by Sarah Vowell
I attend a networking event at an office whose walls are hung with inspirational posters that quote tech luminaries I’ve never heard of. The posters say things like “Life is short: build stuff that matters” and “Innovate or die.” I am dead. Our interior designer tried hanging posters like these in our office; the front-end engineers relocated them to the bathroom, placed them face to the wall. The event is packed; people roam in clusters, like college freshmen during orientation week. There are a few women, but most of the attendees are young men in start-up twinsets: I pass someone wearing a branded hoodie, unzipped to reveal a shirt with the same logo. I Google the company on my cellphone to see what it is, to see if they’re hiring. “We have loved mobile since we saw Steve Jobs announce the first iPhone,” their website declares, and I close the browser, thinking, how basic.
The tenor of these events is usually the same: guilelessly optimistic. People are excited to talk about their start-ups, and all small-talk is a prelude to a pitch. I’m guilty of this, too; I’m proud of my work, and our recruiting bonus is 15 percent of my salary (alignment of company-employee goals and incentives). I talk to two European men who are building a food-delivery app geared toward healthy eaters, like people on the Paleo diet. They’re extremely polite and oddly buff. They say they’ll invite me to their beta, and I am excited. I like to be on the inside track. I want to help. I tell them that I know a lot of people on the Paleo diet, like the guy in marketing who stores plastic baggies of wet, sauteed meat in the communal refrigerator. I chatter on about Paleo adherents and people who do CrossFit and practice polyamory, and how I admire that they manage to do these things without detrimental physical or emotional consequences. I’ve learned so much about polyamory and S&M since moving to San Francisco. Ask me anything about The Ethical Slut; ask me anything about Sex at Dawn. That night, I download the healthy-food app and can’t ever imagine using it.
My opinion doesn’t matter, of course: a few months later I’ll find out that the Europeans raised $30-odd million after pivoting to a new business model and undergoing a radical rebranding, and I’ll find this out when our company starts paying them thousands to organize the catering for our in-office meals. The food is served in sturdy tinfoil troughs, and people race to be first in line for selfserve. It is low-carb and delicious, healthier than anything I’ve ever cooked, well worth someone else’s money, and every afternoon I shovel it into my body.
Our own 101 billboard is unveiled on a chilly morning in November, just a few months after I’ve started. Everyone gets to work early; our office manager orders fresh-squeezed orange juice and pastries, cups of yogurt parfait with granola strata. We’ve arranged for a company field trip around the corner. We walk in a pack, hands in our pockets, and take a group photograph in front of our ad. I forward it to my parents in New York. In the photograph we’ve got our arms around one another, smiling and proud. The start-up is still small, just thirty of us or so, but within a year we’ll be almost a hundred employees, and shortly thereafter, I’ll be gone.
I have lunch with one of the salespeople, and I like him a lot. He’s easy to talk to; he’s easy to talk to for a living. We eat large, sloppy sandwiches in the park and gaze out at the tourists.
“So how’d you end up choosing our company?” I ask. Roast turkey drops from my sandwich onto the grass.
“Come on,” he says. “I heard there were a bunch of twentysomethings crushing it in the Valley. How often does that happen?”
I lean in and go to a panel on big data. There are two venture capitalists onstage, dressed identically. They are exceptionally sweaty. Even from the back row, the place feels moist. I’ve never been in a room with so few women and so much money, and so many people champing at the bit to get a taste. It’s like watching two ATMs in conversation. “I want big data on men watching other men talk about data,” I whisper to my new friend in sales, who ignores me.
Back at the office, I walk into the bathroom to find a coworker folded over the sink, wiping her face with a paper towel. There aren’t many women at this company, and I have encountered almost all of them, at one point or another, crying in the bathroom. “I just hope this is all worth it,” she spits in my direction. I know what she means—she’s talking about money—but I also know how much equity she has, and I’m confident that even in the best possible scenario, whatever she’s experiencing is definitely not. She’s out the door and back at her desk before I can conjure up something consoling.
Half of the conversations I overhear these days are about money, but nobody likes to get specific. It behooves everyone to stay theoretical.
A friend’s roommate wins a hackathon with corporate sponsorship, and on a rainy Sunday afternoon he is awarded $500,000. (It is actually a million, but who would believe me?) That evening they throw a party at their duplex, which feels like a normal event in the Burning Man off-season—whippits, face paint, high-design vaporizers—except for the oversize foamcore check propped laterally against the bathroom doorframe.
Out by the porch cooler, I run into a friend who works at a company—cloud something—that was recently acquired. I make a joke about this being a billionaire boys’ club and he laughs horsily, disproportionate to the humor. I’ve never seen him like this, but then I’ve never met anyone who’s won the lottery, seen anyone so jazzed on his own good luck. He opens a beer using the edge of his lighter and invites me to drive up to Mendocino in his new convertible. What else do you do after a windfall? “You know who the real winner was, though?” he asks, then immediately names a mutual acquaintance, a brilliant and introverted programmer who was the company’s first engineering hire, very likely the linchpin. “Instant multimillionaire,” my friend says incredulously, as if hearing his own information for the first time. “At least eight figures.”
