Ellen Ullman: the computer programmer who became a novelist

Ellen Ullman uses her experience as a successful computer programmer to write books. She talks about sexism in the tech industry

Ellen Ullman: 'There are very few women writing apps.' 

Ellen Ullman's first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80, a squat little machine with a chunky cassette deck for the data on which she taught herself how to program. It was the 1970s and Ullman, who had just moved to San Francisco, found herself in the middle of the nascent Silicon Valley – a place so desperate for anyone who knew anything about computers that they were throwing job offers around, even at a self-taught programmer with an English degree. Even at a woman?

By Blood

by Ellen Ullman

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The first thing Ullman puts me right on, when we sit down in a cafe near her hotel in central London, is that there were quite a few other women working in the tech industry then, just not many in programming.

Why not? "I think because of the stereotype – that it's mathematics. Typically women were steered away from that. I was steered into English, though I'm absolutely happy to have studied that. I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how the depths and variety of human imagination."

She experienced a great deal of sexism, from being mistaken for a secretary when she was running a project, to salesmen for the companies she worked for being disappointed when she turned up in a trouser suit to meet clients (they expected her to look "sexy"). She would be "daring", as she puts it, when asking for the right level of pay. "I would say: 'If you want to keep me after two months, this is what you have to pay.' I had to have a confidence. When I did consulting occasionally it was a barrier to be taken seriously as a technical person. It is to this day."

In some ways, she thinks, the sexism in the tech industry is getting worse. "There are very few women writing apps, and venture capitalists will say openly, 'I want to hire a couple of guys who can come up with an app over spring break,' and it's always a couple of 'guys'."

After her first book, Close to the Machine, was published in 1997 Ullman started to write more. The book, a "cult classic", was one of the first to really convey the appeal of code. But it's a curious mix – alongside the clear passion for the problem solving and possibilities is Ullman's unease at how much it could change our lives. She would build programmes for clients, who would then ask her how they could keep track of their employees' keystrokes, or databases that would also give government agencies access to private health information. Even just the way computers would inveigle their way into our everyday lives. "I have this idea that we programmers are the world's canaries," she writes. "We spend our time alone in front of monitors; now look up at any office building, look into living-room windows at night: so many people sitting alone in front of monitors."

Back then, it was a lover, Brian, who described the people who would really become rich, "And it would not be the 'content makers' – the artists, writers, multimedia makers … the ones making the money would be the owners of the transaction itself. The new breed of entrepreneur: net landlord. Content is worthless, art is just an excuse to get someone to click."

Ullman's first novel, The Bug, was obviously influenced by her 20-year career as a programmer, but her latest, By Blood, is a firm step away, despite being set in the 1970s. Based on conversations between a therapist and her patient – a woman who is trying to track down her birth mother – it is a book about identity and is inspired, in part, by Ullman's own history.

She was adopted when she was six months old – all she knows of her birth mother was that she was "a pretty Jewish lady" – and grew up in a wealthy family in New York. After studying English at Cornell University, she moved to San Francisco and found herself not only in the boom of computing, but also in the midst of radical feminism (she was already deeply political, having briefly joined the Communist party). She was, for a while, involved in the lesbian separatist movement (she was in a long-term relationship with a woman) and remembers a "women-only coffee shop and library" with a smile. "We mostly lived in the Mission district and there was She remembers feeling detached from huge billboards of adverts featuring women in high heels. "I just stopped seeing them. I had this idea 'this doesn't apply to me' and it was a way to detach from the pressure of how a woman is supposed to look or be.

Even then, the people she worked with were more political than the young men who appear to populate startups now, she says. The stereotype of the programmer – nerdy, socially-awkward – certainly existed, "but people I knew at that time were wild, outside the mainstream". Now, "this group are all in business casual. Riding bicycles, terribly healthy. It's just awful." She laughs.

Back then, did they have any idea what sort of future the technology they were working on would bring? "No. [We were] imagining something and then seeing what would work. There were tremendous limitations with the hardware and software so it was a step-by-step thing. "

You get the sense she is a little disappointed with some of what has happened. Ullman seems astonished that there isn't a mass general protest at threats to privacy, and she doesn't use Twitter, for instance. "This idea that everything should be tailored to you, that you should broadcast your every thought. And the self-promotion that everyone has to do. I think it's required in some way because this is the way ideas get disseminated, but the idea that each person has to be their own marketer, that's a different scale."

Ullman is already working on her next book, which will see a return to technology. "I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you the working title, but it's We Are All Programmers Now. That idea that it went from this tiny group of people who knew what was going on to, I think, you, who have an idea how to do a little tinkering through your webpage, or dealing with your phone settings. I think, to that extent, everyone is becoming a programmer."