Forgive this totally out of the blue and profusely forward email but my recent taste of google life is causing me some major distress and provoked a career crisis. I am here in New York studying business journalism and fascinated with the tech beat. However having been a student for the better part of a decade now, I'm becoming sick of the grind and frankly being poor. I recently started dating someone at Google and it opened my eyes just to the extravagance and largesse of these places. He literally works a few hours a day (in GCS) but is paid for full time work and of course still garners all the benefits you are well aware of. He spends his weekdays rock climbing and playing ping pong on the Google card. At this point I am feeling a sense of dread that when I should have been surfing the hiring wave in big tech during covid I was instead of following my hunger to study and have now missed out on getting a foot in the door. Although writing is a passion, I'm conceding money is now more of a motivation. Wondering if you had any sage words of wisdom for a lost soul like me.

Cheers, [redacted]

When I fished this message out of my bloated cubbyhole on LinkedIn, I’ll admit I was like….is this...meant for me? Someone out there crossed paths with my “whole deal” and was like, “this gives me FOMO”? Nevertheless, here I am, foxed out of the hole—let’s see where we go, eh?

For starters, my friend, feeling like a loser who’s wasted his life is one of the sacred ties that binds humanity (I’m doing the “sign of the horns” and sticking my tongue out in a gesture of solidarity). When I started at Google in 2007—this is going to be a very “in my day, sonny” edition of Tech Support, sorry—there was plenty of sorrow/depression about having already missed the boat: the IPO had recently happened, turning every random yukster who happened around in the “Before Times” into a multi-millionaire. 

What’s more, Silicon Valley HR had realized that the brands of these companies were so strong they didn’t need to offer crazy salaries or stock options to lure in new grads (at least if you weren’t an engineer…). They gave out lunch and a yoga ball instead of a regular office chair, rubbed their hands together mischievously, and called it total compensation. As an entry-level communications staffer, I felt as rich and lucky as (end-of-the-book) Charlie Bucket, yet was barely making more than my bff Yvonne who was teaching at a public school in Harlem. I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it!

I’d like to puff the pipe myself and coast into “what even is money, man?” turf, but I’ll stay on-course and concede that the Soho House membership vibes of the megacorp tech job remain…surprisingly strong. Look, I lived it, I know better (have I not decried Google as a cult/fraud/op any chance I’ve had??) yet I still fall into the “accept me, Daddy!” trap. The other day I passed through Chelsea Market, the multi-billion-dollar Google building in New York where I worked for a few years (my cousin visiting from California wanted to walk the nearby High Line, this wasn’t just for weird nostalgic yuks–I SWEAR). Anyway, I became briefly obsessed with sneaking into the office. There was an unguarded stairway I thought I might be able to tailgate in through, should some unsuspecting Googler be heading that way. I’d have a likely story about leaving my badge on my desk (“I’m sooo late to my 1pm,” I’d add, in a British accent to add intrigue). What did I even want? A pull of the soft-serve machine for “old times sake”? To steal a Google tote bag to carry around ironically (I burned all of mine)? To feel the numb, womb-like comfort and ease of being a Googler again? I did have to pee. 

All that is to say, tech companies are so good at this psychological stuff. Your sense of dread about missing a hiring wave, the eagerness to catch the next one, the prospect of a random right-place-right-time fortune–this is what keeps the Valley humming, honey! The sense of precarity never really leaves once you’re “in,” either. Being lined up and rated against peers in a totally subjective/opaque process a couple times a year really brings out the insecure achiever in everyone year-round (and now the random layoff cycles are going to crank the heat riiiight up!). It’s an endless, exhausting exercise in currying Papa’s favor (of course “Papa” is always the most antisocial and ruthless of the bunch, so you’ll never truly win his/her love). I’m chuckling thinking of a gallows-humor bit I used to do in the office: “thank you for hiring me, Mr. Schmidt” in a baby voice (curtsy, bat lashes, etc.). That joke is aging prettyyyyy poorly in light of every single one of the Google guys being on the Epstein flight logs, eh!

But caveat emptor, let’s say you still want a Google job. Is it still possible, you seem to ask. Well, it’s certainly not too late (the STEMlords are gonna be riding this hoss [Earth] til the wheels fall off [civilizational collapse]!). But things have changed: the Golden Era has waned, a period of sad, dynastic bloat has set in, and understanding that is the key to navigating the sea of grifts—I mean possibilities!

What you have to know about tech—and you’ve gotten a taste from the laissez-les-bon-temps-rouler-on-the-Google-card love interest—is that it’s all bullshit. That’s both what’s terrible about it and where the opportunity is. These overstretched empires are built on waste and on meaninglessness; there are entire cottage industries built around selling services (nothing) back to Big Tech. When I was on YouTube’s social marketing team, we had like 7 agencies “firing on all cylinders” constantly to produce what was essentially like 10 random tweets a week. “Hiring freezes” and “belt-tightening exercises” be damned, the budgets are in the billions at this point. “You don’t get a gold star for coming in under budget,” my old boss once said after buying our team a round of overpriced sweatshirts at a team-building event on Alcatraz (poignant!!!). She knew—knows!—exactly how it goes: spend spend spend, spin a yarn about impact, and people will eventually believe you (your soul won’t though, hon…). I recently heard that one of the baby-faced consultants we hired on the influencer marketing side—I’m struggling to articulate one thing this agency did that would make any sense to the outside world—bought himself a BOAT. From this one account! Just think: that could be your boat. To crib my six-year-old’s summer catchphrase: “boom, baby!”

