Voices from the Valley

by Ben Tarnoff

  Did you start looking for another job right away?

  I did. But it’s hard to find a job when you’re pregnant. It was my second pregnancy and I was already showing. Then I had the kid, which didn’t make it any easier. Trying to find a job with a newborn is impossible.

  My husband was working, which meant we were on his health care. But his salary wasn’t enough to pay all of our bills. So I had to bring money in one way or another. Fortunately, I found contract work. Contract work has saved me time and time again.

  I would take care of my kids during the day. Then I would put them to bed and start working. I was really doing two jobs at once.

  What were your days typically like?

  I probably averaged about four hours of sleep a night. I would wake up around 5:30 a.m. and go to bed around 1:00 a.m. I would take naps with my kids in the afternoon. That was how I got through. I would force my toddler to take a nap when the baby did. Then I would take a nap with them.

  It was a delicate dance. I was very tired for about two years.

  That sounds really hard.

  It wasn’t all bad. Contract jobs typically pay well, so I was able to pay off a lot of things, including my student loans. That was great. But I was out of full-time work for almost two years, which was terrifying.

  How did you find your way back to full-time work?

  There was a long period where I didn’t think I would. I was just done. I didn’t want to work in tech anymore. I wanted to go a completely different route. I was kicking myself for taking that first technical writing job, thinking, What did I get myself into?

  What changed your mind?

  I used to ask my daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And when I was working full-time, she said, “I want to be a writer, like you!” Or, “I want to be an artist, like Dad!” He’s a designer.

  Then, after I had been home for a while, her answer began to change. Even though I was still doing contract work, she didn’t really understand that. She just knew I was at home. So she started saying, “I want to be a mommy, like you.”

  Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a full-time parent. It’s a super admirable thing to do. But, personally, it broke my heart to hear my daughter say that. I didn’t want to be instilling that idea. So in that moment, I decided that I was going to find my way back to tech. I was going to find a place to work that wouldn’t treat me in the way that I had been treated.

  Where did you start?

  I focused on remote jobs. I figured that people who trust their employees to work from home will treat them like adults.

  And eventually I landed at a wonderful place. Most of the people who work there are remote. I’ve been there almost four years. I’ve been promoted three times within that time period, and I’m leading the team now.

  Tell us more about why working remotely is so important to you.

  Being able to work remotely is the entire reason that I’ve been able to keep a full-time job while having two small children.

  There’s a million doctor’s appointments and school functions. They don’t actually take that much time. But if you’re working on-site, you just can’t do them all. You can’t take your kid to that twenty-minute doctor’s appointment that they need to get antibiotics. You can’t show up to the thirty-minute classroom party where the parents just stand in the corner.

  So being able to work remotely has really enabled me to be there as a parent and not give up those things that matter to me, while still being able to contribute professionally in a meaningful way. When you work remotely, you don’t have to feel guilty about asking your boss if you can work from home one day or leave early another day.

  For instance, at one of my former full-time positions, I had wanted to take my kids trick-or-treating on Halloween. The trick-or-treating starts in my neighborhood at 7:00 p.m. I had a two-hour commute, so I had to leave work at 3:00 p.m. to get home with enough time to put my kids into their costumes. My boss told me I was allowed to leave early, but that I would have to come in early the next day. So the following morning I was in the office at 5:00 a.m. I turned the lights on that day, just so I could take my kids trick-or-treating.

  I shouldn’t have to choose between my kids and my work. Working remotely means I don’t have to.

  If working remotely is not an option, I imagine that many women will just opt out of tech entirely for the reasons you’re describing. So this also has major consequences for gender inequality within the tech industry.

  Exactly. There are a ton of women who had to leave tech when they had kids. How do we support women who are trying to come back into the industry when their kids are a little older and they’re ready to make that transition? What resources can we provide?

  It’s frustrating to have to face this problem, because it’s very specific to women. In general, women are still expected to fill certain roles in the home and be a parent in a way that men aren’t.

  I’d imagine these types of gendered exclusions happen early in the hiring process. Like if someone has gaps in their résumé because they were raising a kid, it’s counted against them.

  Yes. Not just from the perspective of whether they’ll get the job, but also how much they should be paid. Because people assume that if you’re out of the industry for a few months, you’re behind on things. There’s a belief that the technology is moving so fast that if you fail to keep up with it even for a moment, you’ll no longer have the relevant qualifications. Women already face a huge pay gap in tech, and this sort of thing just exacerbates the problem.

  My first boss at my first job, the one I was telling you about, once made a comment along these lines that I will never forget. He said that women should be paid less when they take time off to have a baby. Because if they’re out of the workforce for a month or two, they’ll be less valuable when they come back. Therefore their pay should be docked.

