accounting product functionality. The VP decided on what she considered a Solomonic decision: she would give the accountants and the HR department their own ERP databases.
Sometimes the most heroic actions are in preventing a disaster. She was analyzing the problem in terms of office politics, not technical merit; the correct decision would have been to terminate the rogue contractors. I had to push-back forcibly, knowing she could have me rolled off at will. The whole concept of an ERP system is to integrate functionality across the enterprise; she fought me every step of the way. She told me some of her peers in other companies had done it. Just to humor her, I agreed to talk to a relevant peer DBA. No lie, his first response to me, "Yeah, we did that 3 years ago and have regretted it ever since. Do you know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?"
You have to wonder if the ideologues are stuck in the past, in 1930's shorts, when Alfalfa, who had a crush on the ever-so-lovely Darla, betrayed the cooties-hating he-man women haters club:
I personally have had both bad male and female bosses. I used to work for a private company later acquired by Equifax. My boss, the geek co-founder of the company, used to get up in the early morning to design and develop computer games; as a company officer, he didn't particularly like having to interface with customers. Another company, which the CEO co-founder considered a competitor, offered him more of a tech executive role. The last few days were bizarre with office rumors of lawsuits. PC, who openly said hiring me was one of the best decisions he ever made, told me his separation agreement did not allow him to bring me to his new employer and said that he had recommended me to replace him. As you might imagine, this was like the kiss of death with the CEO, whom had previously drafted me to work on a Citibank Indonesia project.
To provide some context for what followed, the senior VP of the company, who later unsuccessfully ran for Congress, called me in and gave me a broad mandate to get the growing small computer (Sun Solaris) databases under control: developers were consuming disk space faster than we could order new disks, contracted data loads were falling through the cracks, etc. I am a natural administrator and exceeded managerial expectations. I had revoked special database privileges, and developers were unhappy I was "creating a bureaucracy"--not true: they simply preferred no constraints. For example, one developer had a table build script that automatically allocated 50 megabytes of storage even if he actually needed less than a megabyte. The basic point: I was widely viewed as a tool of management.
The company had gotten its start renting off-hours use of mainframe computers. They eventually moved into their own location and leased a mainframe computer. For those that don't know, mainframe computer leases easily run into the six-figures. The company was in the process of migrating mainframe apps to microsystems, with paybacks typically within 6 months. We had maybe 10-20 mainframe programmers reporting to a middle-aged female manager I'll call Dee, with no background in microsystems.
The CEO named Dee instead of me to replace PC. I would later hear that paranoid mainframe developers thought I was management's axman and would fire them and replace them with new college grads with microsystems skills. In fact, I never had any personnel discussions with management, and I knew management was more interested in their business knowledge and wanted to retrain them. Who better to retrain them than a former MIS professor? But reportedly they threatened to resign together if I was named successor: I never had any prior contact with them.
It would be difficult for me to think of a worse managerial moment than Dee's first conversation with me. You might think that she would have gone out of her way to say, 'Ron, I don't have any experience with Oracle or Sun Microsystems. I'll be needing your expertise to transition into this new role." Instead, she said, "I don't care what you've done before. As far as I'm concerned, you're no better than anybody else working for me. You have to prove yourself to me." She also stripped my supervisory authority over a data administrator because she thought I intended to terminate him (Not true. But he had ignored an assigned task because he decided he had higher priorities.) It was miserable; she was trying to micromanage me, even to the point of setting up database sessions so she could tell if I bounced a database without first going through her (these were not OLTP databases). I was absolutely demoralized and signaled to management I was ready to leave the company.
Another account manager had just landed a million dollar SBC contract, and the DBA's were exchanged. But even after I had created a standard operating procedure for monthly loads, thoroughly documented the process, and walked the Indian DBA, whom by the way was being paid significantly more than me, twice through the process, Dee tried to stop me from going down to Brazil on a project because she was worried the other DBA couldn't function in my absence.
I can't argue generalities based on anecdotal experience. I will say that I think better managers don't sweat the small stuff, are confident and unflappable under stress, don't personalize feedback, are decisive, well-informed and able to delegate authority. I didn't dislike Dee because she was female; I disliked her because she was an incompetent boss. When women resort to idiotic stereotypes about men, I think it's a cop-out; weak managers look for low-hanging fruit: it's all because I'm a woman, isn't it? I've also had incompetent male bosses; it's not all because they're men.
I would have no problem supporting an American version of Margaret Thatcher for higher office. And my relatives don't want me to mention them in my blog, but I remember my first niece was in a Colorado high school and wrote about targeting a career in biotechnology; I was ecstatic (although she later changed her mind). I have other bright nieces; I was hoping one would go to med school, but she decided to become a registered nurse like her mom