With your writerly background, [redacted] Grasshopper, study the bullshit. The rhetoric. Become a genius at spin. You CAN bullshit these bullshitters. Hang out on Linkedin (you’re already there, so that’s good!) and notice how strenuously the corporate managers are trying to avoid facing the knock-on effects of tech’s stranglehold on society. As outdated as all the mission statements and narratives seem—”we’re giving people the power to build community and bringing the world closer together” (that’s Meta, hahahahhah)—the bullshit is carrying a lot of weight inside these places right now. Imagine being a billionaire trying to square the circle in his head that their endless rent-seeking is somehow making the world a better place, or not just actively accelerating collapse and revolt? They’re going to need help sleeping at night if they don’t already. That kind of courtly, human-to-human emotional labor is worth $$ and AI could never (or at least yet).

Sigh. My ideas about work—like what’s the point of it, the worth of it, where it should fit in the overall picture of life in chaotic times—have swung around a lot over the past couple years, mostly because the things I’ve founded the most joy/meaning in since leaving Google (taking care of my kids, contributing to my community, staring at the wall in service of my own cReATiVE eXpresSion, etc.) are so divorced from money-making or an externally-comprehensible definition of ambition it’s a joke (haha?). The times are only getting grimmer, the available career paths look ever-dumber…so shouldn’t we just take the “grill pill” and let jobs be jobs—whatever you have to do for money—and let life, real life, just be the other stuff?

And look, sometimes that will be the case. You can’t really be ground down in mind/body/spirit without some baseline of financial security and like you said, your passion-path isn’t getting you there right now. But I wish to dispel the notion that the rock-climbing-all-day Google guy (are y’all still dating? lol) won the life sweepstakes. This is going to sound like coping, because I totally blew up my own bullshit career path, but I don’t think the goal of life is to maximize comfort and ease. You can’t just hang out til you die, right (is that what golf is?)? I mean, maybe you can. But ultimately, I think you have to care about whatever it is that you do—your “life’s work” has to answer some larger, deeper personal call. So yeah, I suspect Google boy has a reckoning coming—soul-crushing boredom, depression, burnout, midlife psychotic break, choose your fighter/crisis! And if he doesn’t, I’m sorry—to quote Logan Roy, he’s not a serious person.

Your passion for writing and your hunger to learn aren’t the things that led you astray. They are hopefully what will guide and sustain you over the course of your life no matter how many daylight hours you have to devote to making a quote-unquote living.

Now get out there and secure the bag/boat. Boom, baby!

Best,

Me

Not in the Tech Support Discord? WTH?? Also, I’m speaking at the Labor Notes conference (first tech industry organizing edition!) on October 7th in NYC. Check it out!!!!! https://labornotes.org/techcon2023

Aw, friend. All these layoffs! What the hell. When I first heard how it went down at Google—mass firings via middle-of-the-night email, “see ya suckers!”—Larry Page’s big dumb grin popped into my mind with haunting/pristine clarity. Due to my old job, which I’ll explain in a second, I have all these catchphrases of his permanently lodged in my psyche like Jenny Holzer statements projected on a building in all caps. And one of these is GOOGLE SHOULD BE LIKE A FAMILY.

[interluding here, sorry….we’re going for a ride on a rickety rollercoaster, folks!] There was a period of a few months during my time on the Comms team in like 2011 when it was my job to note down everything Larry Page said. He had just become the CEO (this was a short stint—he would step down a year or two later after getting diagnosed with vocal paralysis and basically never spoke publicly again, so you tell ME what kind of illuminati little mermaid soul-trade went down there?!), and my ultimate boss, the head of PR, was trying to figure out what he wanted to say, to feel out his “vibe,“ knowing that the quickest way to a powerful man’s heart is through (writing) his talking points. I took this on with the utmost seriousness, which is funny in retrospect; I chose a font (“Courier New”) that gave it the look of an official dossier, like something clacked out in a back room at Mi5. But it was also funny in the present, back then, because he really never said anything. All his “money” lines were painfully cringe, like “our vision is computers doing more of the hard stuff so humans can do what they do best: learning, living, and loving!” Over and over he told a story about how he read a biography of Nikola Tesla as a tween and cried—he really emphasized the crying bit—because Tesla died poor, which taught him the all-important life lesson “commercialize your inventions or you’ll die poor.” Still I assumed he was a genius and had the highest, purest hopes that once Google unleashed the full spectrum of human potential, it would solve all the world’s “highest-impact” problems—he had another one-liner about how curing cancer was simply too small a problem for Google, so they had set their sights on the true moonshot: CURING DEATH.

