At ranks of computer screens, young men with crew cuts in camouflage fatigues sit interspersed with teams of male and female hackers in green and yellow T-shirts, most in their early 20s, many with piercings and tattoos.
She has also made it to the top of the notoriously male-dominated world of Silicon Valley, where the paucity of women among the ranks of computer scientists and engineers is still all too visible.
Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession's shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category.
And, if you think broadly enough, these computer-network spam delivery mechanisms join the ranks of computer telemarketing (phone spam), junk mail (paper spam), billboards (visual space spam) and cars driving through town with megaphones (audio spam).
With top intelligence officials warning in March that cyber attacks and cyber espionage have supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the United States, the administration is trying to boost security in critical infrastructure and the military is vastly increasing its ranks of computer specialists.
Ranks of computers and servers churn the numbers in a sub-basement world where the capital flows.
Despite these beginnings, she built a modern architectural office equipped with ranks of computers, and sophisticated parametric modelling software, in which rows of assistants sit working at screens plugged into headphones.
In place of white-coated researchers toting test-tubes and scribbling in notebooks, there are ranks of computers sifting silently through complex algorithms, or robots scurrying around banks of glass and steel equipment.
Less than one-third of the white American males who populate the ranks of engineering, computer science, math and the physical sciences scored higher than 650 on their math SATs, and more than one-third scored below 550.
Forbes National Editor Quentin Hardy talked with Holley, an IBM fellow, about how he traveled from inner-city Chicago to the front ranks of the computer industry.
