Brotopia

by Emily Chang

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  WHAT SANKAR ALSO DOESN’T address is that all jobs in Silicon Valley don’t have to fall into the same category, because the industry is now mature enough to afford a variety of work options. The twenty-two-year-old recent graduate who wants to create his or her life all around work should put in sixty-plus-hour weeks and be lauded. Certainly that’s what many founders and early employees have done, many to great success. But the idea that this is the only way to go, or that this should be the work style across one’s entire career, is ridiculous. Silicon Valley doesn’t need one more life hack. What it needs is an entirely new operating system.

  Family isn’t the only thing that gets put on hold in the work-obsessed Silicon culture. Workweeks used to leave hours available that could be devoted not only to children but to community, church, volunteering, and socializing. In return for taking those hours away, companies try to compensate employees by offering money, stock options, and perks. And they seek to replace the traditional social networks on which our communities were built—for example, by encouraging employees to take all of their meals at work or to socialize at the office. So the employee needs to do the economic calculation: Is what Google will compensate me for that hour worth more than the value of keeping that hour for myself or my family? That calculation changes as we age, and as kids enter the picture, it becomes a retention issue.

  In a 2012 interview, Sheryl Sandberg rocked Silicon Valley by revealing that she leaves work at 5:30 p.m. every day. Hard to say which left people more incredulous, that such an important female executive could leave work at such an early hour or that she would actually admit it. The press trumpeted the story everywhere, and Sandberg says a friend remarked that she “couldn’t have gotten more publicity than if she had murdered someone with an ax.” Sandberg told Bloomberg Businessweek that the entire legal team at Yahoo sent her flowers, with a card reading, “Thank you, we’re all leaving at 5:30 pm now too.”

  Sandberg has said that she spent years trying to hide her exit time. She’d leave her jacket on her chair so people might think she was still in the office taking a meeting somewhere, or she’d schedule afternoon meetings in other buildings so people wouldn’t see her walk to her car. She would send a few emails late at night and early in the morning to show she was still at it. Now she is confident enough in her achievements that she can admit to (gasp) leaving work in time for dinner with her kids. She doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t pick up work again after they’re in bed. “Of course I do. [That’s what] gives me the flexibility I need to be home,” she told me in a Bloomberg Television interview in 2017. She thinks employers “need to communicate well with our employees. Not everything is an emergency . . . I do send emails late at night. I have a system with people I work with,” she explains. “If it’s important and I need an answer, I will red flag it. If I don’t red flag it, you can wait.”

  Sandberg’s message is that people shouldn’t have to choose between being great employees and being great mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters and that companies need to help make this vision a reality. “Companies have an opportunity and an obligation to step into the gap,” she says. “And what’s important for companies to understand is this isn’t a trade-off between the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. This is both. When companies make a deep commitment to their employees . . . employees make those commitments back.”

  Sandberg is arguing not just for better corporate and public policy around things like family leave but also for companies and managers to be more attuned to their employees’ emotional and personal needs. When it comes to dinner at Facebook, she told me, “We offer dinner, but no one’s required to come. I know our people who take their dinner in a box when they go home.” Then she reiterated, “I think companies have an obligation to do what they can.”

  Most companies, unfortunately, don’t “step up,” as Sandberg advises; they wait to get pushed. It took a report from the former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder for Uber to move its dinner offering from 8:15 to 7:00 p.m. Holder was tasked with critiquing the company’s culture after Susan Fowler’s accusation of sexual harassment came to light. Holder noted that an earlier dinner would allow a “broader group of employees” to utilize the benefit—including those who “have spouses or families waiting for them at home”—and signal an earlier end to the workday. Uber complied.

  In April 2017, as I was writing this book, Apple opened its new spare-no-expense, spaceship-like campus, Apple Park, at a cost of $5 billion. A true marvel, it includes four-story sliding glass doors, rotating elevators, and a 100,000-square-foot wellness center (plus a two-story yoga room), not to mention a carbon-fiber roof and nine thousand drought-resistant trees. One thing it doesn’t have is a child-care facility. One blogger quipped, Apple’s new campus has “everything an Apple employee could wish for, unless they have children in which case: tough.”

  Sure, child care might be hard to execute, but Silicon Valley has never claimed to be normal or shied away from hard problems. Large firms have basically reinvented commuting by running fleets of tricked-out buses around the Bay Area. Because child care has proven an effective way to retain female employees, it’s curious it hasn’t gained more momentum in an industry that prides itself on groundbreaking solutions. But perhaps that’s because Silicon Valley doesn’t realize just how much this industry is disrupting the families of those who work in it.

