Take Your Child To Work Day Testing GitHub as Blogging Platform
Today was "Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work" day. Emma was very excited to go and surprisingly insisted on staying the whole day with me. I put her to work learning about career choices and later she "interviewed" me using a set of interview questions provided by the daughtersandsonstowork.org web site. She participated in our morning "scrum" where each team member talks about what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today. Later on, I tried to show her how much of my job is spent communicating - via meetings, e-mail, instant messaging, phone, yammer ("facebook for work" as I described it to her), etc. We then looked at how design documents describe in human terms what the software is *supposed* to do, and then we looked at some software we were working on that "made web pages for searching for stuff" ("you know, like google"). That nearly put her to sleep. :)
Emma was well behaved and kept herself busy with other activies so Dad could get *some* work done.
We rushed home to eat dinner. Went to T-Ball practice. Rushed home and wrote up a story based on her interview notes. I helped in this effort. After helping her organize her thoughts, she dictacted the story as I typed and I think it largely captures what she learned today.
I think this was a great experience for her and she is already asking when she can come do it again. I told her, next year. :) I really enjoyed sharing with Emma what I do. I like what I do and am proud of my accomplishments. It was great to share with Emma what I do when I'm not at home with her. I also hope to spark an interest in math, and "the sciences". Those fields could really use more female representation and its really not a bad way to make a living.
Logistically speaking, it isn't easy for a company to have everyone bring in their kids on the same day. A number of people around the office commented that they thought our site had terminated the practice. I don't know what the official policy is at our Rochester site, but I did clear it with my boss before hand. We do allow for a fair amount of disruption for other educational and charitable activities. It would seem that this event could be formatted to minimize disruption in our workplace.
To learn more about the event and its motiviations, visit www.daughtersandsonstowork.org.
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