Voices from the Valley

by Ben Tarnoff

  Get wealthy and solve the world’s problems—this was the message that I absorbed early on. You couldn’t do one without the other, the argument went, so don’t feel bad about becoming rich. The profit motive is the only way that we can possibly solve problems at scale.

  I truly believed that. And it remains a widespread belief in the industry, and in the engineering departments of elite institutions. But to move forward, I think we are going to have to challenge that belief very directly. That’s why I’m skeptical of some of these newfound regrets expressed by Sean Parker and others. I don’t think they’re actually attacking the core notion that the profit motive is the best way to make the world a better place. They still believe they can centralize large amounts of capital in these massive corporations and pay themselves well and solve the world’s problems. I think there are some inherent trade-offs that they’re not yet acknowledging.

  Sean Parker is also a billionaire. Do you see rank-and-file tech workers expressing doubts about what they’re building as well?

  When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product. Time spent is considered a proxy for value delivered to the user, because if your product wasn’t useful, the user wouldn’t be using it.

  Here’s how it typically works. An order comes down from on high: the board says to increase revenue. What’s the best way the management team knows to increase revenue? To increase time spent. So they issue the order, which gets percolated down the tree, and now everyone is working on increasing time spent. This means making the product more addictive, more absorbing, more obtrusive. And it works: the user starts spending more time with the product.

  But every worker knows this is bad. Every engineer and designer knows this is awful. They’re not happy making these features. But they can’t argue with the data. The engineer and the designer who care about the user don’t want to put these features out in the world. But the data says those features are increasing time spent—which means they’re good. Because more time spent means selling more advertising, which means making more money.

  And so long as you’re working for an advertising company, what other metric besides time spent could there be?

  So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive.

  The directives to increase metrics like time spent come from above, but the actual work is being done by tech workers on the ground. And they’re doing this work because their performance is measured by whether or not they moved that metric and whether or not they implemented those features—even if they know they’re bad for users.

  But there’s no way they can push back on it. They can talk about it—in their company Slack, in their public forums, at their all-hands meetings. They can express a lot of malaise about it. But they can’t argue against the experiment succeeding, because you can’t argue against increased profits.

  You could imagine different structures of the company that might not have this problem. You could imagine a world where these companies empower rank-and-file workers to make certain decisions themselves, and give users a voice in those decisions. Workers and users could together decide what metrics to optimize for, and what kind of technology they want to build.

  Have you seen this begin to happen in your own workplace, or in the workplaces of friends? What might it look like concretely to give workers and users a say in how products are designed and implemented?

  I’ve started to see some changes. Broadly, we tech workers are starting to find our voice in saying no. No, we won’t build that weapons system at Google; no, we don’t want to game metrics.5 These small victories feel invigorating, but saying no isn’t enough.

  It’s probably easier to start small. My favorite video game studio, Motion Twin, describes itself as an “anarcho-syndicalist workers’ cooperative,” and they have a close relationship with their community of gamers. These alternative structures are possible in tech, but we’re up against unbelievable amounts of venture capital that can scale for-profit ventures faster than any cooperative can.

  We’re starting to ask the right questions about technology and who owns it. We’ve tried private control. Now we’re talking about worker control. There is also a lot we could do with state backing, but that has its own risks. Then there are ideas floating around like platform cooperatives, where platforms are owned and governed by a combination of their creators and their users. I think we should be trying out lots of things and seeing what works. Soon, I hope to be able to do some experiments of my own.

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  The Technical Writer

  Silicon Valley, as you might expect, is crawling with software engineers. But writing code is only one of many jobs that make the industry run. Plenty of other white-collar labor is needed—and many of the people performing it are women.

  These are the so-called nontechnical roles, and it’s where Silicon Valley’s stark gender divide grows even starker. Google is nearly 70 percent men; Facebook, 63 percent; Apple, 67 percent. When it comes to the “technical” part of the workforce, however, the numbers get even worse: 77 percent men at all three companies. This imbalance partly accounts for the industry’s gender pay gap, because people who are seen as less technical tend to be valued less. But what does “technical” even mean? Is a customer support associate who patiently helps customers debug their code really not technical?

  We spoke to a technical writer about what it’s like to be a woman in tech perceived to be less technical, despite having the word “technical” in her title. She spoke about navigating the industry’s gender politics, why she almost left as a result, and how she found a way to stay.

