by Ben Tarnoff
At the end of the day, you need to be building something that people want. You need people to get value from it. Otherwise they won’t use it.
That said, with platforms this big, managing that value can get difficult. You have to balance the different considerations we discussed earlier, across many different groups of people at a global scale. You have to find a way to serve one audience while trying not to frustrate or alienate another audience. It’s complicated.
Inside Voices
Your job was to tell the public a story about a product. But companies don’t just talk to the public—they also talk to themselves. They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing, whether in the form of an explicit mission statement or an unofficial mantra. And these internal stories seem especially important in Silicon Valley: don’t be evil, move fast and break things, and so on.
Humans need stories. They need to create an accounting for themselves, a sense of how it all fits together. But sometimes people are skeptical about corporate missions or mantras. They think they’re too vague or idealistic.
I think of the scene in Silicon Valley where all the startup founders are onstage explaining how their complicated technical product is going to “make the world a better place.”
Right. The cynical view is that those mantras are a way to get your employees to pretend they’re doing something other than building a business. Or, worse, that by permeating the workplace with the language of purpose, you’re getting them to be on board with something unpalatable. You can convince them that whatever bad thing they’re doing is for a cause. At the end of the day, very few people in their self-accounting are comfortable with thinking of themselves as deliberately inflicting harm. So those missions might be seen as a form of rationalization, as a way for the company to engage in “cause washing.”
The more charitable view is that those phrases can actually help lead to the right outcomes. I’ve seen a lot of situations where the mission has been invoked at a critical juncture and it’s helped refocus things in the right direction.
What’s an example?
Within a company, people are incentivized for their own success. They have to perform, they have goals. It’s natural. But that can mean that in a group setting, they will argue for the things that will eventually make them look good. They will focus on their own self-interest, their own targets, and their own achievements.
I’ve seen the mission work in a way that counters those dynamics. It helps reground the conversation. It helps people pull back from the individual incentives and ask, “What are we doing here?”
The whole change-the-world mentality that these mantras embody can certainly feel impractical or utopian—and we’re in an era now where we’re second-guessing it—but as a working model I’ve definitely seen it improve outcomes rather than degrade them.
So missions or mantras can be useful for reorienting away from the individual to the collective—away from an employee who’s trying to maximize their opportunity to thinking at the level of the team or the firm as a whole.
Yeah. And that’s why they have to be lofty. Creating a sense of shared purpose is the whole point of these things.
You can have either a cynical or a charitable interpretation of their existence. You could ask what would be different about these companies if you subtracted their missions or mantras. And in my view, the difference is there’d be a little less sense of purpose, and without a sense of purpose, things would be harder. You’ve gotta have everybody rowing in the same direction.
We’ve talked about the story the company tells about a product, and the story the company tells itself about what it’s doing. But what about the story that you personally tell about your own work, to friends, family, or others? Has telling that story become harder in recent years, as the scrutiny of these companies has grown more intense?
I’m not interested in being an apologist for corporate or industry interests. So the conversation I would have with friends or family, or even a stranger in a bar, is not too different from what we’ve talked about here.
Basically, I think the truth is important. The public conversation about tech can sometimes fall into a simplistic framework: the industry increasingly feels like it’s being put in the same category as Big Oil or Big Tobacco. And I think the industry has had a lot of growing up to do, but it doesn’t strike me as that simple. These products can be misused, but they aren’t carcinogens.
So in those conversations, I try to go beyond the hype and talk specifics. What is the specific situation and what are the specific challenges? If people are upset about Russia, or the mismanagement of user expectations with a new product launch, well, that’s a real concern. That’s something they should be upset about, and the company should respond to it. They’re entitled to not like a feature or a product, they’re entitled not to use it.
Probably the most frequent thing you hear when you say you work at one of these tech companies is people telling you, somewhat contemptuously and smugly, that they don’t use the product. “Oh, I don’t have that anymore.” “I don’t like that.” It’s almost like they’re trying to goad you into selling them on why they should use it. And I always find it a bit strange, because I really don’t care. I totally understand. If someone doesn’t want to use something, they don’t have to. That doesn’t bother me at all.
