by Ben Tarnoff
Could you walk us through a normal day?
I get up early in the morning, usually at 5:00 a.m., and I get to work by 6:00 a.m. We prepare food. Then we take a break. Then we prepare more food. The service comes, and we serve the food. Then we clean up and get out at 3:00 p.m.
But everybody’s gotta have two jobs. Myself, I just started a new part-time gig. Most of my coworkers, when they get out at 3:00 p.m., they go to another job and work another shift. With the way traffic is, they have to go straight there. They have to be at their second job at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. to get that next eight hours in, so they can at least be home before midnight. Many of them live so far out: they’ve got to go drive all the way home to East San Jose or Gilroy or Morgan Hill. I heard some people are even coming from Vallejo. You know how far that is from here? With traffic, that’s like a two-hour trip.
So that’s the typical day for most people. Start at 6:00 a.m., get home by midnight. They’re busting their ass. They’re really busting their ass. But you have to. Especially if you got kids.
Are a lot of the people you work with from the Bay Area originally?
A lot of people did grow up here. But they’re getting forced out. They’re moving further and further out. A lot of them are having to set down new roots when they still have their old roots here.
As someone who grew up here, you must’ve seen a lot of change over the years.
Oh, yes, a lot of change. I went to my mother’s neighborhood in West Oakland recently, where I grew up. That neighborhood was notorious. It had a lot of negative activity. Now they have houses there going for a million plus. Like, nice houses. They put some work in them.
But the changes that were made, I don’t think they were the best ones for the people. Low-income cities like East Palo Alto could’ve invested in low-income housing instead of bringing in IKEA and Home Depot. Why we got a fucking PGA golf store in the middle of the hood? I mean, I get it: the rich cities around us need a place to come shop. But that all used to be housing. So you take the housing away, and now you put the problem on the people.
If you ride down El Camino you see nothing but hotels. Hotels, but no housing. They’re building those hotels for the tech industry, so all these people can come in and do big business here. But they ain’t let us—the people that’s living here—get no part of the big business. That’s wack.
A Really Good Feeling
I know you were active in organizing a union in your workplace. How did you start getting involved in that?
Some homies that I work with pulled me aside and said, “We want to unionize.” And then they introduced me to the people from the union. They wanted to make power moves. They wanted to give the workers the power to actually have a voice and make some changes. I thought it made sense. So I started going to some meetings with my coworkers.
When and where would you meet?
We met at people’s houses. Or after work we’d chop it up in the parking lot for a minute. We’d go have a beer or pizza or something like that.
It was cool. We heard each other’s stories. We heard about how hard it is for each of us to get by and raise a family. And once you get to know your coworkers, you start seeing things a lot differently. You want to help them out. You want to make it fair.
As you started talking to your coworkers about organizing a union, did you have any challenging conversations? How did you try to convince people to support the effort?
It was hard. People are afraid they’ll lose their job. And they got a family. That’s a real-life situation. How do you get over it? The union people pump you up. They have you feeling juice like, “Yeah, if he gets fired I’m gonna walk off the job with him! They can’t fire us all!”
There’s a movie called Which Way Is Up? with Richard Pryor. Go back and watch that movie and you’ll see exactly how the whole system works. Because you don’t always know which way is up. It’s hard. People got shit on the line. They got families. But it’s needed. So you’ve got to keep pushing.
You talk to one person, and the next person talks to somebody else they trust. And so on, until you have a nice little core. And of course you’ve got to have some clowns like me, who ain’t got no sense so they talk loud and talk hella shit and get everybody fired up.
Were you scared? Excited? Both? How did it all feel?
It’s a really good feeling. When people actually realize that they are worth more, it’s nice.
But once we went public with the union, and started negotiating our contract, it was difficult. That process was new for me. I had never sat down at a negotiating table before or read a contract.
How long did negotiations take?
A long time. It was painstaking.
What were the main things you were negotiating over?
For different people it was different things. But for me … I like to talk shit. I like to run my mouth. So I wanted the chance to just be like, “Yeah, man, fuck y’all!” Also, I needed a raise. I needed the benefits.
But it’s hard, because you can’t go on in there and ask for everything. You want to act like you can. You want to act hella hard-core and whatnot. But then management responds, and you start seeing your people fall back. So you have to make choices about which demands are more important.
It caused a bit of bickering, of course. “We should get this much.” “Nah, we should get this much.” “This is more important than that.” “No, we need this.” People disagree. Then at the next meeting, some people aren’t there because they can’t get what they want. You can’t please everybody.