But the “Google should be like a family” company philosophy stuff was the frontispiece of Larry’s vision at that time. He shined while riffing on this theme….he had a whole story about how his grandfather, a Michigan autoworker, had a lead pipe that he used to protect himself against the bosses (generational trauma really “connects”), and no one at his company would ever feel like that, it was going to be all trust, respect, meaningful work, “bringing your whole self to the office” and so on. So it was surprising and surreal to watch the parade of layoff posts go by on LinkedIn, each sob story more Dickensian than the last: the husband/wife duo with a newborn, both laid off on parental leave, a woman with a baby fighting for their life in the NICU, a guy on an H1B visa who happened to be on vacation when he got laid off so now he can’t come back into the US and has to ask his friends to sell his car and things. It’s not exactly giving “family”?! I assume the decisionmakers think that giving people slightly more than the legally required amount of severance is fair recompense for 1/ firing them totally unnecessarily and 2/ denying them the opportunity to say goodbye in a dignified way (especially considering most Googlers have a totally fragmented sense of self/vocation/purpose after years of being inculcated with I AM GOOGLE, GOOGLE IS ME, GIVE THYSELF TO G). And they’re wrong about that. The people turning the knobs at the top have zero humanity or heart. It’s all a game, and the rules are arbitrary/bad.

It makes you wonder why Google is so willing to let go (lil’ layoff humor there!) of the progressive-corporate-utopia mythos they were carefully cultivating over so many years and executive briefing docs. I’ve come to the view that organizational culture in tech is about normative control, strategic influence over employees’ hearts and minds in order to serve the company’s interests/goals. Larry Page said as much all those years ago! They weren’t creating these crazy workplaces with ballpits (??) for the fun of it, or because of some genuine belief that corporations could or should be a site of self-actualization. They did it because that’s how they attracted, retained, and got the most out of people in those freewheeling, creative, high-growth, get-in-loser-we’re-curing-death years. The goals are different now (chase ChatGPT’s tail? maintain search advertising monopoly?), the world’s changed, too, and new norms and forms of employee control are needed. They’re not gonna be good ones: one of the more depressing developments of the past couple years at Google is the establishment of an Internal Community Management team, a bunch of hall monitors who rove email lists and Memegen like Dolores Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad, tattling when people say something too “politically charged,” or post something too challenging on the Q&A page when Henry Kissinger comes for a “fireside chat.” My guess is that management has decided that fear, insecurity, and having workers be regularly confronted with their insignificance vis-a-vis the force and weight of the institution are more effective “cultural values” at the moment. Not very “Googley,” innit?

As for your life after Google: of course it’s better, or it will be better when you’ve healed what feels broken and sat miserably in the occasional paroxysm of shame/grief/anger. Not to get all Pema Chodron, but what you are offered here, now, is nothing less than the gift to define your worth/work on your own terms. I think a place like Google (all FAANG? Or sorry, it’s MAMA now) makes it increeeeedibly hard to do that. There’s just way too much stress and politicking, and I would assume the culture of self-promotion and the theatrics of selling your impact (that’s totally divorced from, like, real-world impact) is only going to intensify in this post-layoffs, am-I-next era. It might just be impossible to make a meaningful life inside a mega-corporation? Is this obvious to everyone? There’s some smart people in the Discord who have figured out how to “make it work in the Matrix” via a sense of true vocation in their technical skills and a keen facility with using their middle management status to make things better for people around them, to speak truth to power in effective and non-self-immolating ways, etc. That sounds admirable and yet very hard to imagine when I think about my old department at YouTube which, seemingly as a rule, elevated the most odious corporate operators every performance cycle and punished the “real ones.” Be a real one! It’s better that way.

On a parting note, I’ll leave you with the hard truths of my Google/post-Google journey: Google was never a family, it was always just a corporation, and if you never commercialize your inventions, you’ll die poor.

solidarity/peace/love,

claire

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I’m coming off of a job experience that was some bad shit. The environment was toxic and I was consistently undervalued, disrespected, and frustrated. I’ve been talking to my therapist a bit about my rage and my inability to shake it despite my new gig being pretty good. She encouraged me to consider what justice looks like for me. One of the reasons why I’m so ragey is because everyone thinks I left for my dream job. The reality is I left because I was so traumatized that I nearly lost everything. I’m curious how you handled everything as I explore my own path to confronting and owning my story. I’m not sure if I’ll ultimately go public but she’s encouraging me to talk more to people who did to understand the rewards and risks of doing so.