  PARENTHOOD AND THE PRESSURE TO KEEP UP

  Katharine Zaleski had just given birth to her first daughter and had just launched her first start-up, PowerToFly, which aims to find women tech jobs that offer flexible working arrangements, when she publicly apologized to all the moms she had ever worked with. In a Fortune article, Zaleski admitted that in her many years running digital products at the Huffington Post and the Washington Post, she had “silently slandered” women with kids by negatively judging their job performance. She rolled her eyes when they couldn’t make post-work drinks, repeatedly questioned their commitment, scheduled last-minute meetings at 4:30 p.m., just when parents might be wrapping up so they could go pick up their kids, and stayed at work late simply to prove she was more dedicated to the job. Some mothers would come in early and leave early, doing more work after dinner, but Zaleski wouldn’t value their after-hours contributions. She only realized she’d committed this “long list of infractions” when she had her own child and discovered that “work is so rigged against mothers—and not only mothers, but young women, who are taught, ‘You have to outman the men.’”

  In tech, however, even men who become parents find it hard to keep up. Bret Taylor, founder of Quip, a workplace collaboration software maker, started working at Facebook in 2009, when he was twenty-eight years old and expecting his first child. Taylor had left Google to start his own company, FriendFeed, which consolidated updates from social-media sites. When Mark Zuckerberg made an offer to buy the company, it was the opportunity of a lifetime for Taylor, who agreed to the sale and was later promoted to chief technology officer. There was only one problem.

  Just as he was becoming a father, Taylor recalls, “I was losing control of my own schedule and no longer running my own company and working for someone . . . younger than me [Zuckerberg was twenty-five at the time] who didn’t have kids. I was really, really nervous about it.”

  Taylor says “the culture was younger” at Facebook than at Google and he found it more difficult to feel as if he belonged to the community. “The hardest part for me as a father—which applies infinitely more so to mothers—was the implicit stuff,” Taylor says, such as feeling obligated to attend the hackathons that were integral to Facebook’s operation. “You face this social trade-off where you say, ‘Am I the uncool person who says, “I can’t go to this thing that everyone is going to”?’ Or, worse, do I tell my boss that I cannot do a meeting at bedtime because I have to be home? Or do you suck it up and . . . tell your spouse, ‘Putting the kids d
own is on you tonight’? I faced that more at Facebook than any other place,” Taylor says. “If Mark Zuckerberg asked me to do a dinner meeting, it would be really uncomfortable for me to say no, for obvious reasons.”

  Taylor believes the women who worked at Facebook faced an even bigger trade-off: “When someone would go on maternity leave, it was like fifty-fifty whether they would come back.”

  As he struggled to balance work and family, Taylor found both Zuckerberg and Sandberg to be very supportive. Sandberg “had had hard pregnancies too and cared a lot about her kids,” he says, while Zuckerberg was always empathetic and, true to his curiosity, asked many questions about Taylor’s family. When the CEO eventually had his own first child, he not only served as a role model for other fathers by taking two months’ leave; he also posted photos of himself changing diapers. But the reality is most dads don’t work for Facebook or Google and often don’t take advantage of the leave they’re entitled to. According to one 2014 study of new fathers, the vast majority take only a week or two off, feeling that putting family first may stigmatize them among their colleagues and cause resentment.

  That leaves women to put in for the parental leave and the risks that come with it. Taking time off from any job has its disadvantages, but perhaps even more so in the tech industry, where the pace of change creates performance pressure for employees. For start-ups, one missed opportunity can be live or die. For the big companies, it can mean a huge missed market. There is little room for error. No surprise, then, that Google keeps meticulous performance data and systematically ushers out the people who aren’t measuring up.

  That obviously creates issues for parents considering leave. “I look at my friends who’ve taken breaks, and it has not served them particularly well,” one female tech executive told me. “Things in Silicon Valley change ten times faster than anywhere else, so in some respects it’s really hard to reengage because there’s a lot of catching up to do. The pace of technological change has made it very, very hard for people to successfully take a break and come back.”

  So, why not push off having kids until later—until you get to a certain level in your career when you can afford child care and your company may be more flexible in order to retain you? The problem is you could wait indefinitely and by then it might be too late.

  For entrepreneurs, the work-life calculation is even weightier. Zaleski says she was “like, forty-two weeks pregnant” when she was making her final pitch to investors. Raising a round of funding is never easy for women in Silicon Valley, and being hugely pregnant doesn’t help. “There’s usually some VC that asks how you’re going to [run the business if you] have a family with kids,” Zaleski says. “When men pitch a business, it is all about the business. Nobody asks them how they’re going to take care of their kids.”

  Studies show that in all fields working mothers are paid less and perceived as less competent than working fathers. There’s every reason to believe the “motherhood penalty” can be especially harsh on female entrepreneurs who are expected to devote their whole selves to making the company a success.

  “Women entrepreneurs, especially mothers, are underestimated,” Janica Alvarez, CEO of the smart breast pump company Naya Health, tells me. Alvarez says investors frequently ask how she plans to take care of her three sons, while her husband/co-founder never gets that question. When Naya had trouble with fund-raising, the couple moved themselves and their kids into a minivan for a month, to buy themselves extra runway. “If an investor came to me and said, ‘Well, we’re not sure you can sacrifice enough,’ I’d want to punch him in the face,” Alvarez says.