  That’s a surprisingly pervasive attitude among men in tech. They think women who are taking maternity leave are doing it for fun or something. They think we’re hav- ing a vacation. So why should we make as much money as men?

  The Conversations Are Louder

  In addition to having more remote-friendly policies, what are the other kinds of things you think tech companies could do to reduce gender inequality?

  Put in place better programs to train their managers. Managers have an enormous amount of power. As I’ve moved into a leadership role myself, I see how little training there is. I hire people, I promote people, I give them raises, I sponsor them, I coach them—and I do all of this with no real training. There’s nothing preventing me from imparting my own biases. And that’s a terrifying thing to see from the inside.

  It seems like one common career path in tech is that if you do well as an individual contributor, you move into management. But just because someone is a good software engineer doesn’t mean they’ll be a good manager.

  Yeah, it’s a totally different set of skills. But there isn’t much agreement on what those skills even are. For most people, it’s a complete black box.

  When I moved into a leadership role, I joined Slack communities where managers give one another advice. Some of the things they say are pretty wild. The women and nonbinary folks had to create another private channel just for us, where we talk about how we can influence the men to not be shitty.

  So, yes, we need better criteria for who we promote into management and better training to remove people’s biases, or at least be aware of them. We need to be more intentional about the kind of environment we’re trying to create, and understand the roles that individual managers play in creating that environment.

  Are managers in tech especially powerful? Is there something about the greater informality of tech workplaces and their “flatter” organizational hierarchies that tends to leave more decisions to managerial discretion?

  Let’s say you have salary ranges for the different levels of a particular role. That’s a way to help standardize
pay and reduce gender disparities. But those ranges can be as big as a hundred thousand dollars. And it’s up to the manager to place a new hire within that range.

  So, all the time, I see men who are hired in at higher rates than women with the same amount of experience. Again, it all comes down to the individual manager. Maybe that manager saw something that makes them see the woman as a little less technical. Maybe that woman wasn’t at a well-known company. So they bring her in lower because they have these biases against things that women have no control over, and which does not actually speak to the value they will bring to the organization.

  In recent years, we’ve seen a bigger public conversation about gender inequality in tech. There have also been actions by tech workers against gender inequality that have received media attention, such as the Google walkout in November 2018.1 What’s it like to have these conversations grow?

  These conversations have been happening in back channels for a long time. Not just around women, but around any minority group in tech. If they’re not happening in back channels, they’re happening within people’s heads. We know what’s going on. We know the situation.

  Now there’s this heightened scrutiny. People are calling out things for being unjust, and that’s great. But the heightened scrutiny is not necessarily productive. The media, for example, can be exhausting. There were articles written about my company a couple of years ago that I found really frustrating.

  Why?

  Because we were having these conversations among trusted back-channel groups internally. Then all of a sudden it became a public issue and the narrative was taken away from us. The media makes you out to be victims. You become part of a bigger story about women being mistreated in tech. It’s really tiring after a while.

  It sounds like what you find tiring about the media attention is being made into the object, not the subject, of the story. That you’re being presented as the victim, and not as someone with autonomy and agency.

  Yes, that’s exactly it.

  I mean, just look at the entire situation with James Damore.2 The story was all about him. It was all about his beliefs and his backstory. He was the subject. He got to have all the autonomy and the agency.

  The Damore thing is also interesting because it demonstrates how, as the conversations around diversity become bigger and more visible, people who are not from underrepresented groups start to join them. You see a lot of new voices coming in who don’t really have the context to participate constructively. They don’t really understand the situation, but they feel entitled to offer their opinions. So spaces that were previously smaller and more trusted are now being expanded, and it’s usually not for the better.

  You can no longer use those spaces to vent. Instead, you’re being asked to defend your existence within tech on a larger stage. So a lot of women just back out of the conversation completely, because they don’t want to be put in the position of being the voice of all women.

  So the conversations are louder. There are more people involved. But that doesn’t necessarily make them better.

  3

  The Cook

  The people who populate tech aren’t just software engineers, technical writers, and other white-collar workers. They’re also the security guards, shuttle drivers, janitors, and cafeteria staff who work on office campuses across Silicon Valley. Their labor is often invisible but completely indispensable: if they don’t do their job, nobody else can do theirs.

  Tech’s blue-collar workers are overwhelmingly people of color, and many are immigrants. Despite working in one of the world’s most profitable industries, they earn very low wages: a 2016 study found that they make on average about twenty thousand dollars a year, less than the median annual rent in Santa Clara County, which encompasses Silicon Valley. In response to this punishing math, many of these workers have unionized in recent years, winning higher wages and better benefits. But even with a union, life is hard—long hours, long commutes, and the manifold hardships and indignities that come with sitting in the shadow of Silicon Valley’s wealth.