xoxo -Trauma Queen

How I handled everything….hmm….I appreciate that this question pre-supposes I’ve handled anything, the verb “to handle” carrying—for me, anyway—a sense of having managed a project to completion, as I type this from bed, where I’m fully swaddled in a winter-weight comforter and propped up by a cheap and extremely punishing shiatsu massager. I generally feel more handled than in a position of handling, and insofar as I have “gone public” about my own “bad shit” at work, much of this figures in memory now as random and/or accidental, the cosmic alignment of having a congenitally enormous mouth and some opportunity to run it. I’m clearly still processing: I recently dreamed about running into a former manager that I called out publicly in the dizzying post-Walkout high (I’m referring to Google Creative Lab, if anyone out there knows or cares about the sub-group specificity). The dream wasn’t a nightmare or anything—the manager (“Justin”) and I just stared at each other wordlessly, our pursed lips and narrowed eyes maybe doing a bit of “how dare you….” “how dared you”—but nevertheless I woke up drenched in sweat and remorseful. Was it right for me to say all that? Was it fair (I really did talk some shit.)? I read “Conflict is Not Abuse” recently and wondered: am I guilty of overstating harm? Who has power over whom? I had a really bad time in that job and despise everything they (“they” being the management, “The Lab,” Google in general!) stand for, but I also dislike flattening stories, and the whole picture was quite a bit more nuanced than the way it appeared in New York Magazine. The morning after the dream, I toyed with “liking” a virtue signaling LinkedIn post from one of the other leaders of that department, unsure if the impulse was more peace offering or light trolling. So that’s how replying to this question started, and how it’s going is that I’ve been psychically thrust into a multi-part reliving/re-processing of that traumatic work experience, and while I’m at it reckoning with everything I’ve ever said and done. Will there be a rainbow at the end of this spiral that justifies and makes peace with all my life choices? All right, all right, I’m up, I’m rolling out of bed, shuffling to the door, flipping the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’….COME ON IN.

The Very Bad Year started with such promise. Getting this job—at Google’s “elite” in-house creative agency, Creative Lab—had been suspiciously easy. For the five years of my career that preceded, I was a rank and file Communications employee who’d gotten some internal notoriety by sending around a quirky weekly company-wide email. People liked them and made memes about them, etc. (I found it all pretty embarrassing now, though; in the sobering light of 2021, they sound like a one-woman psyop—making fun/light/absurd of whatever was going on at Google in a way that managed to flatter executives and contribute to the company’s self-mythologizing). Eventually they attracted the attention of some of the company’s marketing execs—someone forwarded me an exchange where they were parsing my emails and being like “why isn’t she working for us?” Taking a job at Creative Lab meant pulling up stakes and moving to New York. But I was a restless 27-year-old going through a breakup, so this opportunity to start a new chapter felt so effortless and ideal I figured I’d somehow manifested it—it was meant to be.  

Google Creative Lab’s office was a gorgeous, two-story loft on top of Google’s city-block-sized building in New York, with postcard views of the Manhattan skyline. On my first day, I snapped a picture of the words painted on the entrance: “This place is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all, love.” This should’ve been a red flag, a foreshadowing of the smug, pseudo-religious rhetoric masking sub-optimal working conditions, but alas, I posted it earnestly to Instagram. 

Creative Lab turned shilling for a megacorp into an art form—literally. The place was full of incredibly talented young people—filmmakers, designers, producers, animators, technologists, etc.—and as the executives boasted at every opportunity, the team spent “at least 95% of their time making stuff.” But what exactly were they making? The various mission statements they floated around were a mix of sing-songy corporate gobbledegook (“remind the world what it is they love about Google,” “make Google’s magic more magical”) and faux altruism (“we’re just here to connect everyday people with amazing Google technology they could really benefit from!”). At the time I joined, 2012, they were really feeling themselves for having influenced the early interface design of Google Glass (“when our creative artists collaborated with the amazing mad scientist engineers, we knew we’d hit upon something that was going to change the world.” No further comment beyond “lol”) and the growing power that implied they had to “help invent Google’s future.” But their real niche (and arguable genius) was the “manufacturing consent” commercial; if you’ve ever seen a Super Bowl ad from Google like “Dear Sophie” or “Loretta”, the Lab made it. In 90 seconds or less, they’ll make you cry, remind us of our shared humanity, and assure you that ceding all your personal data to Google is good, actually. 

The head of Creative Lab, Andy Berndt, was an ad industry titan shrouded in tech industry myth—he’d apparently come up with Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. He had a gregarious, charming, self-deprecating schtick, but his management style could best be summed up as “fear and anxiety.” His opinion on the work and the people who created it was literally the only one that mattered. Unlike my old team in Mountain View where there were some checks and balances and processes that prevented the power (im)balance between management and employees from becoming totally out of whack, the Lab operated however Andy wanted. He apparently did the performance review process with a whiteboard and a stack of post-its with people’s names on it, unilaterally deciding who went above and below the line. You were only as good as your last creative review, so the office was never completely empty; even at midnight and over the weekends, you’d find guys in front of their massive computer monitors, glassy-eyed and on the wrong end of a pile of Red Bulls, swirling a stylus around a Wacom tablet. People never really commiserated or complained, though, because they were all freelancers whose contracts could be cut or extended at will, randomly, sometimes with no notice (of course if you were a “total rock star,” a “perfect culture fit,” maybe you’d get converted to a full-time position and get health insurance and vacation days).   