You weren’t negotiating directly with the tech company, because you’re contractors. But obviously the tech company has a lot of influence over the contracting company. During the negotiations, did you encounter full-time tech workers who were supportive of your unionization effort?
Yes. They were a big help. I think they’re really cool people. Like, weird cool. Like, computer techie hacker cool. They came through and stood up and put the word out. They showed up at meetings and some of them even came to negotiations. They just went above and beyond. Hella cool-ass people.
The Tech Workers Coalition1 is forming these groups now that reach out and understand that everybody working for a tech company should be part of that company, in one sense or another. You see, these companies don’t want to hire the help themselves. They’d rather hire the help to get the help, so to speak. Above all, they don’t want to be responsible for the help.
Service workers like us are at the bottom of the list. And since we’re at the bottom, we didn’t have any say. They could just treat us however.
Did that change after you unionized? I know that you negotiated for better wages and better benefits, but did the workplace feel different after you formed a union? In terms of how you were treated?
It definitely felt different. Even before we got our contract, when management first found out we were organizing, it changed the workplace. In our kitchens, the chefs are the bosses and the cooks are the workers. Right away, the chefs started showing a little more class. They started treating us nicer. Before, most of them treated us like peasants. Honestly. Most of the time they didn’t talk to us. They were just there to discipline us and keep us in line. But when they found out we were going to organize, their bosses were like, “Hey, y’all better get y’all shit together. Because we don’t need this kind of tension.”
Who are the chefs? Did they used to be cooks? Or do they come in as supervisors?
Just like any other company, some of them get hired into that position and some of them come in as a cook and work their way up—the ones who kiss ass.
You ever watch The Office? That’s pretty much how every workplace is. It’s definitely like that in the kitchen. You got your boss that’s the idiot. Then you got the one dude who just don’t give a fuck. Then you got your nice normal people. Then you got all the ass-kissers—there’s a bunch of wannabe Dwights running around. They know what you’re going through because th
ey went through it, but once they get their assistant regional manager title, they just start going hard-core on you.
But when our organizing went public, and that tone shift happened, it was nice. My coworkers and I laughed about it, actually: “He just asked me how my day was!” “He just said, ‘Thank you’!” Simple shit like that. They started treating us like people. That was a good feeling. That was a really, really good feeling.
Happy Bill Gates Day!
Now that you’ve won your union, what’s next?
You gotta keep organizing after you organize. That’s the most crucial part. It was hard work getting the union, but it’s even harder work keeping it.
When we first ratified our contract, a lot of people were happy: “Cool, I got a raise!” But then when they actually got that first raise, and it ain’t really what they thought, then they’re like, “Man, y’all could’ve got more.” Like, what? You weren’t even coming to the meetings!
It’s hard. We started out with a small group of organizers. Then we became a big group—and if you stay big like that, you can really run shit. They’re really going to feel it.
Look at the Oakland teachers.2 When they went on strike, they shut shit down. We don’t have the power to do that yet. Maybe one day. But again, it’s hard to keep people organized. Especially now, as our company grows, we have new cooks coming in who don’t know the struggles that we had to go through. And in general, people don’t know much about unions.
Unions used to be a big deal back in the day. They used to be so tough, so fierce, so hard-core. And I get it. I understand why unions were so big. Because they honestly do give you that sense of power if you really listen to the message.
I heard a rumor that some of the white-collar tech workers were thinking about unionizing.
That’s right.
That’s crazy to me. But it shows you how wack it is out there. A lot of tech workers are like us to a certain extent.
I knew a tech worker who said she was a contractor like me.3 I didn’t even know that they had tech workers as contractors at those companies. So they feel us. They feel the pain. As I said earlier, the company would rather hire the help to get the help. It’s easier. They don’t want that liability and they don’t want to pay. Because if you’re a contractor, you don’t get those good benefits. You don’t get those perks. It’s kind of fucked-up. So now a lot of the tech workers, they’re feeling like us. And they can’t afford the houses, either, because they’re getting better money than us, but they’re not really getting enough.
You work in tech, but how do you use tech in your own life? What do you think of social media, for instance?
I think it’s a little invasive. You know, I’m old-school. I don’t like people in my business. And I don’t care if your daughter is thirteen months and just started walking. That’s none of my business. I really could care less. You don’t have to post that on there. That’s normal to me. I went through that. I saw my son walking when he was ten months.
My son is a clown at times. He’s a teenager now, and teenagers today are more influenced by social media than they are by their parents. A person can get a million views or likes or whatnot for doing something goofy and then become famous in less than a year. My son will see that and think it could be him. But if things don’t work out, now his ass is in trouble, because he did some stupid shit.
