Ruby's Porn Ghetto

05/17/09

Welcome, to the ghetto.

It has been a lot of days since the scandal erupted over porn images at the Gogaruco conference. I have had my head buried in the sand, and believe it or not was clueless. At any rate there is too great a confluence of personal metaphors for me to avoid piling my 1000 words on the heap.

As the conference was starting, the very awesome CTO of Rupture wanted to meet me there to hang out, check in. Now that I have those CTO initials, everyone wants to have coffee with me. It is unfortunate because I don’t drink coffee, and am a charismatic hermit. I avoid conferences as much as coffee, even though I appreciate the learning and connection that comes from such things. To seem like less the freak that avoids conferences with dread, I told him that I wouldn’t be there due to my own poor planning. Freakish hermitage wasn’t my only reason though.

Although it took me almost a year to actually push this site on to the web, I started building this site, and privately writing Ruby stuff a year and a half ago. I had just stopped working for my little entrepreneurial porn experiment, Red Handed Porn, and strangely I was working at a very prominent Ruby company. They had advertised for someone to own their website. That I had run my own business for two years (even a porn business), said to them that I could own projects. That I spent most of my time at the company building web applications in Ruby and Rails, said that I knew the technology. That I had done engineering work on the largest particle accelerator in the world, gave them hope that I understand their underlying technologies and translate it into white papers. That I was able to get articles about a porn site published in three national publications, said something about media savviness, if not tenacity.

Strangely enough there were a whole bunch of companies who felt equally compelled by the combination of owning a business (even porn), and knowing Rails. I had choices and I chose this high-profile Ruby company because I love code and thought it would be really cool to get to wear most of my hats.

There were some problems though, cultural problem. Those cultural problem stemmed from being female(ish).

On the particular weekend that I started this blog, there was a kerfuffle at the company over my existence on their payroll. Emails with my name were flying between the CEO, CTO and the office manager. That the office manager was considered just the ‘office manager’, really did her a disservice and has a lot to do with why I was fired. She was running most of the company and was on a high-energy power-trip, which culminated in her vying for CEO. From day one, she didn’t want me there because I was making too much money. She had also been promised (strangely) that I would take on a bunch of low-level marketing tasks, that she was trying to get rid of.

Being a hermit, I really knew that calling t-shirt manufacturers to confirm shipments to various conferences was not my forte. Being a former business owner (even of a porn business), I had a very clear plan for gathering information to rapidly build the website and related stuff. The office manager wasn’t the only one, however, with a lot of conflicted feeling about my presence. The CEO, who I reported directly to, was really precious about everything they had built, and vetoed out the door my plan for gathering information.

Clearly not all of this difficulty is related to being female. But the reason that on a Saturday afternoon when I was building out this little Merb CMS, that I got an email being fired, was because of ‘style differences’, which is to say culture.

Poe, the bi-sexual and occasional cross-dressing Rails developer that works on my current team recently asked me about the gender cultural problems faced by women developers. We got into a really passionate thing, because well, it isn’t references to porn, or the objectification of women that are a problem. It is the ways that I am expected to communicate in order to demand respect.

At that high-prestige Ruby firm where I worked an unhappy two months, it was really common to be talking code strategy amongst a small team and have some high-profile male developer zoom over like a rocket was attached to his ass, yelling. Yes, yelling. He would be yelling about why a particular way of doing things was totally idiotic. I would see the same developer initiating this type of ‘dialog’ with other high-profile developers and it would go really different. He would rush over yelling about idiocy, but the respondent would yell back with equivalent zest and zeal. Essentially they were sparring for respect. Because I generally responded to this sparring with bemused but quiet confusion, I didn’t garner their respect.

That’s not really sexism, but it is a contributing reason that there aren’t more women in the open-source software world.

Monday morning after I was fired from my high-prestige web owner job, I went in to the office to pass the baton to the guy taking my job, and was unfired. It turns out my replacement didn’t know any Ruby so he needed a non-prestigious developer to get the website running. They moved me on to contract status, and I helped him code the website for about three weeks. He was happy with my work, there was tons to do. It was an ok gig now that I wasn’t reporting to the CEO, though I still had to contend with developer experts yelling about my idiocy.

At the end of that three weeks, I was fired a second time. The marketing man who was now my boss, said he had no idea why. They needed to get the site live for an upcoming conference; I was priced appropriately for my skills. I did a great job for him. I didn’t stir up any trouble, and was easy to work with. The office manager and CTO just didn’t want me around.

That is sexism. If I am doing my job and doing it well; if the boss likes working with me and would have to struggle to replace me; if the position was not being eliminated, there are precious few non-sexism reasons for being fired.

This second time that I was fired, I knew what I wanted to name this blog: the Ruby Ghetto. For those of you who haven’t ever lived in a ghetto, you probably are under the impression that the rents are lower. They aren’t; at least, they aren’t significantly lower. What is lower is the bar for getting in. They don’t care about your credit report or color or marital status or in my case gender presentation.

Since that initial disaster, I haven’t worked at a high-profile Ruby place. When people contact me for work expecting a man, and get a woman, they are surprised and happy or surprised and unhappy. I work for the people who are surprised and happy. So far that has been the low-profile ghetto jobs.

As a result of the latest drama, there is lots of talk about the absence of women in Ruby. There are still a lot more women in software than mechanical engineering (which is part of why I am here). They aren’t in Ruby, or open source, which says that we don’t need an education fund for women. We need a more welcoming environment.