I joined as a copywriter, and I would say I just wasn’t very good at it, but I never really had a chance. Justin, one of the executive creative directors and my manager, was constantly stressed or on deadline or in the middle of something. When I first arrived, he instructed me to just watch everything Creative Lab had ever made and they’d find something for me to work on eventually. That was the last I heard of him for at least a month; my Gchat archive from that time (shoutout to Yvonne Delbanco and Lisa Bubbers for being such generous space-holders for my career-induced panic disorder from 2012-13!) is just me spiraling about Justin always canceling our 1:1s or recounting choice anecdotes like him saying to me “Oh, I forgot you existed” when we ran into each other in the snack kitchen. A freelancer, a buddy of Justin’s from Wieden+Kennedy, joined around the same time and was immediately busy. I honestly have no idea if he was a good writer or not, but it didn’t really matter because he was so Southern charming and kept a guitar at his desk with which he often broke into spontaneous mid-afternoon song. Justin also loved Emily, a copywriter who was absolutely incredible at the job. However much they were paying her, it wasn’t enough. She was always working on the most important Lab projects and her writing output was lightning-fast and invariably perfect. Whenever Justin would throw me a bone and give me some small copywriting assignment, I’d toil over a script or creative treatment, anxiously trying to get it right, then wait on tenterhooks for his feedback. From there it played out like this: Justin would enter the doc, exit, then some days would pass and I’d see the team assembled in Justin’s office or the glass-walled conference room for a creative review and realize that Emily had been tagged in to take my place. This place was about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all, love!

Eventually I found some creative flow—mostly by shopping myself to the non-Justin creative directors—but it clearly was too late or not enough. A year after I joined I had a performance review where Justin told me it was time to “wrap things up.” This was a Lab after all, and the experiment that was Me had failed. Just in case I hadn’t fully gotten the message, in the next day’s staff meeting, he glanced briefly over at me before launching into a long rant about how the whole team needed to step up and help onboard a new writer who was starting the next week. “We all know how painful and awkward it is to watch people who've uprooted their lives to join the Lab,” he said, only to flail around and "fall through the cracks" and "linger around forever." He concluded by saying, “if I could just clone Emily, my life would be a lot fucking easier.” 

(I realize I’m a football field away from the question but I promise I’m jogging back to the general vicinity now…). That final humiliation was crushing—I can still conjure up the sense-memory of tensing up my entire body, physically barring the tears from coming out before I could get out of the conference room—but I’m oddly grateful for it now. Feeling shattered by the place I’d given so much of myself to was, while not an experience I’d recommend, a profound and instructive life event: it shook the company shill out of me, so to speak. I was free from believing corporate bullshit, especially the narrow ways they assess people’s value and Google’s specific brand of cloying techno-optimism, because after that, who could?

What I believe now is that Google is looting the world and consolidating power in advance of the increasing chaos and instability facing humanity. And that necessarily involves treating a lot of people like they don’t matter. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot of the choices that I’ve made since the Lab—be it the Walkout or just habitual shit-talking in the press, or even this cathartic little jog you’ve inspired me to take—is about reminding people (and myself) that they do.

I’m kind of running out of time and space here so I’m going to sign off and hope for the best that this covered off risks/rewards of going public, confronting/owning one’s story, what justice for traumatized tech workers looks like. The therapeutic journey is good, but so is holding onto a little bit of the rage. As Alice Walker says in the perfect book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, “a little bit of hate, keenly directed, is a useful thing.”

Yours in truth, beauty, freedom and of course, above all—who could forget?—love,

Claire

***

🏆 TECH SUPPORT CLASSIFIEDS 🏆 (new section alert! Do you want to put something here? askclairest@gmail.com)

• A Thing or Two is a weekly (Monday) newsletter with quick-hit recommendations from Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, two women who are quick to spot things that are going to be big when they are still small and the only influencers I consent to influencing me. Features 10 finds they’re most excited about discovering and sharing—from recipes to design sources to books to beauty products—and I earnestly love it!!

• Looking for an easy way to contribute to the tech labor movement? Consider making a donation to the Coworker Solidarity Fund, which gives grants (more than $100K so far) to workers in the tech industry engaging in activism and organizing in their jobs and workplaces. 100% of online donations go directly to workers; help them grow and power worker activism.

🪕 TECH SUPPORT RECS 🪕

• Absolutely unputdownable three-part series on Elon Musk and Tesla. I learned so much about Elon’s backstory, the weird history of electric vehicles in California, and the sheer depth of the grift that is Tesla, a zombie stock company shored up by gaming the stupid regulatory credits system. The cars are also crappy (who knew?? now I do!) and the factory labor practices worse. A stunning/stunningly depressing American tale of “innovation”! The day I finished this, I was walking with my son when he tugged my arm and said “Look, that’s the coolest car I’ve ever seen.” I groaned, sure he was pointing at the white Tesla that’s occasionally/oddly been parked on our Brooklyn block. Thankfully, he was in fact referring to a KIA STINGER. Totally based. Kids get it!

• Dr. Timnit Gebru was on the cover of Wired and the profile is a v valuable and interesting read about how money and power have overrun the AI ethics field, like everything else!

• Since I last wrote, the paywall to the best comedy miniseries ever made according to me, Kate Berlant and John Early’s 555, was lifted: https://5--5--5.tumblr.com/

• Loved this rich convo with Mike White, who has both artistic integrity and commercial success, plus almost won Survivor (?).

• I don’t think there’s any new Harry Styles content out there, but Tech Support feels a little incomplete without him, so just holding space o reflect generally on him here.

