Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

  My coworkers treated it as much like an office as a clubhouse. People roamed around barefoot, juggling and playing guitar. They came in wearing expressive and ironic clothing: spandex leggings printed with unicorn emojis, shirts printed with teammates’ faces, bondage collars, Burning Man pelts. Some played video games while they half worked, or napped in the coder caves—dark, cushioned booths designed for those who worked best under conditions of sensory deprivation.

  It seemed like half of the engineers were DJs—a group of developers regularly performed at a club in the Mission, with a data scientist who projected angular and geometric visualizations on a screen behind them. Some of them practiced on a mixer across from the company bar, reminiscing proudly about dance parties they had hosted in the office, and the times neighbors had threatened to call the cops.

  Despite the robust amenities and club culture, the office was rarely full. Meetings were held over videoconferencing software, and people dialed in from wherever they happened to be: public transportation, pool loungers, unmade beds, living rooms with partners napping in the background. An engineer attended his daily stand-up meeting from an indoor climbing wall, gripping a plastic rock and wearing a harness. A telepresence robot rolled around the first-floor event space, lanky and conspicuous, a bridge between worlds.

  People came and went, operating on individualized schedules. I never knew whom I would run into at HQ, or whether I would be working alone. On every floor were mounted television screens displaying heat maps, and lists of employee avatars indicating who was in the building and where. The heat maps felt like a violation—I didn’t know how to opt out. I side-eyed the television monitors whenever I walked to the bathroom, waiting for my data, a radiant orange blob, to catch up. The maps almost offered a feeling of company cohesion. It was surprisingly affecting to be the only node.

  * * *

  I still wanted to be part of something. I staked out an unclaimed standing desk in a cluster of engineers, and left my new business cards next to the monitor: a flag in the ground. I decorated my laptop with octopus-cat stickers from the company store. I patronized the in-house masseuse and received a cautious, fully clothed back massage, the decadence of which left my body tense with shame. I drank scotch with coworkers in a room hidden behind the library bookcases and designed to look like a nineteenth-century smoking parlor: coatrack of velvet jackets, a globe that served as a stash box, and, above the mantel, an oil painting of the octopus-cat as Napoleon Bonaparte. I tripped over my own ankles on the company soccer team, doing my part to help meet the two-woman quota. I used the office gym and showered anxiously in the office locker room, deciding to never again get naked at work. I walked around proudly in my employee hoodie: my platform handle lettered down the sleeve, the silhouette of the mascot plastered over my heart.

  I was employee number two hundred and thirty-something. At that point, the number didn’t matter. I had no trouble identifying the early employees, and not just because some listed their hire numbers in their social media bios. I saw my former self in their monopolization of the chat rooms, their disdain for the growing nontechnical teams, their wistfulness for the way things had been.

  I did envy these early employees, their inside jokes and well-deserved pride. Sometimes, reading their banter or seeing photos of their children dressed as the octopus-cat for Halloween—or skimming engineers’ personal blog posts extolling the virtues of asynchronous collaboration and the Zen of open source—I would think about my foregone institutional authority, or the stack of data-driven T-shirts I kept folded beneath my towels, and feel a jolt of nostalgia. Desire. Corporate loneliness. I would yearn for the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation. And then I would remind myself: There but for the grace of God go I.

  * * *

  Support met once a week, for an hour, over videoconference. I prepared for these meetings by brushing my hair, closing the curtains to the street, then frantically tossing visible clutter on top of my bed and covering it with a quilt.

  “Maybe we should split your job,” Ian suggested one morning, watching me position my laptop so that the laundry rack, draped with underwear, was out of frame. “We can both work part-time, live off one salary, and travel around the world. Who would ever know?” No one, I said. While we were at it, I told Ian, he might as well get us promoted into Engineering. I could do the video chats, and he could write the code.

  While my teammates did fly out to HQ from time to time, it was strange when we were embodied, disorienting to see everyone from the neck down. Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.

  I liked the specific intimacy of video: everyone breathing, sniffling, chewing gum, forgetting to mute the microphone before clearing their congestion. I liked the banter, the frozen mid-sentence faces, the surprise of seeing an animal emerging from under a desk. I liked watching everyone watch themselves while we pretended to watch one another, an act of infinite surveillance. The first ten minutes were almost always spent correcting the videoconference software, during which I became acquainted with my teammates’ home interiors, their color-coded bookcases and wedding photos, their earnest letterpress posters or obscure art. I learned about their hobbies and roommates. I grew fond of their children and pets.

