It's a bit hard to make sense of this story. Google might not think that her UX/Design talent is a good fit for them (the Design and engineering teams at Google are "separate" from what I've seen). That doesn't say anything about her.
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.
>It was seeming proof that even within the happy-go-lucky world of tech start-ups, there are winners and losers, and more often than not, the losers in situations like these are the designers, who are more likely to be female than their engineer counterparts, and whose "soft" skills are seen as less valuable than coding chops.
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.
Agreed, and that is shrewd thinking, though I'm not sure if it is related to gender. It may be part of it, but I think also design is a more attractive job than coding which is gross and technical, so there are more people who want to do it -> more labor supply -> lower pay.
Same thing with games, tons of people grow up playing them and want to make them -> more supply of workers -> get paid & treated like crap.
It is definitely a supply demand thing. Lots of people go to art/design school, and jobs are scarcer.
Also, look at your average consumer/business startup - by the time you get to 10-20 coders, you might have one full-time designer. Maybe. Or a freelancer whom you bring in for a project when you need them.
I have to disagree. Designers who can actually write serious code are rare unicorns and can typically demand a higher salary because of it. I wouldn't downplay my design skills (if I had any). I'm not sure what your pay grade is at the moment, but an engineer that can design is worth more than someone who is solely a designer or engineer in my books. Maybe it depends on the size/type of company? A small-ish company or startup would be more likely to value someone with multiple toolsets, whereas larger companies look more for specialists.
The problem is, once you demonstrate skills in creative, if you are female, that's now your label. Period. At least, that's my personal, anecdotal experience.
The article really tries to make this about her gender when on the face of it it's about her role. "she had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her male colleagues made" doesn't sound as bad when stated as "the designer had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her engineering colleagues made".
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.
Could be any number of reasons for this. Salary is surprisingly rigid over time for many because people simply don't like negotiating. Women especially negotiate less than men. Maybe she had a $40k salary at her previous job and $60k looked like an amazing deal when in reality is is way below market. Who knows...
Depends tremendously on experience level, whether or not the designer can implement in code (ie, works in HTML/CSS rather than Photoshop), and other important factors.
Having recently hired both designers and engineers, I can say with confidence that the pay differential is a hell of a lot more than 7%. Double is absolutely plausible.
There is a pretty high correlation between gender and roles at technology companies...
"You see, it's not that women get paid less than men... it's that women are designers, and men are programmers, and programmers make more than designers!"
It does sound as bad. The lack of appreciation for 'non-technical' employees labor is pretty sad. I am highly technical, and the designers on my team are the most valuable ones in my eyes... they can do something I can't.
Those statistics and environment aren't something that companies individually create, though. They are just responding to supply and demand for those different roles. And while a web/graphic designer may indeed be valuable to a team, (1) there are probably a lot fewer of them than coders, and (2) their average compensation is probably lower than the average compensation of coders.
The issue really needs to be addressed earlier - at the high school, and college level, when girls start to drop out of technical course work.
>We, socially, consider 'women's work' to be less valuable then men.
I definitely agree with this when we're talking about teachers, nurses, librarians, etc. but I don't think web/product/UX designer is a particularly gendered role. It just looks that way because there are so few working women programmers (in comparison to their solid majority of the population) and the sex ratio for designers is more even.
We consider designers to be less valuable than programmers because there are 5 times as many of them than there are programmers.
Of course designers do something that you can't, and if programmers were common, the designers would be calling the shots. Architects do something you can't, too, and they make a lot less than you do - because there's more of them than we need.
I explained (1) poorly. And yeah, I do agree that they feed into each other. Companies and orgs collectively create supply and demand, and people's attitudes have impact on that.
What I meant was there are fewer designers on staff because there's a need for them, but a much lower need for designer man-hours than coder man-hours.
Your average web/software startup can be served by one or two designers while the coding team scales up to 10+ times that number. Maybe that's different in video games or other design-heavy areas but consumer and business products don't seem to have as much demand for designers.
Designers work tends to be in much more of a winner-take-all star system, where a celebrity with a track record like Johnny Ives, Karim Rashid, or Phillipe Starck can make millions, while your 'average' designer makes very little. In contrast, it's probably a flatter distribution for software engineers.
This is true, but rightly or wrongly roles are compensated very differently. A successful tech company probably needs programmers, designers, testers, customer support, managers, ops, etc. It would be an odd company (though not necessarily a bad one) that paid all those employees the same. Remember that the wage paid to a person is somewhere between 'what I must pay to hire a decent candidate' and 'how much value they actually add', and usually skews towards the former.
It sounds like she sort of got a raw deal, IMHO. Although I blame Google less, and more her company. For a company this small I don't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone. Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.
Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.
For a company this small I don't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone.
I doubt you'd get that. As of 2011, Google's pretty firm on regular employees of acquisitions being contractors first, and sub-80 conversion rates happen.
Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.
I agree. They should have done that.