Dear Tech Support,

My corporate tech job is technically prestigious but the work is not meaningful and the backdrop of the pandemic has made it feel especially pointless (as one of my teammates said recently, “we all just build sand castles” :(. But one silver lining of the pandemic is that we can talk openly about the meaninglessness of it now!).

What’s kept me hanging in there during this very hard year-plus is that my role has been, until recently, quite low-stress and chill. The problem is we just got a new manager. She’s extremely Type A and ambitious (an Ivy League MBA, I assume you know the type). Obsessed with make-work and jargon. The hours of the day that I would’ve spent doing things that made me feel at least somewhat OK are now consumed by all these new workstreams she has invented for us to do. Every ping from her fills me with rage and they are frequent. With the onslaught of devastating news all the time, all of her talk about how impactful our work is feels a little like gaslighting?!

Any strategies for coping with this new reality? I would consider looking for another chill role but transfer prospects are slim at the moment and I am still paying off student loans so can’t go follow my dreams to work on a cheese farm (kidding but not).

What are the chances she will eventually chill out and realize the world is dying so we probably don’t need to do 17 upstream reports to increase our visibility every week?

Thanks,

Longing to find my chill again

HONEY.

Simply devastating plot twist. If only we were in the same space, both comfortably double-vaxxed, and you’d provided your full written consent, I’d be going in for a hug right now. We’d queue up some Bonnie Raitt, make a voodoo doll in the likeness of your new manager, light a candle to honor all of the fleeting chillnesses of life that we’ve loved and lost. Eventually, after some sun salutations (in my post-covid fantasy, we’re all doing vigorous yoga next to each other all the time for some reason), as we lay sweaty in corpse pose, I’d roll over and whisper in your ear: “Guess what? This is actually good for you.”

For starters, what a liberation to admit that your job feels/is pointless. Despite how ubiquitous that experience is (David Graeber, the author of Bullshit Jobs, estimated that up to 40% of workers believe their jobs don’t need to exist), it’s something we mostly harbor privately—a secret shame, a social taboo. It’s much easier to admit post-facto. My various YouTube jobs seem cartoonishly dumb now, bad drafts of an episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” yet damn did I workshop my cocktail party schpiel at various points to make them sound important!

In one stint as a “curation strategy manager,” I watched YouTube videos all day and updated playlists on YouTube’s house channels that no one ever visited because they were functionally impossible to find. Occasionally, I had to write a line of copy for said playlists and my manager would tell me to tone down the personality–it shouldn’t sound like a human wrote it, he said, explaining that because of a settlement with Viacom, YouTube needed to strenuously avoid the appearance of any human curation on the site (so then what…exactly…were all of us doing there?).

It is wrong to boast, but my next job—social media manager for YouTube—was the absolute apotheosis of bullshit jobbery. The content of the work was straightforward enough, but the setup was depressingly complicated and bloated, somehow requiring dozens of people and multiple agencies to produce a couple of cheerful, inoffensive tweets and Instagram posts a day with the occasional hollow gesture of performative activism in support of women/the LGBTQ+ community/minorities.

That the world did not want or need this content was an unavoidable fact. Nearly every constituent who engages with YouTube on social media is angry at the platform. K-Pop fans, PewDiePie stans, people concerned with social justice and democracy, the right wing just in general: anytime we would tweet, people would take the opportunity to broadcast their grievances, complaints, and feedback about how to run the business (e.g. “you should all fire yourselves.” “thanks we hate it here!”). None of this mattered at all to the team lead, whom I’ll call “Magda,” whose sole interest seemed to be building her own mini-empire. She was curiously non-knowledgeable about social media–she had never used social media herself as far as anyone could tell—but knew how to play and win whatever corporate game that required taskmastering the team to create strategy decks, best practices docs, and data reporting (the data, which usually served to try and disguise/hand-wave around the reality that the Internet either hated or was resolutely unaware of the marketing team’s work, was churned out CONSTANTLY. the number of staff analysts grew so rapidly it was ultimately spun out into its own team, make it make sense!) on a near-constant basis. Magda’s vision for the team (“24/7 global community management”) wasn’t rooted in anything real, either. I can only imagine how much emptier it feels for the team to be overseeing this operation now: the constant, mindless deployment of heart-eyes emoji replies every time someone tweets a cat video in a global pandemic, being forced to play along that it all matters.

I wouldn’t hold out much hope that your manager magically chills out or clues you into her own existential unrest. I wondered about Magda’s inner life occasionally: what was it like to have an enormous team whose misery over the slavish bullshit of their work was both so deep and right at the surface? She never seemed to mind. At the twice-yearly offsites she would sometimes be asked what her own career goals were and she would always cheerfully say the same thing: to have a Harvard Business case study written about her team’s work and to get a patent. Inspirational stuff!!