When I was a teenager, we didn’t have dating sites. We didn’t have Snapchat and Instagram. I had a pager! I used to have to page chicks “143”—I love you, that goofy shit. Nowadays, these kids are dealing with a whole other beast.
I took his phone away recently. And he’s changing a little bit every day. He actually threw his stuff in the garbage yesterday. I was like, Wow, this is amazing. It’s working already! He’s actually putting shit in the garbage like he’s supposed to!
Where do you think Silicon Valley will go next? You’ve seen a huge amount of change since the 1990s. What will the next couple of decades look like?
You ever see Demolition Man, that movie with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes? Where Snipes has blond hair?
Yeah.
That could be where we’re going.
Damn.
The near future is gonna be hard. Really hard. We’re going to make some changes, with the help of the organizers and the unions and all of the other people that are pushing to make a change. But I worry that it’s too little, too late. I worry that it’s not going to be enough to actually help the people that need to be helped now.
A lot of people are leaving the Bay. A lot of people are leaving California. They’re moving to places where the cost of living isn’t as high, places where you can afford a house and raise a family. That’s the dream, right? You got a house, two kids, a car, and a soccer van, and you’re able to take your kids to the movies. But those other places are gonna turn into here if they make the same mistakes we made: not organizing early, not getting the communities involved early.
They’re having a celebration near here in a park for Cinco de Mayo. If it gets worse, that’s not going to be there. That’s going to be some tech holiday. It might be Bill Gates Day instead of Cinco de Mayo if things get out of hand.
4
The Engineer
Google occupies a special spot in the firmament of Silicon Valley.1 It’s not only one of the region’s most successful companies—it also defines a cultural ideal. Silicon Valley presents itself as a playground for weird geniuses, as a place where creativity, commerce, and a little bit of counterculture fuse to form a new synthesis capable of generating extraordinary wealth. Few companies appear to embody this synthesis better than Google.
Yet over the years, Google has changed. And its transformations have paralleled the broader shifts of the region as a whole, as a generation of companies that saw themselves as eccentric underdogs evolved into corporate leviathans. At Google, this dissonance was especially intensely felt. It became a source of internal tensions, which in turn helped make the company a hot spot for white-collar worker organizing.
There is no better vantage point than Google to observe how Silicon Valley has changed in recent years. We talked to an engineer who spent nine years at the company, and experienced many of these changes firsthand. What happens when Silicon Valley’s golden child grows up? What does it look like for a company to have a midlife crisis?
* * *
How did you start using computers?
I didn’t really have a computer growing up. Then, when I was in high school, my parents bought one for their business. You could use the modem to dial into the BBS [bulletin board system] of the local public library, and connect to the internet from there. One of the first things that I remember thinking was, Oh, the internet is really cool!
It was around that time that I started programming. The library had a book about Perl.2 So I taught myself Perl, and soon I was making websites for local businesses. That was my first tech job, I guess.
Did you go on to study computer science in college?
Yeah, I went to college in 1999. At the time, the dot-com boom was going strong. There was a lot of optimism in my undergrad class. The computer science major was bigger than it had been in previous years.
I definitely felt behind my peers. I had always been at the top of my class in math and science, but I didn’t have a whole lot of programming experience. The homework was hard.
When you’re first learning programming and something goes wrong, you don’t really know how to tell where it’s going wrong or why. It’s an intuition you have to develop over time. You learn where to look or what to push on to figure out why this particular piece of code isn’t working the way you expected it to work. And, even for experienced programmers, you never know how long that process is going to take. Sometimes you figure it out in a few minutes, sometimes it’s a few hours. Sometimes you never figure it out, and you have to start over from scratch.
What happened after you graduated college?
&nbs
p; As I mentioned, I started college in 1999, during the dot-com boom. By the time I graduated in 2003, the bubble had popped. Given what I was hearing about the job market, I decided to go to grad school.
Did you want to become an academic?
I wasn’t sure. The actual experience of being a Ph.D. student was definitely hard for me. I felt again like, Oh my God, these other people are so much smarter than me.
When it came time to identify a research topic and write a thesis proposal, I really struggled. I think that was the hardest part of the whole process. I didn’t have a lot of academics among my family or friends. I didn’t know where to start. By the time I got through the thesis proposal, I was drained. The whole thing had left me feeling pretty burned-out—maybe about as burned-out as I’ve ever been.
My adviser had a very large stable of grad students. One summer, she didn’t have funding for all of us, so I ended up working with a different professor on a research project that eventually became a startup: something called reCAPTCHA.