I think the founders took a deal that was good for them and failed to make sure it worked for everyone. She got a crappy severance; they got jobs at twice what they'd get under normal terms. Not that it excuses their betraying her, I think they were probably a bit panicked about their own job security.
Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.
They saved themselves. You could say that they weren't leaders, then. It's unclear what their other options were.
It's typical bad business. At such a small firm especially when the employees are underpaid with the expectation of some large payoff in the future, the management should ensure that there is a positive outcome for all of their employees. Unfortunately, this frequently does not happen. This scenario is similar to when companies sell out for a per share value below the employee stock option strike price and the senior people all have stock so they get paid while all of the option holders get nothing. Or the startup that fired a lot of their employees with unvested options just prior to the ipo announcement.
These things happen and they are upsetting. There are many bad operators who wouldn't think twice about screwing over the people who helped them get where they are. On the other hand, there are folks who will try to do their best to make sure everyone comes out ok and these are the people who you should try to seek out.
Do acqui-hires go through the same rigorous hiring process as regular hires at Google? I wonder how many engineers that are hired as part of an acquisition would actually pass the infamously hard interviewing process at Google.
As of 2011: regular employees convert to contractors (red badges) and have 12 months to prove themselves. Obviously, executives get a sweetheart deal they arguably don't deserve.
I do know I'd be "orange" or more when negotiating with Google in general, based on this kind of thing. It really is down to the CEO to make sure the whole team gets a fair deal in an exit (not necessarily the same deal, but something as far as possible for each of them).
Where it will really hurt Google is not so much acquihires (where you're doomed otherwise, especially without other options), but when there's any competition. Taking 75% as much money overall but having a great work outcome for everyone for the next 2-6 years is probably worth it, especially if you ever plan to do a startup again.
Which is sad, because Google sounds like an amazing place to work (your concerns for early-career people might be valid, but for senior people, people in infosec, or people at Google Labs, it sounds awesome).
It varies by deal. If you are a hot-shit growing company, you obviously have more leverage to negotiate for your employees and can get them full-time positions with good retention bonuses/stock.
If you are running out of money and don't have a choice, then your employees are probably going to be rolled into an existing product, and at that point, there's probably not a lot of benefit to Google to hire sub-par employees, so they may not get an offer or might get less than in the above case.
It also depends on what your team does: A failing company that does hard core research and employs a bunch of Phds might be worth a lot more than a random social startup that just employs a bunch of randos.
I'm really dismayed by this story, because it reminds me of too many conversations with young professionals who are stuck in their career because they are not professionally developing out of some inner rage. Quoting:
> "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.
> "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.
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.
For better or worse, disadvantaged minorities always have to consider this. It's probably one of the biggest privileges that white males have in day to day life -- they rarely need to consider if race/gender played a role in any decision they encounter.
There was an interesting experimental study that showed that a white male just released from prison was as likely to get a job callback as a black male with no criminal record [1].
There are typically multiple factors at play for any employment decision, but race and gender loom very large -- large enough that ignoring it is just ignorance.
And note, that the domain matters. Jeremy Lin faced discrimination as a basketball player being Asian. But for most domains, being a white male is preferred.
Second, statistics that measure the state are not direct evidence. Individual cases may or may not fit. There may be statistics that measure a company that demonstrate a bias, but unless you have direct evidence of that, it's better to not burden your mind with that negativity.
Third, you aren't a statistic. You have to keep developing and getting better. Don't internalize the statistical oppression. Internalization is the worst form of oppression.
It is incredibly, blindingly privileged to say that internalized oppression is the worst form of oppression. Being oppressed is the worst form of oppression.
And, for people who aren't white men, oppression is a lived reality, not an abstract concept that you can attempt to rationalize away. It is both rational and justified to think that prejudice is a predominant factor in virtually everything, because it is.
Finally, oppression isn't "statistical." The people who cause those statistics have names, faces, and addresses. As do the people who act as their apologists. The personal is the political, but the political is also personal.
If this is true why so many homeless are white men? If this is true why being a soldier, the worst job in the world (because amputations and PTSD are no fun) is done by so many white men? Where is the "privilege" you talk about there?
And there is no intrinsic racism against others by white men, where I'm from (Colombia) everyone is brown-ish but there is still a lot of racism against black people, just for being the majority not for being white.
And why would people say that planes are for flying when there are so many on the ground? Where do you see this "flying" then? And what of broken planes, or model planes, or photographs of planes? Next time you see a photograph of a plane flying through the sky at 20,000 feet you can try again to convince me that racism exists, buddy.
It's a cancerous post modern rhetorical strategy, where people are so convinced that they are absolutely, 100% correct that they use shitty sarcasm to the point of absurdity, then try to call you out for not "getting" a shitty half baked idea, a là reddit/r/shitredditsays
What are you talking about. Being a white male is easy mode.
I'm a white male. This shit is awesome. I won the genetic lottery.
