<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 8:04 PM, Jacinta Richardson <<a href="mailto:jarich@perltraining.com.au">jarich@perltraining.com.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Caroline Ford wrote: > 2008/6/19 Tricia Bowen <<a href="mailto:tricia.bowen@gmail.com">tricia.bowen@gmail.com</a>>: >> to rethink my career choices. Do I want to go back to a conference room >> where men google "anna kournikova" obsessively and display crude pics of her >> on the projector screen before meetings? Do I want to got back to an >> atmosphere where the bosses male lunch buddies get promoted while the few >> women, who have no position of power, are stuck back in the office doing the >> grunt work? Do I want to sit in another stinking "war room" pulling an >> all-nighter to make the higher ups feel good, when I know the reason we're >> all here is because of poor planning. Poor planning that was pointed out >> months before the launch date. > This is why I went back to work in the public sector administration > and didn't continue my IT qualification. I have far too much self > respect to deal with these people. I'm not going to try to talk you out of your decisions, I understand there are a lot of reasons people make the career choices they do. However, I do want to say that not all IT jobs are this bad. In fact, I'd argue that _most_ aren't, but I don't have statistics so I could be wrong on that bit. If you enjoyed doing IT, even if you didn't enjoy where you worked, I would encourage you to at least look around at IT jobs when you start looking for jobs to restart your career. Unarguably the *best* jobs that exist are the ones you can find through networking. So put LinuxChix, UbuntuWomen and any other group of contacts you have to work. Ask here for leads to jobs (to be sent to you privately), in your city/state, preferably in businesses that we're working in or have worked in or have other good reasons to feel are women-friendly. You may be surprised at what you find. All the best, Jacinta </blockquote> <div>I've tried applying for jobs at local colleges, which have jobs with sane hours and healthy work environments, but I keep getting the "over qualified" response. I was told by one woman that she couldn't see how I would be happy installing someone elses program instead of writing my own, even though I stressed that I would not have a problem with that. It doesn't mean that I wouldn't joke that I could write that bloated program in ten lines of perl, but at this point I could care less about writing the program myself. I just have to figure out a way to convey that on interviews.</div> <div>--Tricia </div></div>