  At the start of these meetings, I would log in and lean into my laptop, enjoying the camaraderie and warmth of a team. For an hour, my studio would fill with laughter and chatter, conversation tripping when the software stalled or delayed. Then I would stand up, stretch, tape back over my laptop camera, and open the curtains—adjusting to the silence, alone in my room.

  The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people who loved to fight with them. People whose default conversational mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men all the way down.

  It wasn’t for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. The site’s creator had specified that political debate destroyed intellectual curiosity, so political stories, and political conversation, were considered off topic and verboten. Instead, the guidelines asked that users focus on stories that were interesting to hackers. I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted. Whatever; I wasn’t a hacker.

  The posters experimented with new ideologies they seemed to have discovered on crowdsourced wikis. In conversations about industry stories, white papers, product announcements, and one another’s personal blog posts, they swapped notes about ethics, philosophy, and economics. What books make up the core of your operating system? the men asked one another, with great sincerity. They discussed how to preserve mental cycles, how to achieve a state of Deep Work. They debated the merits of a Hippocratic oath for developers, the existence of natural monopolies, the value creation of personal compliments, the state of the Overton window. They talked about Stoicism as a life hack. They teetered on the brink of self-actualization.

  When news about the open-source startup’s gender discrimination case first came to light, the message-board commentariat had grappled with the company’s fall from grace. They pounced on a detail that had surfaced in the reports, about male employees watching their female coworkers Hula-Hoop to music in the office. The first woman in Engineering had described the employees ogling their colleagues,
as if at a strip club. It’s not like watching Hula-Hoopers would make men rapists, one commenter argued—after all, not even strip clubs turned men into rapists.

  Should CEOs be allowed to bring employees to a strip club? someone asked. What if the employees initiate, and they’re women, and they invite the CEO? Another man chimed in to suggest that the Hula-Hoopers were putting on a show—perhaps they wanted to be ogled. Remember, chided an ambassador from the land of evolutionary psychology: desire was an evolutionary imperative.

  Side arguments had broken out about the forensics of reverting someone else’s code. Some debated the role played by the open-source startup’s choice of programming languages. Perhaps, they posited, the company’s choice of language mirrored the workplace conditions. Someone pointed out that people tended to confuse tech’s gender ratio—worse than average, he acknowledged—with its harassment rate, which was difficult to judge compared to other industries.

  Men built a wildly successful company where they loved to work, and now they have to destroy it to make feminists feel welcome, fumed a prolific commenter.

  A man whose handle paid homage to a cartoon cat stirred up a debate about the qualities of a positive office environment. Why, he asked, would a workplace filled with happy young males necessarily be a bad culture?

  * * *

  I flew to Phoenix for an annual conference of women in computing. The conference had been established in honor of a female engineer who helped develop military technologies during the Second World War, a nod, perhaps inadvertent, to the industry’s underacknowledged government origins. On the plane, I joked with my seatmate about whether the National Security Agency would have a recruitment booth: a bad joke that only got worse when I learned that the NSA was one of the conference’s major patrons.

  I was not really a woman in computing—more a woman around computing; a woman, with a computer—but I was curious, and the open-source startup was a conference sponsor. All interested employees, regardless of gender, were invited to attend. While nobody was excited to explore Phoenix, a city whose downtown appeared to be a series of interconnected parking lots, the company put us up in a boutique hotel with a pool and a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant bar quickly became our new headquarters.

  On the first night, my coworkers gathered over bowls of guacamole and sweaty margaritas. For many of them, the conference was just an excuse to get together in person, a reunion of sorts. Many hadn’t seen one another since the startup’s gender discrimination crisis. There was a lot to catch up on.

  I hovered on the periphery, hoping the women engineers would adopt me. I found them intimidating: smart, passionate about their work, and unafraid to call bullshit, at least in the privacy of their own cohort. Some of them had unnaturally colored hair and punk-rock piercings, signaling industry seniority as much as subcultural affiliation. I had no conception of what it would be like as a woman in tech whose skill set was respected. I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t too dissimilar from being a woman whose skill set wasn’t.