Does anyone ever assume that I can't speak English - No
Does anyone ever assume that I might have body odor - No
Does anyone ever assume that I am not technical/intelligent before speaking to me - No
Am I ever physically/sexually harassed - No
If I move to any high tech friendly city anywhere in North America will I be in a minority and possibly have difficulty finding friends who understand my culture - No
Do I ever worry about little things like having to search for somewhere special to get my haircut - No (I've heard this is a problem for Black and possibly Asian people, I honestly have no idea)
Every door is open, no doors are closed.
It should be the same way for everybody, but right now it isn't and that is really unfortunate. Is it really too hard to recognize that others have it harder?
You should try to start from scratch somewhere else in the US without using your tech/management knowledge, your current money and current friends. I bet you would change your views about the relevance of your skin color.
I don't disagree that your attitude is more productive, but telling people to ignore statistics and assume that they're a special snowflake would be considered unsound advice in any other context.
EDIT: Original post edited so making slight changes.
Considering it is a federal crime to not hire based on race, most employers don't provide the information as to why they break this federal law so readily -- they just do it since it is hard to prove.
So in summary... "Of course we discriminate. We have what we consider awesome reason to do so."
I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be Black and trying to get a job, and run across people like you who won't even give you a chance because they so clearly know how poor of an employee you'd be. Even worse they don't come out front and say it. Well maybe you could fly a confederate flag -- a not so subtle hint, but not an admission of guilt.
But at least for your own comfort -- you're clearly not alone.
Someone burning out from hiring whites? I've never heard such a thing. I doubt that Google looks at its stack ranking and says, "Wow, we have a lot of white underperformers". That was one of my original points -- whites are almost never judged on the basis of race, whereas others are. You seem to be confirming that fact -- but trying to justify it.
Race and gender are both protected groups, although treated differently. There are laws in place meant to stop the type of discrimination that you seem to want to justify.
Contrived examples are not useful. Maybe we'll find out that Asians can cure cancer by touching people -- sure then I'd prefer they become oncologists. But in the real world what you do is test/interview for skills, and sometimes you'll see data that disproportionately over/under-represents a group. That is fine, and that is good to discuss. You'll often find that this bias is due to some other factor.
Simply discriminating because your miniscule sample (and likely media/culturally induced bias) gives you a bias, is almost the canonical definition of racism.
There was a time in my lifetime that Blacks were not considered smart enough to be quarterbacks. The data seemed to support it (when Doug Williams was drafted, there had been a total of 11 Black QBs in NFL history). In less than a generation we now have Blacks overrepresented in the NFL as QB (as compared to the population, not as compared to Blacks in the NFL). And another Black QB won the Super Bowl, largely viewed as one of the smartest players in the game.
The good thing is that sports tends to really favor skills assessment over the long haul (the scoreboard is a pretty good reflection of quality). Except in the most exceptional cases, I'd suggest others do the same.
This was very similar to my thinking as well. If you look for reasons you will find them. The simplest explanation was the acquisition was for $X + All engineers. It was stated that the acquisition was done under duress (the company was out of money) She wasn't an engineer, she wasn't part of the deal. I would wonder why as a founder she wasn't part of the discussion with Google but that certainly can happen when its just the board (typically CEO and the early investors doing the discussion). Depending on the culture the CEO may or may not bring the other founders into the process.
So this is the mind disease that "Amy" needs to cure:
> "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."
She didn't "fail" any more than the rest of the group "succeeded", it was a business transaction and had nothing to with her and everything to do with Google hiring more engineers. She now has a CEO type person who she can note as someone who doesn't have her interests at heart (the company representative in the negotiation should have gotten her a decent severance package from the deal) and she's been through a company from start to finish so she has an idea of what it takes. Armed with that experience and, if she's spent some time processing it, wisdom, she is in a position to start again and potentially be more effective. What part of the marketing worked? What part didn't? Were the traction issues product or messaging related? Did they reach their target audience? If not why not? Do the whole post mortem thing and learn.
I've been doing this a long time and know it is rarely "about you." You're resume now has a startup with a "successful" exit (acquired by Google), almost everyone reading it will know that is a better outcome than Chapter 7 bankruptcy. (everyone went home and got nothing) You get the respect of having 'been around the block.' which is awesome. So if you do go into a startup situation again, this time as part of the negotiation you say to your potential boss, I want it in my offer that we're acqui-hired and they decide not to hire me, I'll get 6 months severance with benefits so that I can work on my next thing. That is an "easy" thing to agree too since it both clarifies your position in a future acquisition strategy, and it only pays off when the company is being acquired. The second startup I did the Marketing VP had this in their agreement because they knew, as marketing, they were associated more with the product/space and not simply tech talent that could easily be re-purposed[1].
Bottom line, it isn't you, it's never about you, its about what the company wants. Move along. For grins and giggles though check in with your engineer colleagues to see if they would have preferred not to be hired later on. Often such acquisitions include a "retention" clause which, in practice, means the acquiring company can put you (an engineer) on really crappy projects that nobody else wants and you're going to do it anyway because you're locked in for some amount of time to get your bonus. A friend of mine, who has been acquired by Cisco twice, we would ask "So, how long are you in for?" because for an entrepreneur, being stuck at BigCorp for 18, 24, or 36 months really wasn't a vacation.