Why did you stop doing this job? What prompted that decision?
I kind of burned out. Not necessarily with the company or the industry, but with my role. Burnout is a big thing in the industry. It’s a burnout culture. The companies have gotten a bit better in trying to help people balance things better, but still, the work takes a toll.
For me personally, I think I lost faith in words. I felt fed up with the mandate of merely talking, because in my heart I don’t think that the words about things matter as much as the things themselves.
Why not?
Because the words don’t feel so effective. It’s been a tough few years. With the challenges we’ve been discussing, it can feel frustrating if all you’re doing is talking. There are communicators and there are builders. I’d like to spend my time building products rather than telling stories about them. There is no shortage of problems, and I’d like to help solve them. There are limits to talking.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the people whose voices fill its pages. We’re grateful to them for speaking with us and letting us share their stories.
We’re also indebted to Chris Parris-Lamb for providing crucial encouragement early on, and to Emily Bell, Jackson Howard, and everyone at FSG Originals for taking a chance on this collaboration. To Zoe Tarnoff, for slowing us down. And, above all, to the other members of our Logic family: Jim Fingal, Christa Hartsock, Xiaowei Wang, Celine Nguyen, Jen Kagan, and Alex Blasdel. Without their wisdom and kindness, this book—and much more—would not exist.
Notes
1. The Founder
1. API stands for “application programming interface.” It is an agreement that governs how programs talk to one another over the internet. In this case, access to the company’s private API would mean the ability to obtain and use some of its data.
2. The mention of TPS reports is a reference to the movie Office Space (1999), where they represent pointless, and mandatory, paperwork.
3. Swift is a programming language developed by Apple for its operating systems, including iOS.
4. Yo is a mobile app initially released in 2014. At first, the app’s only feature was the ability to send the word “Yo” to your friends. Within a few months of launching, Yo boasted a valuation of five to ten million dollars.
5. Google had a contract with the Pentagon to help with Project Maven, an ongoing Pentagon initiative to use machine learning to analyze drone footage. After a monthslong campaign by workers at Google, management announced in June 2018 that it would not be renewing the Project Maven cont
ract.
2. The Technical Writer
1. On November 1, 2018, twenty thousand Googlers, both full-time employees and contract workers, walked out from some fifty offices around the world. They were protesting gender discrimination and sexual harassment at the company, angered in particular by the disclosure that Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, had received a ninety-million-dollar exit package amid a sexual harassment investigation.
2. James Damore was a Google engineer. In July 2017, he published an internal memo that criticized Google’s diversity policies and claimed that the overrepresentation of men in tech was partly due to innate biological differences that made women less suitable for certain kinds of work. The next month, he was fired.
3. The Cook
1. Tech Workers Coalition is an organization of tech workers that has been active in organizing efforts throughout the industry.
2. On February 21, 2019, Oakland teachers went on strike. The strike lasted for seven days, and forced school officials to make major concessions after more than eighteen months of failed negotiations.
3. While tech companies have long used contractors for blue-collar service roles such as cooks, security guards, and shuttle bus drivers, they increasingly employ contractors for white-collar office roles as well, from programming to testing to recruiting.
4. The Engineer
1. Since a corporate restructuring in 2015, Google’s parent company is called Alphabet, and Google is technically a subsidiary.
2. Perl is a programming language that was once widely used on the web.
3. TVCs are temps, vendors, and contractors. This is Google’s term for its contingent workforce.
4. By late 2015, Google had scanned more than twenty-five million books from more than a hundred countries, in four hundred different languages. According to Google, there are approximately 130 million published books in the world.
5. According to The New York Times, Google employed 121,000 TVCs and 102,000 full-time employees by March 2019.
6. Doxing is the practice of collecting and publishing an individual’s personal information on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
7. 4chan and 8chan are message boards popular with the alt-right, while Stormfront is a long-running neo-Nazi forum.