  For the most part, the other women seemed glad that some of the company’s problems had been exposed. Too many people puking in the elevator, metaphorically and not. Too many unexamined disparities. The obsession with meritocracy had always been suspect at a prominent international company that was overwhelmingly white, male, and American, and had fewer than fifteen women in Engineering. For years, my coworkers explained, the absence of an official org chart had given rise to a secondary, shadow org chart, determined by social relationships and proximity to the founders. Employees who were technically rank-and-file had executive-level power and leverage. Those with the ear of the CEO could influence hiring decisions, internal policies, and the reputational standing of their colleagues.

  “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.”

  “It’s like no one even read ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’” said an engineer who had recently read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”

  It was perhaps predictable that modeling a company after an internet community would have drawbacks, but modeling a company after the open-source software community turned out to have been uniquely fraught. On top of the problems with meritocracy and the no-managers workflow, open source was historically a boys’ club. Fewer than 5 percent of contributors were women. Exclusionary rhetoric proliferated. Even in person, at technical meet-ups and conferences, men pontificated and strutted across stages with pop-star lighting while the women engineers were leered at, condescended to, groped. Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.

  It quickly became apparent that I was sheltered: good communication and compassion were built into the support function. On Engineering, as the men wrote high-minded manifestos about the importance of collaboration, everyone else struggled to get their contributions reviewed and accepted. Some men shipped huge parts of the platform based on internal popularity, while women’s code was picked apart or dismissed. The company promoted equality and openness, until it came to stock grants: equity packages described as nonnegotiable were, in fact, negotiable for those who were used to successfully negotiating. The infamous name-your-own-salary policy had resulted in a pay gap so severe that a number of women had recently received corrective increases of close to forty thousand dollars. No back pay.

  Over the next few days, I wandered the bowels of the city’s convention center, where eight thousand students and technology professionals had gathered in a semi-coordinated attempt to capture each other’s attention. There were booths for all the large technology corporations, and for startups from every investment-firm fiefdom. Temporary stalls draped in cheap dark fabric had been erected along the sidelines, inside of which corporate recruiters conducted job interviews. I found it reassuring to see companies focused on biotech, robotics, health care, renewable energy—staid and serious organizations that did not reflect the startup giddiness of consumer tech to which I had grown accustomed in San Francisco.

  Among the computer science majors, I felt vaguely out of place, then embarrassed to have impostor syndrome at a conference designed to empower women in the workforce. I made sure to keep my identification badge, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup, over my T-shirt, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup. I stood behind the booth and handed out stickers of the octopus-cat costumed as Rosie the Riveter, the Statue of Liberty, a Día de los Muertos skeleton, and a female engineer—swooshy bangs, ponytail, cartoon hoodie decorated with the octopus-cat.

  As I watched a flood of young women pass out their résumés and chat about careers they hadn’t started yet, I felt heartened, inspired. Perhaps I will work for you one day, I thought, feeling expansive and corny. I wished, vaguely, that I had stuck with the programming exercises the previous year. My skill set had never exactly been on the cutting edge of technology, not even close, but I already felt myself sliding toward obsolescence. There was the sense that my coworkers and I were coming face-to-face with our replacements, and I envied the younger women’s futures. I also felt, in a maternal way, responsible for them.

  Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first- or secondhand. That week, I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job, only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who had been raped by a “10X” engineer, then pushed out of the company after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another, that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men; that there were more men in engineering because men were innately more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward and speak about
their experiences openly. It felt like the start of a sea change.

  Not everyone was excited by the public conversation. Some prominent founders and investors, habituated to fatuous coverage of playful workplaces and unfiltered, idealistic CEOs, did not appreciate this style of media attention. They blamed journalists who reported on sexual harassment for making the industry look bad; they claimed the media were jealous because the tech industry was eating their lunch. They complained that complaints about the boys’ club discouraged girls from pursuing STEM, as if this were all just a matter of marketing. Some women, would-be scabs, chimed in to say that they’d had male mentors, and were just fine. The level of discourse could use a boost.

  During the conference’s keynote speech, the CEO of a highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate encouraged women to refrain from asking for raises. “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raises as you go along,” he said. “That might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for raises have.” Better, he offered, to trust karma.

  At a Male Allies Plenary Panel, a group of women engineers circulated hundreds of handmade bingo boards among attendees. Inside each square was a different indictment: Mentions his mother. Says “That would never happen in my company.” Wearables. Asserts another male executive’s heart is in the right place. Says feminist activism scares women away from tech. At the center of the board was a square that just said Pipeline. I had heard the pipeline argument, that there simply weren’t enough women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields to fill open roles. Having been privy to the hiring process, I found it incredibly suspect.