  How did you get into tech?

  In college, I wanted to be an editor. I wanted to find the next big writer and nurture their career. When I graduated, I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. Entry-level jobs in publishing are difficult to find, especially if you’re not in New York.

  So I started looking around for a job. I’d been working the night shift at a factory to cover my student loan payments while I was finishing school. But I needed better-paying work. Eventually I ended up applying for an entry-level technical writing job, having taken a couple of technical writing courses at college.

  Had you considered the possibility of becoming a technical writer when you were in college?

  No, I never saw myself going into technical writing. It was just the first job that I got. I took it because I needed to pay rent.

  Tell us about that first job.

  It was a financial software company, so it was a cross between tech and finance. Both are highly masculine industries that tend to have problems with women. So, as a young woman coming right out of college, I dealt with a lot of inappropriate comments.

  In my interview, they had asked me some weird questions, like, “How would you react if someone was throwing paper balls at you all day?” It turns out the two men interviewing me asked that because they knew the team lead was extremely unprofessional, especially with young women. He wasn’t sexually harassing them. But he didn’t treat them as equals. They wanted to make sure that I would be able to stand up to him.

  He definitely had problems. I remember going out to lunch with him and another person and he started rating the women that walked past us on a one-to-ten scale. I remember not saying anything because I didn’t know what to say.

  So this person was your boss?

  Yeah. He was the one who divided up the tasks. And he gave me a lot to do—very soon after I arrived, I ended up with the lion’s share of the work. I was on a team of three technical writers. The other two were men, and I probably had thr
ee times as much work as they did, although I was being paid significantly less.

  What did you do?

  Well, eventually our team lead left. That made things better. I moved under a different manager, and during our first performance review he took me aside and said, “I know that you do most of the work and that you’re underpaid.” And then he gave me a 40 percent raise.

  Wow.

  Yeah. It totally changed my career. I stayed there for about five years.

  You said that you had taken a couple of technical writing classes in college, but presumably you also learned a lot in that first job. What did you learn? What is technical writing?

  I usually compare it to IKEA. When you buy something from IKEA, the only way you know how to put it together is by looking at the instruction manual. It’s the glue that holds everything together.

  There are the people who build a product—engineers, designers, and so on. Then there are the people who explain how to use the product. That’s us.

  Could you give us an example?

  My first company made financial trading software. And we needed to explain to our customers what the requirements were for installing that software and getting it to run properly.

  When I got there, we had a thirty-two-page document explaining all this. It was unusable. Customers were very confused about what they needed to do. So I turned it into a two-pager. That was my first moment of realizing, “Oh, technical writing really is necessary. I can provide real value.”

  How well do engineers and executives understand that value?

  It’s highly dependent on the kind of engineer or executive you’re working with. The stereotypical dynamic is that you’re not valued. They don’t really understand what you’re doing in the room. They talk over you or talk down to you because writing is seen as a soft skill. We’re seen as humanities people. Even though technical writers are some of the only people who actually have “technical” in their role name, we’re not seen as technical. People assume we don’t know what we’re talking about.

  Presumably, this is also a highly gendered dynamic.

  A lot of technical writers are women. At my current job, my whole team is women. And all women in tech deal with the perception that we’re nontechnical. Which means we are paid less. You see this particularly with equity. In tech, your equity generally depends on how technical you are perceived to be.

  With technical writing in particular, perhaps some people see it as less valuable because writing is something that they do all the time, even if it’s just writing emails.

  It’s a way to devalue the craft. It’s like saying that product designers are just there to make things look pretty.

  Technical writing is actually probably only about 10 percent writing. It’s a small portion of the job. Most of your time is spent on research, information architecture, content strategy—all these related disciplines. It’s not about typing words on a screen and publishing them somewhere. It’s about telling the right story to your users so they know how to use the product.

  And some products are harder to use than others.

  Sometimes people forget that not all software looks like email. There’s a lot of software that’s actually pretty complex. A lot can go wrong. And the stakes are high when it does. If users do the wrong thing when using a big piece of enterprise software, for example, that company could lose millions of dollars.

  It seems strange that certain people would find it hard to see the value in technical writing, when the success of a product so clearly depends on it. The product is not usable if users can’t use it.