But back to you. As Graeber puts it, bullshit jobs violate a basic principle of human nature, which is that we want to be useful, to affect the world in some positive way with our time. It sounds cushy to get paid so well to do so little, but inevitably it starts to erode something deep within, and you’re not a bad or entitled or ungrateful person for feeling that way. This is really challenging in big tech, with all the propaganda about how special you are and how amazing and world-changery the work is, such that you shouldn’t have to walk more than 50 feet to a snack kitchen lest you lose your train of thought and now humanity will never invent an algorithm that eliminates car accidents. And don’t forget all the money and stock options and wellness walks and if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance and get deeper into debt and you’re going to have to do a gofundme if you get cancer and wait what was wrong with your cushy job again? Just do a corporate-sponsored meditation course that has no ulterior motive whatsoever and forget about it!

All this is to say: resist coping too much. If you start numbing yourself further or rationalizing why this job actually is OK or the manager is not that deranged and bad, I’m going to be mad at you. The only Tech Support-sanctioned form of corporate cope is trauma-bonding with your teammates. Gossip (and analyzing the incompetence and corruption of bad managers and the system itself) is power-building and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The question remains, though: what does fulfilling work look like? What is one supposed to do in lieu of a bullshit job? We can’t ask David Graeber, who suddenly and tragically died in September, at the peak of his powers as one of capitalism’s sharpest activist-critic-scholars, before finishing his next manuscript (no, my mind isn’t wandering to a dark conspiracy place, YOUR mind is wandering to a dark conspiracy place….). But anyway, this isn’t his or anyone else’s question to answer, heaves sigh as long and mournful as a foghorn, it’s yours/ours alone. There’s a Rilke quote about how we aren’t ready for the answers, we have to live the questions first. The chill bullshit jobs can numb and distract indefinitely, the intense ones can’t. Let yourself get burned out and mad. Your inner voice is going to scream at you every day and little by little that’s going to say/reveal something clear to you. You may not be able to make this bullshit job work. But in the long run, that’ll get you where you’re going faster.

**

ADD’L TROUBLESHOOTING:

• Carrie Battan on how the Trump years cleaved the online knitting community is my favorite thing I’ve in a long time, an absolute rollicking ride, the Internet is hell and also quirky as hell!

• A delightful Talk of the Town by Hannah Goldfield on ABC carpet neglecting to BCC when they sent a delivery delay email to 200 people has me begrudgingly admitting reading can be good for a laugh sometimes :(

• Now that I have AirPod Pros and can reliably tune my children out when they are in my charge I’m finally getting into podcasts/podcast personalities with religious fervor. POOG with Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant (also reviewed in the new yorker last week—third new yorker mention in as many bullets….is the new yorker good again? was it ever not good? were we just not good enough to appreciate its goodness for awhile?) remains the most important thing in my life (which is weird because I have children), but Celebrity Book Club with Steven and Lily — similarly an absolutely perfect showcase for two brilliant/unhinged/of-the-moment minds —is quickly careening up the ranks. Love to lol in end times!!

• Genuinely confused that I missed this 17-minute long Jemima Kirke-directed John Early masterpiece when it came out in 2019. I cleared my schedule when Carrie from bullet #1 sent it to me last week and had the honor of paying it forward to another bejohnce connoisseur yesterday. “omg we’re eating good tonight,” Hunter immediately texted in reply, “17 minutes!!” If there’s a purer, truer pleasure in these colorless times than being a stan, I’m unaware of it.

see you soon!

anyway, here’s a short piece I wrote for techworker this week. i will be back in the regular tech support queue soon (askclairest@gmail.com)!!!!

**

I have to admit that when news broke that Google workers had formed the Alphabet Workers Union, my first thought was, “haha, no one in my old department would EVER join this.” But as AWU’s numbers have modestly but steadily climbed–now 800ish since going public with 200 in January, I started instead to wonder: well, why not?  

It’s not for lack of love for social justice that my former colleagues on YouTube’s marketing team haven’t “signed their card;” on any given day on Instagram, they’re out there elevating marginalized voices, boosting BLM posts, decrying kids in cages. They strenuously document and display their goodness: one senior manager whom I generally saw as being on the wrong side of workplace issues memorably broadcast her agony over the ethics of cutting down her own Christmas tree in the woods near her pandemic country house. When Biden was inaugurated, my feed was flooded with Googlers posting about how happy, proud, and emotional they felt about the better days in America dawning, while solemnly noting that, of course, “there’s so much more work to be done.” Joining the Google labor movement is probably the clearest shot that any of them have at actually contributing to racial and economic justice…so….who’s in? Anyone??? Hello? Where’d everybody go?  

I tease my ex-colleagues from a place of love and identification. Of course I, too, am a card-carrying member of the liberal-coastal-elite PMC (professional-managerial class). In Catherine Liu’s new book, Virtue Hoarders, she argues that the PMC is well aware of how dystopian and intensely unequal the status quo is, but they’re not actually interested in changing it. All the virtue signalling and insistence upon the correctness of its ideology and tastes is pure PMC anxiety: “There’s this hyperrational desire to be perfect,” she said on the Jacobin podcast recently. “they know the world they’ve made is a bad world, and they want to be perfect to defend themselves from the badness of that world.” OK, so getting the Junior Managers of America to join the traditionally working class struggle against the bosses is going to be a tough sell. I don’t think AWU’s success hinges upon its ability to recruit my old team, per se, but to some extent it does depend on recruiting workers like them. To build real power, the union needs big numbers, and Google is absolutely swimming in PMC. 