“Wow,” I say, handing my beer to him to open. “What do you think he wants to do?”
My friend deftly pops off the bottle cap, then looks at me and shrugs. “That’s a good question,” he says, tapping the lighter against the side of his beer. “I don’t think he wants to do anything.”
An old high school friend emails out of the blue to introduce me to his college buddy: a developer, new to the city, “always a great time!” The developer and I agree to meet for drinks. It’s not clear whether we’re meeting for a date or networking. Not that there’s always a difference: I have one friend who found a job by swiping right and know countless others who go to industry conferences just to fuck—nothing gets them hard like a nonsmoking room charged to the company AmEx. The developer is very handsome and stiltedly sweet. He seems like someone who has opinions about fonts, and he does. It’s clear from the start that we’re there to talk shop. We go to a tiny cocktail bar in the Tenderloin with textured wallpaper and a scrawny bouncer. Photographs are forbidden, which means the place is designed for social media. This city is changing, and I am disgusted by my own complicity.
“There’s no menu, so you can’t just order, you know, a martini,” the developer says, as if I would ever. “You tell the bartender three adjectives, and he’ll customize a drink for you accordingly. It’s great. It’s creative! I’ve been thinking about my adjectives all day.”
What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this? I try to game the system by asking for something smoky, salty, and angry, crossing my fingers for mezcal; it works. We lean against a wall and sip. The developer tells me about his loft apartment in the Mission, his specialty bikes, how excited he is to go on weeknight camping trips. We talk about cameras and books. We talk about cities we’ve never visited. I tell him about the personal-shopper service my coworkers all signed up for, how three guys came into work wearing the same sweater; he laughs but looks a little guilty. He’s sweet and a little shy about his intelligence, and I know we’ll probably never hang out again. Still, I go home that night with the feeling that something, however small, has been lifted.
Venture capitalists have spearheaded massive innovatio
n in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The Internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back.
Sometimes it feels like everyone is speaking a different language—or the same language, with radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep talk. Our director looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he straightens up and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact with everyone around the table. “We are making products,” he begins, “that can push the fold of mankind.”
A networking-addicted coworker scrolls through a website where people voluntarily post their own résumés. I spy. He clicks through to an engineer who works for an aggressively powerful start-up, one whose rapid expansion, relentless pursuit of domination, and absence of ethical boundaries scare the shit out of me. Under his current company, the engineer has written this job description: “This is a rocket ship, baby. Climb aboard.”
I am waiting for the train when I notice the ad: it covers the platform below the escalators. The product is an identity-as-a-service app—it stores passwords—but the company isn’t advertising to users; they’re advertising their job openings. They’re advertising to me. The ad features five people standing in V-formation with their arms crossed. They’re all wearing identical blue hoodies. They’re also wearing identical rubber unicorn masks; I am standing on one of their heads. The copy reads, “Built by humans, used by unicorns.”
We hire an engineer fresh out of a top undergraduate program. She walks confidently into the office, springy and enthusiastic. We’ve all been looking forward to having a woman on our engineering team. It’s a big moment for us. Her onboarding buddy brings her around to make introductions, and as they approach our corner, my coworker leans over and cups his hand around my ear: as though we are colluding, as though we are five years old. “I feel sorry,” he says, his breath moist against my neck. “Everyone’s going to hit on her.”
I include this anecdote in an email to my mom. The annual-review cycle is nigh, and I’m on the fence about whether or not to bring up the running list of casual hostilities toward women that add unsolicited spice to the workplace. I tell her about the colleague with the smart-watch app that’s just an animated GIF of a woman’s breasts bouncing in perpetuity; I tell her about the comments I’ve fielded about my weight, my lips, my clothing, my sex life; I tell her that the first woman engineer is also the only engineer without SSH access to the servers. I tell her that compared with other women I’ve met here, I have it good, but the bar is low. It’s tricky: I like these coworkers—and I dish it back—but in the parlance of our industry, this behavior is scalable. I don’t have any horror stories yet; I’d prefer things stay this way. I expect my mother to respond with words of support and encouragement. I expect her to say, “Yes! You are the change this industry needs.” She emails me back almost immediately. “Don’t put complaints about sexism in writing,” she writes. “Unless, of course, you have a lawyer at the ready.”
A meeting is dropped mysteriously onto our calendars, and at the designated time we shuffle warily into a conference room. The last time this happened, we were given forms that asked us to rate various values on a scale of one to five: our desire to lead a team; the importance of work-life balance. I gave both things a four and was told I didn’t want it enough.