[1] That engineers are fungible and marketing folks are not is of course not true but a lot of technical acquisitions treat it like it is I've found.
EXACTLY! Blame the disenfranchised for their doubts and concerns. They probably got that way by watching movies or something. It's almost never based in a history of exploitation.
I've grown keenly aware of the gender disparities in tech and it's an issue I care about fixing.
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.
"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.
You're missing out entirely on the point of the article.
The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand".
It's ultimately shitty that everyone in the company but the designer got to fail upwards and land in cushy jobs while she got $10k and a pat on the head. Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?
You need one designer for every 3 or 4 programmers, but that doesn't mean you still don't need good designers or that their individual contribution is automatically less valuable.
"The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand"."
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I haven't seen any data to back it up. The common sense explanation seems like it fits. Work that can be done by lots of people gets lower (or zero) wages. If the problem were women getting underpaid, we'd see the same problem among female developers. Do we?
Designers are worth less in an acquihire. As a result, designers should demand wages that are closer to the market rate than developers do when they work for startups.
I doubt anyone collects statistics on acquihires let alone "girlfriends or wives who help out in startups but don't get paid for it", or "HR people who got shafted with useless stock options".
(Female developers being somewhat underpaid is a common enough trope, though)
There are plenty of designers who can't code, who are both male and female. Really way too many. Consequently, unless you're beyond extraordinary, demand is low as are the salaries. However, if you're a designer who can code i.e. a front end engineer, you can get a king's ransom regardless of gender.
I've known plenty of designers who aspire to code "one day" but they never do for whatever reason.
I don't doubt that there is gender discrimination and ageism in the industry. However I don't feel that this is a case of one.
>Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?
So why do the developers get paid more than other (white male) workers who work longer hours doing harder work? Because "long hours" and "sacrifice" have absolutely nothing to do with what anyone gets paid.
Your pay is not a function of just yourself. It's a function of every other person who could have done your job instead. The more of them there are, and the worse their other alternatives, the lower your wages will be.
I would just counsel that there are more angles in our relationship to work above and beyond pure supply and demand.
You have (employment) market liquidity, you have long standing cultural practices, you have collective action problems, etc. We happen to work in a rapidly growing industry, which is why times are rosy.
Developers are still more scarce than all those other roles. Full stop.
Nail on the head. These weakly compensated "office coordinator" or "customer service" roles aren't weakly compensated because they skew toward females. They are weakly compensated because they can be.
Try to pay a female engineer $30K when she has offers from other places for 3x more than that. She'll laugh in your face.
"....not all women are the target demo of Randi's lip synching, the CEO of General Dynamics is a woman, I think she has a higher security clearance than the entire Senate, and I know for a fact she builds alien spaceships, why not interview her about how she uses social media to promote her brand and make connections and break ceilings? Because there's no Like button for hard work or triple integrals, which is doubly interesting because calculus was invented to make hard work easier. "I just don't get math." Can't do math if you weren't taught to think logically, and logic is tough on kids' self esteems and makes them way less submissive, easier just to put on a video. "They're obsessed with the Wiggles." And apple juice, whose fault is that? So instead of "if you do the same amount of hard work as everyone else, you should end up in the exact same boat as everyone else, and it will sink because none of you know anything about boats," we get Randi Zuckerberg, a lot, who tells us about the occupational hazards of posting baby pictures"
That post is literally impossible to read. Not only does he fail to stay on topic for huge swaths of the entry, but he goes egregiously off topic multiple times within the same sentence.
I'm also not sure I understand the larger point after reading the rest of the quoted section. Is it women aren't doing the right jobs? Women aren't respected? Women don't respect themselves? He touched on all these ideas at some point in the section. Or is it something totally different?
"Randi Zuckerberg is CEO of Zuckerberg Media, which, according to its 10-K, is an iphone. If you have no idea who she is, and you shouldn't, then the answer to your one and only question is yes."
I guess that should've tipped me off to the insanity I as about to dive into. (Also his stream of conscious is a little too similar to mine and it's never nice to meet yourself)
Your whole premise is founded on there somehow being intrinsic value in a more even split in gender in software engineering, are there not neurological/biological differences between men and women that could explain at least some of the disparity? Never even talked about on here by the gender activists
The following is personal opinion/experience and I do not represent Google, etc.
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.
I don't think this has to do anything with Amy being a woman. I personally know about 2 cases where a silicon valley big corp company interviewed employees before an acquisition and let go some of them. Maybe because they are not that important for the job.
"Talking through her tears on Monday night, Amy said she didn't know if she'd be able to recover from what she considered the worst setback of her professional life. After what happened at Google, she wasn't even sure she could bring herself to interview for another job."
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.
What we say in the emotional raw state is not what is going to determine our future. Otherwise, I would have given up more times than I can count. :)
And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"
> And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"
If she doesn't know how to spin that, she should get someone to help her out because it's really just a matter of perception. I'm no communications expert but I'd start with "Google wanted engineers," "Google was looking for a different skillset," etc. This is the type of thing that a good recruiter can actually really help with.