8. While Google offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine as early as 2000, it didn’t officially launch Google.cn until January 2006. Google.cn provided censored search results, in compliance with Chinese government regulations, until it closed in 2010.
9. Cambridge Analytica was a British consulting firm that worked on political campaigns around the world, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2016. In March 2018, revelations about the extent of the firm’s data-harvesting operations on Facebook caused a major scandal.
10. Dragonfly was a search engine prototype being developed within Google to enable its reentry into the Chinese market. It returned censored search results and recorded users’ searches. In August 2018, The Intercept published a leaked internal memo about Dragonfly, which is how many Googlers discovered the existence of the project. Following the disclosure, workers mounted a campaign to shut down Dragonfly.
11. Baidu dominates the search engine market in China, and is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google.
12. On October 25, 2019, the Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft. Amazon lawyers filed a lawsuit to challenge the move, alleging that President Trump’s personal hostility toward Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, led him to interfere in the procurement process. In February 2020, a federal judge ordered Microsoft to stop working on JEDI until Amazon’s suit is resolved; the following month, the Pentagon asked the court to let it reconsider aspects of its contract, which was granted. As this book goes to press, the future of JEDI is unclear.
13. In April 2019, two of the organizers of the Google walkout, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, went public with claims that they were facing retaliation from management for their role in the action; Stapleton left the company in June 2019, with Whittaker to follow shortly after in July. In November 2019, The New York Times reported that Google had hired a consulting firm that specializes in union busting. The same month, management fired four employees who were active in worker organizing.
5. The Data Scientist
1. Strong AI is the paradigm of trying to model and build human intelligence in a machine. Specific or applied AI, on the other hand, tries to build a method for getting really good at solving a more narrow set of problems.
2. Theranos was a health technology company that promised a new way to collect and test blood samples. After a series of investigations exposed its technology as fraudulent, the company imploded.
3. Cloudera is an enterprise big data company that supports and sells a platform for using Apache Hadoop, an open-source framework for distributed data storage and processing.
4. Spark is a distributed platform for data applications whose main benefit is the ability to process data in memory, which is much faster than applications that must more frequently read data from disk.
5. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment” (September 17, 2013), https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf. Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of computerization. Their claims are controversial, however, and have been challenged from a number of directions.
6. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the advanced R&D wing of the Department of Defense. Over the decades, the agency has funded the development of many breakthrough technologies, including the internet.
7. The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome, a European NGO, that predicted rapid declines in global population and industrial capacity beginning in the early twenty-first century.
8. Robo-advisers are systems that provide automated portfolio management advice.
9. Artificial neural networks are the technology that forms the basis of the recent AI boom.
10. SoFi and Earnest are online lenders that offer personal loans, student loan refinancing, and other services.
11. A protected class is defined by U.S. federal antidiscrimination law as a group of people with a common characteristic who are legally protected from discrimination on the basis of that characteristic. The characteristics include race, religion, and gender.
12. A service of Quicken Loans that offers an online mortgage service.
13. Fintech is short for “financial technology,” and it refers to a group of companies that are trying to use technology to transform financial services.
14. LendingClub is a peer-to-peer lending company. In 2014, it went public in the year’s largest U.S. tech company IPO; in 2016, a series of scandals drove its share price down nearly 85 percent, where it has more or less remained.
15. On December 2, 2015, two attackers killed fourteen people and injured twenty-two others in a mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California.
16. Y Combinator is an early-stage startup investor and accelerator.
17. The Homestead steel strike was an 1892 labor dispute at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill, in Pennsylvania, involving violent clashes between union members and private security forces.
6. The Massage Therapist
1. In June 2011, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a measure that removed the 1.5 percent payroll tax for all new jobs for six years if these jobs were created by companies that opened offices in the economically struggling Mid-Market area. The measure was popularly known as the “Twitter tax break,” because it was designed to keep Twitter in the city after the co
mpany announced it was planning to relocate.
Also by Ben Tarnoff
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers
Also by Moira Weigel
Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating
A Note About the Editors
Ben Tarnoff is the author of the books The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature and A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers and is a cofounder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Jacobin, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.