  Even female investors are racked by these fears. Sarah Tavel, Benchmark’s sole female partner, told me she hoped to have a child someday. “I’m so scared of it,” she said. “The same thing that female founders face when they think about raising money while pregnant, I’m trying to sell a founder on taking me as a board member. That’s scary as a pregnant woman, and then there’s taking care of the kid. Of course, it’s a fear every woman has who’s career oriented, but this is a job where you feel that loss of time more acutely.”

  There’s one kind of employee, of course, whose life is unencumbered by any demand other than work: the unattached young dude. One founder told me the sweet spot for new hires in tech is specifically twenty-five to thirty years old. After age thirty, this founder said, things just get more difficult. They might get married, have kids, slow down, start to leave at 6:00 every night. They might even, God forbid, take their kids to the doctor once in a while.

  The Silicon Valley tropes around who becomes successful, and how, are alive and well: the winners will be those groups of young, single guys hacking all night, night after night, in a race to achieve their billion-dollar dreams. No families, no wives, no relationships, no real anything except the Product and the Dream. All-night hackathons and creepy Silicon Valley incubator homes are spaces and places habitable only by a very specific type of person, captured in the hit movie The Social Network and the popular TV series Silicon Valley. Those young men have achieved great things—witness Facebook, Google, and Apple. But just because those companies were successful doesn’t mean the model isn’t fundamentally flawed or that success can’t be achieved in other ways. As in any industry or institution, tech’s habits and norms were created by those who were there first. And those habits are hard to change, especially when the companies are bringing in billions upon billions of dollars. It stands to reason that if more types of people were given a shot, the tech industry might boast even more success stories.

  BUILDING A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM

  Silicon Valley has a tendency to copy itself. “Google had free food, then everyone had free food. Google did brainteasers, then everyone did brainteasers,” says former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. “You meet these founders who watch The Social Network, [which is] not supposed to be positive, and then they are copying it. People copy it all, the good, and the bad, almost blindly, and it creates all of these cultural issues that become self-perpetuating.”

  When he left Facebook to co-found Quip, Taylor decided to do things his own way. “My co-founder had just had a baby as we were starting the company,” Taylor says. “It was their first, and his wife was like, ‘You can do a start-up but I need you to have work-life balance.’ I said, ‘We will leave by 5:30 every day’—and I do that to this day.” To encourage others to leave at a reasonable hour, Quip did not serve dinner. “After the kids go to bed, I’ll work a little bit, but I do it at home and it’s like a secret. I’m not sending a message to the team that that’s an expectation of them,” says Taylor.

  He believes that Quip’s family-friendly schedule helped him recruit employees, especially women. “I think it may contribute to [Quip’s having] not as stark of a trade-off in terms of gender balance [as other companies] . . . We’re 35 percent female engineers, and it’s not good enough but it’s good.”

  But don’t employees need to work around the clock if the business is going to succeed?

  “It’s just hard to imagine the return on that is so great as to make a company succeed or fail,” Taylor says. In fact, research shows that output starts to decline after workers put in more than fifty hours a week. Some studies go as far as to say that working too long can be counterproductive to both individuals and their companies. The big inflection points at Quip, Taylor notes, had nothing to do with how much sleep was compromised for work. “In general, it’s because we made the right decision or the wrong decision about a resources allocation in terms of what are you working on or not working on. I believe that’s 100 percent why companies succeed or fail. It’s not how fast you’re typing.” Taylor doesn’t believe normal work hours have to come at a cost to the company. In fact, in 2016, Quip was acquired for $750 million by Salesforce, where Taylor later became president and chief product officer. It might not have been the billion-dollar exit start-up founders dream of, but it’s still pretty damn g
ood.

  So maybe the 5:30 thing works for Sheryl Sandberg, Bret Taylor, and the average tech worker bee. But what if you’re a first-time entrepreneur who is trying to make a dent in the universe by taking something from zero to one? We’ve talked about what start-ups demand of founders and early employees; when your company is on the line, can you really afford to worry about work-life balance?

  After working at Twitter and Postmates, Sara Mauskopf gave birth to her first baby and soon after, while managing the demands of motherhood, founded her first company—a start-up named Winnie that aims to make parenting easier. Shortly thereafter, however, her husband was diagnosed with cancer—though at first they had no idea how life threatening it was—and Mauskopf told her co-founder that she needed to go off-line (that is, disconnect from the company) indefinitely. “I couldn’t take care of my daughter. I couldn’t do anything but get his diagnosis to get him a cure. I felt like I would take a gun and shoot people before I would let him not get a definitive diagnosis,” Mauskopf recalls.

  Mauskopf’s team never bothered her once while she was away and finished Winnie’s first product without her. As her husband started getting treatment, however, Mauskopf found herself with more time as she sat through chemotherapy infusions and waited around in doctors’ offices. Slowly she got back online and, to her surprise, found that the company was running just fine.