> He suffered great indignities just to survive and to make money...
Not sure this is a popular opinion, but I feel like a lot of white-collar workers should go work blue-collar jobs once in a while, even if for a day. Indignities are trying to bribe companies to keep a visa valid, not so much working low paying jobs, and perseverance doesn't help others that have no better out like everyone wants you to believe. Which is a huge shame.
I co-own a fast food restaurant, and I try to spend a half day every week there in person making sure things are going okay. People do a double take and then some when they discover that my day job is really as a software developer because they don't expect me to stand around at the counter or flip a burger like the $10/hour employees because I have a six figure income so I could fuck off very easily. People also treat me with way more respect afterwards - totally different from "you're the boss" is "you're the boss but you have a super swank other job". Everyone from random steady customers to like, those (insert major tech company) employees that came in the other day while I was madly typing away on my laptop during a slow hour and the 15 year old punks that just got out of school calling me a "bitch" (..."I want a burger") to "what are you doing, you type really fast" to "yes ma'am, I'm sorry, also that's really cool!!" in a matter of minutes.
Me working hard at the same job is assumed to have a good payoff in the end (maybe my also-programmer husband and I can eventually afford a nice house in SF...lol) while my employees working harder than me is assumed to be terrible - "why are you still a burger flipper" with what time and money to become better even if I try to pay them decently and work with their schedules? I even put out a job posting for more summer hires recently and got a whole slew of people with degrees - including ones with MBAs and a CS degree that I emailed instead with "wanna talk to a tech recruiter?" Sigh...
It may not have been any better for her if she joined. A friend of mine was an evangelist of a startup, acquired by Google for their technology. She was humiliated by having to essentially re-apply for her job and be ejected a few months later. (Incidentally, this woman is an accomplished programmer and project leader, but not quite the C++ rock star that Google looks for).
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.
Faced with a similar prospect in my small company, the founders agreed (in writing) to set aside a portion of their proceeds (including a portion of gross salary) to ensure that payments were made to anyone on the team who was not hired.
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).
A nice gesture like this done before the fact helps mitigate perception problems. The problem is "damaged goods" repulation, its not the "rejection". New hiring managers will silently discriminate against her (surely). By giving your employees something to point to, you are being more responsible in how you do the buyout transaction. I actually don't agree with the view that this is some type of mis=placed "entitlement", because the problem is a real problem regardless of who it impacts. Although she also shouldn't over-worry if she's falling into a hot market with a strong support network.
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.
Being acqui-hired means the company managed to recruit a team that's probably decent, but failed to do anything substantially more valuable than that. If the product were inherently strong they'd continue it with different marketing staff.
I edited my comment several times and I think the message I was originally trying to convey got less clear as a result.
I don't for a moment believe the startup actually failed due solely to the designer. And yet, it's more likely that the designer just wasn't google-quality than libelling google by claiming it was sexism that caused them to hire a few engineers but not the designer from a failed startup.
The first time I heard about "Secret" I thought it sounded awful, and assumed it would be full of spiteful gossip and behind-the-back-talking, and decided I'd never use it and would ignore anything I learned that was sourced from it.
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.
> "'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said
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?
I didn't get that. It looked to me like she took 60k at the startup instead of a higher number at a more established company with the expectation that she'd get paid out the difference at the exit. Isn't that the risk/reward expectation of startup employment?
And what's wrong with pointing out her external financial situation is that it is not relevant to the decisions of the business. Is it less wrong to screw over a girl with a rich boyfriend than it is to screw over anybody else?
> 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
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?
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.
It sucks and I feel for Amy.
Then again, she did make 60K a year for period. As a designer. And 10K isn't much but it's enough to buy a few nice things.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI 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.
her financial cushion had made it easier for her colleagues to leave her behind.
"Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you’re a girl and you have a rich boyfriend," she said.
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.
Same thing with games, tons of people grow up playing them and want to make them -> more supply of workers -> get paid & treated like crap.
Also, look at your average consumer/business startup - by the time you get to 10-20 coders, you might have one full-time designer. Maybe. Or a freelancer whom you bring in for a project when you need them.
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.
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=User+experience+designer&l1=...
Having recently hired both designers and engineers, I can say with confidence that the pay differential is a hell of a lot more than 7%. Double is absolutely plausible.
"You see, it's not that women get paid less than men... it's that women are designers, and men are programmers, and programmers make more than designers!"
It does sound as bad. The lack of appreciation for 'non-technical' employees labor is pretty sad. I am highly technical, and the designers on my team are the most valuable ones in my eyes... they can do something I can't.
All roles help build the company.
The issue really needs to be addressed earlier - at the high school, and college level, when girls start to drop out of technical course work.
We, socially, consider 'women's work' to be less valuable then men. Hence, positions that have a gendered connotation have a difference in salary.
Your (1) should mean that their salary is way _higher_ than programmers. Supply and demand, no? I also don't know if what you say is true.