  Absolutely. And I have found, especially in the last few years, that a lot of people don’t conform to the above stereotype. They see the value in what we do. It’s nice to work with folks like that.

  Source of Truth

  After five years at that first company, you had become an experienced technical writer. What happened next?

  I had a couple more jobs before I landed what I thought was my dream position. I would be the first technical writer at a small company. I was really excited.

  It turned out to be a strange place. They were focused on creating a fun company that people wanted to work at—Ping-Pong tables, that startup feel—but without any real substance behind it. They just didn’t know what they were doing. I was one of the oldest people working there and I was twenty-nine.

  The two cofounders told me they didn’t want any external documentation. They wanted internal documentation. And they wanted me to document the product not as it actually existed, but as they had originally envisioned it.

  The problem is that the two cofounders had each envisioned it differently. So I would sit in a room with them and listen to them argue. “No, we meant for it to look like this!” “No, we wanted it to happen this way!” It was a mess.

  You said that technical writing is the art of explaining to the user how to use the product. But you can’t do that if you’re not allowed to be honest with the user about what the product is.

  Documentation is the source of truth. It’s not marketing. It’s not sales.

  You’re there to be honest with the user. You have to be willing to talk about the limitations, the bugs. You have to be willing to talk about the behaviors that will break everything. It’s important because if users don’t trust your product, they’re not going to use your product. Technical documentation is the place where you build that trust.

  There’s a push and pull sometimes between the various groups. When I talk to folks in marketing, they’re looking at it from the perspective of how to sell the product. When they see a piece of documentation that describes the product less positively, they don’t understand why it needs to be said that way. So we have a conversation, and try to come to a middle ground where we both feel comfortable. Then, once they’re not paying attention anymore, I sneak back in the stuff that users really need to know.

  At this particular company, where the cofounders couldn’t agree on what the product was, how did you do your job?

  Despite the issues I mentioned, I found a way to move forward. I started writing internal documentation. I created a style guide and I laid the foundations for having technical content more widely shared within the company. I was working well with the developers.

  My manager and I had a great working relationship. I had a good performance review. Everything was roses. Then I got pregnant with my second child and I started to take some time off. Just mornings here and there when I woke up and thought, I can’t do it. I’m going to throw up—I can’t go into work. At the time, I had a two-hour commute each way.

  I hadn’t told my company that I was pregnant yet, because conventional wisdom says to wait till you get to that twelve-week mark when things feel safer. When I reached that point, I had a conversation with HR. The company was so small that they didn’t have a formal HR department, just a guy who was filling that role. He had no official training, but he was a nice guy. So I pulled him aside and asked about maternity leave. There was no policy in the handbook, because I was the first person at the company who had ever been pregnant.

  What did he say?

  He said he would talk to the cofounders and get back to me. That sounded good to me. I figured the maternity leave wouldn’t be great, but it would be something.

  Soon after, on the day I was planning to announce my pregnancy to the rest of the company, one of the cofounders pulled me into a conference room. He told me that things weren’t working out so they were going to eliminate my role.

  What?

  He also said that because I was technically negative in my time off—those days when I was too sick or tired from pregnancy to come into work—I owed the company five days’ pay. Normally, it doesn’t matter if you’re negative: you just keep accruing days and it evens out. He told me he wouldn’t make me pay them back for those days, but in exchange, I wouldn’t be getting any severance.

  I was very upset. I told him I was about to announce that I w
as pregnant. He said he didn’t know.

  Did you believe him?

  I’ll never know if he knew. But I’m pretty sure he did. There is no smoking gun I can point to. But my guess is that the HR guy told him. He probably figured it wasn’t worth it to pay for maternity leave, so it’d be easier just to get rid of me. And it wasn’t illegal, because they eliminated the role, not the person.

  Did you talk to a lawyer?

  No. People told me I should have, but I just couldn’t. I was so upset at the time, I signed the paperwork and went home sobbing. I was tired. I was pregnant.

  I also didn’t want to rock the boat. Because the worry when you’re a woman in tech is that if you raise your voice, you’ll get branded as a troublemaker. Tech is actually kind of a small industry. You don’t want to be the woman who’s not easy to work with. I was so scared at that moment that I didn’t do the right thing.

  False Choices