The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker

I'm sure I'd feel pretty bad too if I was in her place. I hope she can get through it and learn and grow from the experience.

One of my friends lost his job during the dot-com bust. He was married only a few weeks earlier. He was on an H1B and about to get kicked out of the country. He couldn't find a job anywhere because of the bust. He paid money to a body shop to keep his H1B "active", and then he got whatever jobs he could for 2 years, moving around CA taking the shittiest jobs just so that he had money for his family. He went from a software engineer to pumping gas during the midnight shift in Redwood City and getting paid under the table, just so that he would have money. Finally after two years, he got a break and got a job at a big tech company, moved to Austin, and is thriving in his job, made senior manager, and has 3 kids. He suffered great indignities just to survive and to make money and his perseverance paid off, thankfully.

To hear this person say they don't know if they can never interview again because they weren't good enough to join Google, and they would look bad in front of their rich friends, frankly it sickens me. No wonder the hate of Silicon Valley is increasing in these past few years, it's producing people like this that can't take the fact that their feelings were hurt.

My experience at Google is that we love hiring women both for SWE roles and PM roles. All three tech leads I've had over 2.5 years have been women, and I've worked with about as many female PMs as male ones. However, we generally hire PMs with a solid technical background (often a CS major or minor), which the author doesn't mention and so I assume does not have. I would be flabbergasted if she wasn't hired because she's a woman.

Which is why I want the "tech undervalues non-coders" meme to stop getting dragged into these gender discrimination discussions. It muddies the waters and only serves to discredit the person bringing it up in the eyes of technology people who still need to be convinced that we have a gender discrimination problem.

A similar example I saw recently at (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sex-and-the-startup-men-w...) put it clearly:

"The roots of the vast gap in power and value between men and women in Silicon Valley begin very early in the life-cycle of a startup, often before the startup officially has employees or executives. For example, in a company like Facebook... women from the beginning of the company did work that had not yet been conceived or compensated as work. Women who casually dated the founders before the company had employees found themselves doing everything from recruiting engineers from their social networks, mediating founder relationships and disputes, providing product feedback, designing social events, and performing emotional and affective labor."

"When startups begin hiring employees, the fact that nontechnical work may have been originally done for free by friends often leads founders to continue to devalue that labor, considering it optional or “fun,” perhaps a matter of social obligation, rather than serious and valuable. Engineers become highly prized commodities to hunt and value highly, while labor that isn’t technical is often expected to be freely performed by people who may have other jobs at the company (such as administrators) or who may not have any job at the company at all (such as girlfriends and dates). And because this labor often goes underpaid or not paid at all, it also doesn’t signify when equity is divided up."

The author of that needs to ask: why can you find people to do the non-coding work for free or cheap, but you can't find people to do the coding for free or cheap? It has everything to do with the supply and demand of skills. Developers are still more scarce than all those other roles. Full stop.

We absolutely need more powerful women in tech -- by letting more women become great coders. Not by pretending coding ability doesn't matter.

Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.

If a field is dominated by women, the pay tends to be less. Anecdotal, no proof. But this rule of thumb has worked for me. I am often asked to do UI and design stuff. I could be good at it, but I refuse to do it because it shunts me into a lower paid position. I stick to programming and don't allow my male counterparts to make the assumption that I will do their prettifying.

Design work is necessary, and I enjoy my attempts at it on personal projects. If it were my dream job, maybe I would feel differently? I don't know. I just know that as someone who is viewed as "creative", my personal experience is that the stereotype is stunting.

I also don't really think that the part about her rich boyfriend is relevant and it feels a bit weird that the article mentions it. She also sounds very, very negative towards the end of the article. Some of my friends in other sectors have applied to 100 jobs, received one offer and got fired after 6 months because of budget cuts. They still get up every day and try again.

If I was her I would ask why they didn't hire me (feedback is always useful), take the 10k. Travel for a month and get ready to try again. I get that it hurts but working for a startup company the possibility of failure is always around the corner and "selling" to Google and getting some money doesn't sound like the worst way to fail.

In my opinion, even if your teammate doesn't "need the money", it's important that you express how valuable they have been to you (for even just believing in your journey and sticking through it).

> "Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else wrong with her application."

If you go through life believing that any prejudice (sexism, in this case) is dominating your career growth, you will always look for it in the tea leaves, project it onto any situation, and in return invite it. In truth, the person who is prejudiced is you.

You have to live your life assuming good faith unless you have direct evidence of bad faith. You're crippling yourself to assume an ethereal, non-specific, constant prejudice against you because you are putting the locus of control outside yourself.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

In fact, in Amy's words:

> "I feel like I have no power, that this happened to me, and it’s my fault," she said. "I feel so betrayed. And, at this point, I don't really feel like I have it in me to fail again."

It's critical as a professional to believe that the situation is something specific, direct, and within you sphere of influence, so you can look to ways to improve.

In this situation, if you start with the assumption no one was being sexist, it's not that difficult to identify the most probable reason she was not hired and her salary was lower. Google acquihired the engineering team; she was a designer. Therefore, she was not hired.

If you see that as a cause, then it becomes easier to think of ways to improve, such as gaining software development skills or taking on a larger and larger product design roles to make yourself more valuable as an employee. Or just looking for another job.

Of course, they could have been sexist towards her, but the article doesn't provide direct evidence, only Amy's perception of their attitude, which I fully trust she believes is fact even though I also believe she is just projecting.

> "'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said."

The lesson in an nutshell is to never assume prejudice. Only draw that conclusion from direct evidence.

As for the OP's case - we only have only her side of the story. If the team jettisons one of their own when acquired, it may be that they are contemptible, or that she is and they were happy to get rid of her. Or, possibly both.

I would love to hear the other side, but I cannot help but think leaving one of your team to fend for themselves is not exactly the act of a standup person.

Really, I guess I don't feel that sorry. People work their hearts out all over the world for little more than subsistence. Work and business is brutal and full of millions of sad stories.

The level of self entitlement displayed by the "startup culture" is astounding at times.

The company "decided to sell itself to Google as a last resort, after failing to find traction in the market". But the engineers got hired, so probably the product was good but the failure was in marketing, branding, etc. Who was in charge of that? "I did our user experience, our logo, the marketing – all that stuff," she said.

So the article could have been written "Strong technical team makes valuable product, but bad marketing and UI prevents success" and no one would be surprised that the engineers got hired and the marketing & design people didn't.

But that wouldn't fit with the sexism in tech narrative the author wanted, so let's ignore the most significant and obvious facts.

She wasn't an engineer. Perhaps they wanted engineers. Whats wrong with pointing out she happens to be cared for financially so won't have that to worry about? Its not the reason, its a fortunate circumstance.

Playing the sexism card is in rather poor taste. Did she complain when they took her on board because she suspected there was positive discrimination at play?

Doing 'the logo' and 'all that stuff' is suitably vague. Is she not fortunate to have got away with coining 60k for a lowly role in the first place?

Anyway recently a friend showed it to me on their phone and it turns out it's actually full of banal not-interesting-enough-for-twitter observations, obviously made-up half-jokes, and trite glurge nonsense that sounds like it was stolen from my grandmother's email forwards. In a way, this reality is even worse.

If you want to make more money, try to train in and work in a field that makes more money.

Because she's not an engineer. The company folded, the underlying tech may have some value. The branded design? Her years of toil? Did the company have a cleaning person for the office as well?

Someone post this to /r/TumblrInAction already.