I definitely agree with this when we're talking about teachers, nurses, librarians, etc. but I don't think web/product/UX designer is a particularly gendered role. It just looks that way because there are so few working women programmers (in comparison to their solid majority of the population) and the sex ratio for designers is more even.
We consider designers to be less valuable than programmers because there are 5 times as many of them than there are programmers.
Of course designers do something that you can't, and if programmers were common, the designers would be calling the shots. Architects do something you can't, too, and they make a lot less than you do - because there's more of them than we need.
What I meant was there are fewer designers on staff because there's a need for them, but a much lower need for designer man-hours than coder man-hours.
Your average web/software startup can be served by one or two designers while the coding team scales up to 10+ times that number. Maybe that's different in video games or other design-heavy areas but consumer and business products don't seem to have as much demand for designers.
Designers work tends to be in much more of a winner-take-all star system, where a celebrity with a track record like Johnny Ives, Karim Rashid, or Phillipe Starck can make millions, while your 'average' designer makes very little. In contrast, it's probably a flatter distribution for software engineers.
This is true, but rightly or wrongly roles are compensated very differently. A successful tech company probably needs programmers, designers, testers, customer support, managers, ops, etc. It would be an odd company (though not necessarily a bad one) that paid all those employees the same. Remember that the wage paid to a person is somewhere between 'what I must pay to hire a decent candidate' and 'how much value they actually add', and usually skews towards the former.
Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.
I doubt you'd get that. As of 2011, Google's pretty firm on regular employees of acquisitions being contractors first, and sub-80 conversion rates happen.
Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.
I agree. They should have done that.
I think the founders took a deal that was good for them and failed to make sure it worked for everyone. She got a crappy severance; they got jobs at twice what they'd get under normal terms. Not that it excuses their betraying her, I think they were probably a bit panicked about their own job security.
Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.
They saved themselves. You could say that they weren't leaders, then. It's unclear what their other options were.
These things happen and they are upsetting. There are many bad operators who wouldn't think twice about screwing over the people who helped them get where they are. On the other hand, there are folks who will try to do their best to make sure everyone comes out ok and these are the people who you should try to seek out.
Where it will really hurt Google is not so much acquihires (where you're doomed otherwise, especially without other options), but when there's any competition. Taking 75% as much money overall but having a great work outcome for everyone for the next 2-6 years is probably worth it, especially if you ever plan to do a startup again.
Which is sad, because Google sounds like an amazing place to work (your concerns for early-career people might be valid, but for senior people, people in infosec, or people at Google Labs, it sounds awesome).
If you are running out of money and don't have a choice, then your employees are probably going to be rolled into an existing product, and at that point, there's probably not a lot of benefit to Google to hire sub-par employees, so they may not get an offer or might get less than in the above case.
It also depends on what your team does: A failing company that does hard core research and employs a bunch of Phds might be worth a lot more than a random social startup that just employs a bunch of randos.
> "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.
For better or worse, disadvantaged minorities always have to consider this. It's probably one of the biggest privileges that white males have in day to day life -- they rarely need to consider if race/gender played a role in any decision they encounter.
There was an interesting experimental study that showed that a white male just released from prison was as likely to get a job callback as a black male with no criminal record [1].
There are typically multiple factors at play for any employment decision, but race and gender loom very large -- large enough that ignoring it is just ignorance.
And note, that the domain matters. Jeremy Lin faced discrimination as a basketball player being Asian. But for most domains, being a white male is preferred.
[1] Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment, Am Sociol Rev. Oct 1, 2009; 74(5): 777–799, http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ASR_pager_etal09.pdf
Second, statistics that measure the state are not direct evidence. Individual cases may or may not fit. There may be statistics that measure a company that demonstrate a bias, but unless you have direct evidence of that, it's better to not burden your mind with that negativity.
Third, you aren't a statistic. You have to keep developing and getting better. Don't internalize the statistical oppression. Internalization is the worst form of oppression.
And, for people who aren't white men, oppression is a lived reality, not an abstract concept that you can attempt to rationalize away. It is both rational and justified to think that prejudice is a predominant factor in virtually everything, because it is.
Finally, oppression isn't "statistical." The people who cause those statistics have names, faces, and addresses. As do the people who act as their apologists. The personal is the political, but the political is also personal.
And there is no intrinsic racism against others by white men, where I'm from (Colombia) everyone is brown-ish but there is still a lot of racism against black people, just for being the majority not for being white.
I'm a white male. This shit is awesome. I won the genetic lottery.
Does anyone ever assume that I can't speak English - No
Does anyone ever assume that I might have body odor - No
Does anyone ever assume that I am not technical/intelligent before speaking to me - No
Am I ever physically/sexually harassed - No
If I move to any high tech friendly city anywhere in North America will I be in a minority and possibly have difficulty finding friends who understand my culture - No
Do I ever worry about little things like having to search for somewhere special to get my haircut - No (I've heard this is a problem for Black and possibly Asian people, I honestly have no idea)
Every door is open, no doors are closed.