The conference room has a million-dollar view of downtown San Francisco, but we keep the shades down. Across the street, a bucket drummer bangs out an irregular heartbeat. We sit in a row, backs to the window, laptops open. I look around the room and feel a wave of affection for these men, this small group of misfits who are the only people who understand this new backbone to my life. On the other side of the table, our manager paces back and forth, but he’s smiling. He asks us to write down the names of the five smartest people we know, and we dutifully oblige. I look at the list and think about how much I miss my friends back home, how bad I’ve been at returning phone calls and emails, how bloated I’ve become with start-up self-importance, how I’ve stopped making time for what I once held dear. I can feel blood rush to my cheeks.
“Okay,” my manager says. “Now tell me: why don’t they work here?”
Morale, like anything, is just another problem to be solved. There is a high premium on break/fix. To solve our problem, management arranges for a team-building exercise. They schedule it on a weeknight evening, and we pretend not to mind. Our team-building begins with beers in the office, and then we travel en masse to a tiny event space at the mouth of the Stockton Tunnel, where two energetic blondes give us sweatbands and shots. The blondes are attractive and athletic, strong limbs wrapped in spandex leggings and tiny shorts, and we are their smudge-edged foils: an army of soft bellies and stiff necks, hands tight with the threat of carpal tunnel. They smear neon face paint across our foreheads and cheeks and tell us we look awesome. The event space warms up as people get drunk and bounce around the room, taking selfies with the CFO, fist-bumping the cofounders without irony, flirting with the new hires who don’t yet know any better. We play Skee-Ball. We cluster by the bar and have another round, two.
Eventually, we’re dispatched on a scavenger hunt across the city. We pour out of the building and into the street, spreading across rush-hour San Francisco, seeking landmarks; we barrel past tourists and harass taxicab drivers, piss off doormen and stumble into homeless people. We are our own worst representatives, calling apologies over our shoulders. We are sweaty, competitive—maybe happy, really happy.
The meeting begins without fanfare. They thought I was an amazing worker at first, working late every night, last out of the office, but now they wonder if the work was just too hard for me to begin with. They need to know: Am I down for the cause? Because if I’m not down for the cause, it’s time. They will do this amicably. Of course I’m down, I say, trying not to swivel in my ergonomic chair. I care deeply about the company. I am here for it.
When I say I care deeply, what I mean is I am ready to retire. When I say I’m down, what I mean is I’m scared. I cry twice during the meeting, despite my best efforts. I think about the city I left to come here, the plans I’ve canceled and the friends I haven’t made. I think about how hard I’ve worked and how demoralizing it is to fail. I think about my values, and I cry even more. It will be months until I call uncle and quit; it will take almost a year to realize I was gas-lighting myself, that I was reading from someone else’s script.
It’s Christmastime; I’m older, I’m elsewhere. On the train to work, I swipe through social media and hit on a post from the start-up’s holiday party, which has its own hashtag. The photograph is of two former teammates, both of them smiling broadly, their teeth as white as I remember. “So grateful to be part of such an amazing team,” the caption reads, and I tap through. The hashtag unleashes a stream of photographs featuring people I’ve never met—beautiful people, the kind of people who look good in athleisure. They look well rested. They look relaxed and happy. They look nothing like me. There’s a photograph of what can only be the pre-dinner floor show: an acrobat in a leotard kneeling on a pedestal, her legs contorted, her feet grasping a bow and arrow, poised to release. Her target is a stuffed heart, printed with the company logo. I scroll past animated photo-booth GIFs of strangers, kissing and mugging for the camera, and I recognize their pride, I empathize with their sense of accomplishment—this was one hell of a year, and they have won. I feel gently ill, a callback to the childhood nausea of being left out.
The holida
y party my year at the company began with an open bar at 4 p.m.—the same coworker had shellacked my hair into curls in the office bathroom, both of us excited and exhausted, ready to celebrate. Hours later, we danced against the glass windows of the Michelin-starred restaurant our company had bought out for the night, our napkins strewn on the tables, our shoes torn off, our plus-ones shifting in formal wear on the sidelines, the waitstaff studiously withholding visible judgment.
I keep scrolling until I hit a video of this year’s after-party, which looks like it was filmed in a club or at a flashy bar mitzvah, save for the company logo projected onto the wall: flashing colored lights illuminate men in stripped-down suits and women in cocktail dresses, all of them bouncing up and down, waving glow sticks and light-sabers to a background of electronic dance music. They’ve gone pro, I say to myself. “Last night was epic!” someone has commented. Three years have passed since I left. I catch myself searching for my own face anyway.
ANDREW SULLIVAN
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I Used to Be a Human Being
FROM New York Magazine
I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I didn’t. I knew why I’d come here.
