• What is your job title?
  
• Please give a brief description of your job, specifying what you do each day.
  
• What have you been working on or teaching lately?
  
• What most interests you in your job?
  
• What do you like least about your job?
  
• What has been your career path?
  
• Was there any person who inspired you to do what you are doing today?
  
• What attracted you to this career when you were in high school?
  
• What careers in your field do you see as promising?
  
• What advice do you have for young women who want to work in your field?
  

Q: What is your job title?
A: Design Engineer. Every company has their own designations for software titles. When I worked for Digital, I was a Principal Engineer. When Compaq bought Digital, I became a System Software Engineer V, and then was promoted to Level VI. Now that I have transferred to Intel, my title is Design Engineer. The funny thing is that I have been doing the same job for all three companies.
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Q: Please give a brief description of your job, specifying what you do each day.
A: Currently my team is designing a new tool, so I spend all of my time reading books and writing specifications. My team then holds meetings where we discuss what we have learned. Once we are done with our specs, we will write the software, and then we will debug and test it to ensure that it is correct.
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Q: What have you been working on or teaching lately?
A: My team is be writing a tool helps other engineers find out why their programs are so slow. I am writing the part that will read and write the code that the hardware chip understands.
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Q: What most interest you in your job?
A: Working with new hardware chips, like the Alpha from Digital, and the Itanuim from Intel.
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Q: What do you like the least about your job?
A: Boring meetings. The design meeting are interesting; the status meetings are dull.
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Q: What has your career path been?
A: I am lucky, because I still love the career I chose nearly 30 years ago. Very few people can still find a job exciting and rewarding after doing it for so many years.
I always liked mathematics when I was in school. I majored in Math when I was in college, and minored in Computer Science. Computers were still rare, and very few colleges offered Computer Science majors. Later I returned to college, and earned a Master's degree in Computer Science. If I was going to college today, I would major in Computer Science, and minor in Mathematics.Since my graduation in 1980, I have worked as a Software Engineer. I haveworked for five companies: Burroughs (1 year), CSPI (14 years), Digital (3 years), Compaq (3 years) and Intel (1 month).
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Q: Was there any person who inspired you to do what you're doing today?
A: No. I did not know anyone who worked with computers when I chose this career.
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Q: What attracted you to this career when you were in high school?
A: The money. Software Engineers earn good salaries. Computers make the world work, and software engineers make computers work. This is a fun job, but I wouldn't do it for free.
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Q: What careers in your field do you see as promising for the future?
A: The Computer Science field has exploded in the last fifteen years. The internet has opened new career paths that were unimaginable before. Security is becoming a hot field right now. Web page design is too, but that will be taken over by graphic designers now that the tools are readily available. Internationalization is also gaining importance. That is designing programs to work in languages like Chinese, that do not use Arabic letters.
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Q: What advice do you have for young women who want to work in your field someday?
A: Mathematics is still the best preparation for a career in computer science. If your school offers a programming course, you should try one and see if you like it.
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