It should be the same way for everybody, but right now it isn't and that is really unfortunate. Is it really too hard to recognize that others have it harder?
[edit - formatting]
Is not hard to also see it in statistics: Men are 68% vs Women; and between races White (non-hispanic) is the largest one: http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf
Considering it is a federal crime to not hire based on race, most employers don't provide the information as to why they break this federal law so readily -- they just do it since it is hard to prove.
So in summary... "Of course we discriminate. We have what we consider awesome reason to do so."
I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be Black and trying to get a job, and run across people like you who won't even give you a chance because they so clearly know how poor of an employee you'd be. Even worse they don't come out front and say it. Well maybe you could fly a confederate flag -- a not so subtle hint, but not an admission of guilt.
But at least for your own comfort -- you're clearly not alone.
Race and gender are both protected groups, although treated differently. There are laws in place meant to stop the type of discrimination that you seem to want to justify.
Contrived examples are not useful. Maybe we'll find out that Asians can cure cancer by touching people -- sure then I'd prefer they become oncologists. But in the real world what you do is test/interview for skills, and sometimes you'll see data that disproportionately over/under-represents a group. That is fine, and that is good to discuss. You'll often find that this bias is due to some other factor.
Simply discriminating because your miniscule sample (and likely media/culturally induced bias) gives you a bias, is almost the canonical definition of racism.
There was a time in my lifetime that Blacks were not considered smart enough to be quarterbacks. The data seemed to support it (when Doug Williams was drafted, there had been a total of 11 Black QBs in NFL history). In less than a generation we now have Blacks overrepresented in the NFL as QB (as compared to the population, not as compared to Blacks in the NFL). And another Black QB won the Super Bowl, largely viewed as one of the smartest players in the game.
The good thing is that sports tends to really favor skills assessment over the long haul (the scoreboard is a pretty good reflection of quality). Except in the most exceptional cases, I'd suggest others do the same.
White males can be minorities, too.
So this is the mind disease that "Amy" needs to cure:
She didn't "fail" any more than the rest of the group "succeeded", it was a business transaction and had nothing to with her and everything to do with Google hiring more engineers. She now has a CEO type person who she can note as someone who doesn't have her interests at heart (the company representative in the negotiation should have gotten her a decent severance package from the deal) and she's been through a company from start to finish so she has an idea of what it takes. Armed with that experience and, if she's spent some time processing it, wisdom, she is in a position to start again and potentially be more effective. What part of the marketing worked? What part didn't? Were the traction issues product or messaging related? Did they reach their target audience? If not why not? Do the whole post mortem thing and learn.I've been doing this a long time and know it is rarely "about you." You're resume now has a startup with a "successful" exit (acquired by Google), almost everyone reading it will know that is a better outcome than Chapter 7 bankruptcy. (everyone went home and got nothing) You get the respect of having 'been around the block.' which is awesome. So if you do go into a startup situation again, this time as part of the negotiation you say to your potential boss, I want it in my offer that we're acqui-hired and they decide not to hire me, I'll get 6 months severance with benefits so that I can work on my next thing. That is an "easy" thing to agree too since it both clarifies your position in a future acquisition strategy, and it only pays off when the company is being acquired. The second startup I did the Marketing VP had this in their agreement because they knew, as marketing, they were associated more with the product/space and not simply tech talent that could easily be re-purposed[1].
Bottom line, it isn't you, it's never about you, its about what the company wants. Move along. For grins and giggles though check in with your engineer colleagues to see if they would have preferred not to be hired later on. Often such acquisitions include a "retention" clause which, in practice, means the acquiring company can put you (an engineer) on really crappy projects that nobody else wants and you're going to do it anyway because you're locked in for some amount of time to get your bonus. A friend of mine, who has been acquired by Cisco twice, we would ask "So, how long are you in for?" because for an entrepreneur, being stuck at BigCorp for 18, 24, or 36 months really wasn't a vacation.
[1] That engineers are fungible and marketing folks are not is of course not true but a lot of technical acquisitions treat it like it is I've found.
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.
The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand".
It's ultimately shitty that everyone in the company but the designer got to fail upwards and land in cushy jobs while she got $10k and a pat on the head. Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?
You need one designer for every 3 or 4 programmers, but that doesn't mean you still don't need good designers or that their individual contribution is automatically less valuable.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I haven't seen any data to back it up. The common sense explanation seems like it fits. Work that can be done by lots of people gets lower (or zero) wages. If the problem were women getting underpaid, we'd see the same problem among female developers. Do we?
Designers are worth less in an acquihire. As a result, designers should demand wages that are closer to the market rate than developers do when they work for startups.
I doubt anyone collects statistics on acquihires let alone "girlfriends or wives who help out in startups but don't get paid for it", or "HR people who got shafted with useless stock options".