  We spoke to a cook at a major tech company who knows this life well. This is someone with deep roots in the Bay Area, with vivid memories of the first dot-com boom and firsthand experience of the industry’s local imprint. We talked about what it’s like to cook food in tech, what it’s like to organize a union in tech, and what the future might hold for the region.

  * * *

  Where did you grow up?

  I grew up in West Oakland, California, with my mom and dad, brothers and sisters. It was fun. It was hard. It was poor. We had a Texas Instruments calculator and used to play a game called Lode Runner on it. That’s the most tech we ever had. But I had good family, good friends. Oakland was the best place ever to grow up.

  At some point, I started making really, really, really, really, really poor decisions—the kind of decisions that your parents tell you not to make. This led to discipline by my father. I got kicked out of the house when I was fifteen or sixteen. I started doing little side jobs, and staying with friends. Ultimately, I ended up having a son. That’s when I realized I had to start doing things super different. So I started working in the irrigation industry, which was a hot industry back then.

  When was that?

  That was right around when CNN ran a special called Silicon Valley: The New Gold Rush [1999]. That’s when I started working in irrigation. It was like boom—you could see it. All around this area: Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose. Irrigation was good business because everybody was having money around here. You can tell the economy’s doing good when people are taking care of their yards. It was a beautiful time. Irrigation was hard work, but it paid well.

  Then around 2008, the irrigation business started going bad. That’s when we had the housing crash. People couldn’t afford to get their houses done. In fact, they could barely afford to keep their houses—and a lot of people had bought their houses on fake-ass Wells Fargo bank loans and whatnot. That just, like, shook up the whole world. Suddenly, everybody was vulnerable. Even the irrigation company I was working for wasn’t able to keep up their payments.

  So I ended up going to culinary school. It was my dad’s idea, before he passed away. He knew I liked to cook. Me and him had butted heads just my whole upbringing—I never wanted to do anything he felt like I should do. But I ended up going to culinary school. Which was bullshit—I swear that culinary school is the biggest bullshit ever.

  Why’s that?

  Because they charge you so much, and you don’t even get the job they tell you that you’re gonna get. It does teach you how to cook. I’ll give them that: if you go to culinary school, you will learn how to cook. I did. I thought I knew how to cook, but I didn’t know shit. When I got out, I went to work for one of the biggest tech companies in the area, as a prep cook making twelve dollars an hour. That was around 2010 or 2011, I think.

  Were you hired directly by the company?

  No. As cooks, we’re contract workers. We’re not direct employees of those companies. We have to go through a staffing agency. A lot of people I went to culinary school with went through those agencies, too.

  What was your first impression of tech? What was it like working for that company?

  It was … hella wack. The people at that company … they were different. They really weren’t that cool. At the time, the tech workers thought they were the shit. They were getting all the perks and bonuses. They were at a fresh-ass company that was about to take over everything, and they knew it. I ain’t gonna be mad at them, but they were snobby as hell. You saw the Benzes, the Lamborghinis, the Porsches, the Ferraris, the Bentleys popping all up in the parking lot.

  Some people got more sense now. Back then they were a little different. A lot of people forgot where they came from when they got some money, I guess.

  How long did you stay at that company?

  I was there for a couple years. My coworkers were good people. The chef I worked
for, he taught me a lot. But after a couple years, I left and went to a restaurant. I like working in restaurants, but they don’t pay. You’re making really good food for really good people, and it’s a fun atmosphere. But you’re busting your ass doing a lot of work, and it doesn’t pay. After the restaurant, I went to a catering company. That was cool, too. But once again, it didn’t pay enough.

  That’s why I left. I was like, I need health care. I got a son. He’s active. He’s an athlete. If I don’t have health care, with the price of health care what it is, I couldn’t even afford a single Tylenol in the ambulance. You don’t really have a choice: you’ve got to go back over there and work for the tech companies. It’s hard for restaurants and catering companies to keep cooks, because they can’t pay the money that the tech companies can pay. These companies can drop a new building or a new campus anywhere, and they’re gonna need people to come in there and cook. So I started working for a different big tech company, which is where I still work.

  It had been a few years since you last worked in tech by the time you went back. Had the mood changed? Did tech feel different?

  Yeah, it did. The climate was different. At my current company, the tech workers are hella cool. They just chilling and getting their money, trying to have a good time. They work a lot. They bust their ass.