(Female developers being somewhat underpaid is a common enough trope, though)
So, we're left with anecdotes. "Unpaid female work" is an common theme. You've got the MVC article linked above or say this one here http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/ceo-archetypes-7-joan-of-... and I'm reminded of Scott Weiss' post on the disruption his personal life suffered due to this startup ( http://scott.a16z.com/2014/01/17/success-at-work-failure-at-... ) and tucked away in there is a bit where his Harvard MBA wife had to stay at home to look after the kids.
I've known plenty of designers who aspire to code "one day" but they never do for whatever reason.
I don't doubt that there is gender discrimination and ageism in the industry. However I don't feel that this is a case of one.
So why do the developers get paid more than other (white male) workers who work longer hours doing harder work? Because "long hours" and "sacrifice" have absolutely nothing to do with what anyone gets paid.
Your pay is not a function of just yourself. It's a function of every other person who could have done your job instead. The more of them there are, and the worse their other alternatives, the lower your wages will be.
You have (employment) market liquidity, you have long standing cultural practices, you have collective action problems, etc. We happen to work in a rapidly growing industry, which is why times are rosy.
Nail on the head. These weakly compensated "office coordinator" or "customer service" roles aren't weakly compensated because they skew toward females. They are weakly compensated because they can be.
Try to pay a female engineer $30K when she has offers from other places for 3x more than that. She'll laugh in your face.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html
"....not all women are the target demo of Randi's lip synching, the CEO of General Dynamics is a woman, I think she has a higher security clearance than the entire Senate, and I know for a fact she builds alien spaceships, why not interview her about how she uses social media to promote her brand and make connections and break ceilings? Because there's no Like button for hard work or triple integrals, which is doubly interesting because calculus was invented to make hard work easier. "I just don't get math." Can't do math if you weren't taught to think logically, and logic is tough on kids' self esteems and makes them way less submissive, easier just to put on a video. "They're obsessed with the Wiggles." And apple juice, whose fault is that? So instead of "if you do the same amount of hard work as everyone else, you should end up in the exact same boat as everyone else, and it will sink because none of you know anything about boats," we get Randi Zuckerberg, a lot, who tells us about the occupational hazards of posting baby pictures"
I'm also not sure I understand the larger point after reading the rest of the quoted section. Is it women aren't doing the right jobs? Women aren't respected? Women don't respect themselves? He touched on all these ideas at some point in the section. Or is it something totally different?
This particular article even self-consciously responds to your criticism:
"Randi Zuckerberg is CEO of Zuckerberg Media, which, according to its 10-K, is an iphone. If you have no idea who she is, and you shouldn't, then the answer to your one and only question is yes."
I guess that should've tipped me off to the insanity I as about to dive into. (Also his stream of conscious is a little too similar to mine and it's never nice to meet yourself)
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.
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.
And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"
If she doesn't know how to spin that, she should get someone to help her out because it's really just a matter of perception. I'm no communications expert but I'd start with "Google wanted engineers," "Google was looking for a different skillset," etc. This is the type of thing that a good recruiter can actually really help with.
Not sure this is a popular opinion, but I feel like a lot of white-collar workers should go work blue-collar jobs once in a while, even if for a day. Indignities are trying to bribe companies to keep a visa valid, not so much working low paying jobs, and perseverance doesn't help others that have no better out like everyone wants you to believe. Which is a huge shame.
I co-own a fast food restaurant, and I try to spend a half day every week there in person making sure things are going okay. People do a double take and then some when they discover that my day job is really as a software developer because they don't expect me to stand around at the counter or flip a burger like the $10/hour employees because I have a six figure income so I could fuck off very easily. People also treat me with way more respect afterwards - totally different from "you're the boss" is "you're the boss but you have a super swank other job". Everyone from random steady customers to like, those (insert major tech company) employees that came in the other day while I was madly typing away on my laptop during a slow hour and the 15 year old punks that just got out of school calling me a "bitch" (..."I want a burger") to "what are you doing, you type really fast" to "yes ma'am, I'm sorry, also that's really cool!!" in a matter of minutes.
Me working hard at the same job is assumed to have a good payoff in the end (maybe my also-programmer husband and I can eventually afford a nice house in SF...lol) while my employees working harder than me is assumed to be terrible - "why are you still a burger flipper" with what time and money to become better even if I try to pay them decently and work with their schedules? I even put out a job posting for more summer hires recently and got a whole slew of people with degrees - including ones with MBAs and a CS degree that I emailed instead with "wanna talk to a tech recruiter?" Sigh...
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.
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).
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.
If a startup fails to find traction, there's no clear reason to blame anybody. Most startups do that.
I don't for a moment believe the startup actually failed due solely to the designer. And yet, it's more likely that the designer just wasn't google-quality than libelling google by claiming it was sexism that caused them to hire a few engineers but not the designer from a failed startup.
If you want to make more money, try to train in and work in a field that makes more money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0
Coffee's for closers.
It's a talking reality check.
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.
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?
And what's wrong with pointing out her external financial situation is that it is not relevant to the decisions of the business. Is it less wrong to screw over a girl with a rich boyfriend than it is to screw over anybody else?
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.
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.