I knew exactly nothing about organizing when I helped plan the Google Walkout. Though it has been billed as “one of the biggest worker protests in the United States in a generation,” it was not built in the typical way, over years of careful solidarity-building around shared grievances. I was very eager to shape and frame the thing in a way that felt “Googley”– that brew of altruism and stuff about how we were going to change the world. After years of working in the comms department, I was totally indoctrinated into all the crap about Google being a vanguard company leading the way for the lowly and less enlightened (PMC alert!). Execs were quick to capitalize on this framing, to say nothing of the farce of them all walking out that day. “If the tech industry can make cars that drive themselves,” CFO Ruth Porat said at a WSJ conference the next week, “why can’t we solve this?” 

Of course they didn’t solve “this,” and anyway, it isn’t their job—I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s their duty to be capitalists on a rampage to amass wealth and power, and it’s workers’ job to strenuously check and counterbalance that! While the Walkout posed some very good, concrete demands (keep working towards pay transparency, people!), without sustained momentum and pressure from workers the execs cruised into full-on manage mode, pumping calendars full of listening sessions and flooding internal sites with empty words about diversity and equity commitments. I still chuckle darkly thinking of how, a couple of weeks after the Walkout, I was invited to share my “lessons learned” at a team event and presented with a pair of Doc Marten boots. A few months after that, I was pushed out of the company altogether. In many ways, Google has managed to have its cake and eat it too, satisfying enough of the PMC base with performative gestures to indicate they’re “taking the issues seriously,” while clearly signalling to the rest that if you speak up and push back, you’re risking your job.  

Nevertheless, I believe the Walkout illuminated some of the paths forward for tech worker organizing, chiefly in revealing Googlers’ very legitimate material concerns and frustrations, including the abysmal way in which worker complaints against management are handled, how chronically under-leveled and underpaid newcomers are (especially women and POC), how slow, arbitrary, and punitive the performance management and promotion processes are, how parents and pregnant women are often discriminated against or given impossible choices, etc.  

This—and nowhere else—is the place to start building real power. It’s tempting to tap into PMC anxiety—it’s a very real, if weak force. But winning looks like simple, material gains and stronger worker protections. What do the SWEs at Google care about? On call burden? I don’t even know what that is but I’d be willing to bet that it is something people could really rally behind. AWU is an enormous, ambitious undertaking and as with anything that directly challenges Capitalism itself, the odds are never in the workers’ favor. Still, as an experiment in power-building, I find it worthwhile, exciting, and cool—if nothing else, it’d make for some killer Instagrams.  

What’s done is done now, or rather what’s not done is not done, so I will just keep expectations low and note herewith a couple of things I’ve been *half-heartedly mimes conducting an orchestra* following recently, and retreat quietly back to my hearth.

• Since I last wrote, the Timnit Gebru situation has remained a stunner on every level (Nitasha Tiku’s piece today in the WaPo is a great snapshot—amazing new tidbit that Timnit had just been promoted with a glowing review from Jeff Dean 2 months before the firing!). More than 3,000 Googlers and 4,000 academics signed a petition supporting her. Elizabeth Warren, Yvette Clarke, Cory Booker and other algorithmic bias watchdog types on the Hill wrote a letter to Google basically asking WTF they were thinking. Timnit’s team (a merry band of radical genius misfits for real) sent a letter over to the CEO proposing the clear solution to the harm he said he wants to repair, the commitment to racial equity he said he’s eager to re-affirm: rehire and promote Timnit. Crickets, of course. Think of the points they’d score, internally and externally, for taking the L on this one! That they won’t shows what’s at stake (or rather what’s more valuable) to them now: unfortunately I don’t think we can make any mistake that this is brute-force, wrong-side-of-history message about workers’ rights, ethics, and people of color in the company. “They wanted my presence,” said Timnit on NPR this week, “but not the reality of me.” But by all means, carry on with your diversity OKRs, Google!

• Ripple effect, righteous rage edition: Timnit inspired Google’s ex-top diversity recruiter to spill some serious tea in a viral tweet-storm. Ripple effect, regular rage edition: Pinterest whistleblowers Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks inspired ex-COO Francoise Brougher to come forward with a discrimination claim. This past week Francoise got a $22.5M settlement from the company, while Ify and Aerica—who risked more, sacrificed more, and paid a bigger cost—got less than a year’s severance when they left. How does that possibly compute? "A metric ton of white privilege.”

• “This moment is not a tunnel with a bright light at the end.” This year exposed and/or sped up the various disasters and crises facing humanity, and despite the squeaking triumph of #theResistance last month, do we have any choice but to face what’s ahead of us? The voice I’ve must clung to is prolific, prophetic activist-scholar Mike Davis. I learned so much from his appearance on TrueAnon in October talking about the California wildfires, climate change, the significance of evangelicalism, etc. And his election analysis is depressingly perceptive and true (“expecting 2008, Democrats got 2016 again” in the LRB here, on Dig Radio here).

• On a jarringly different note, felt such a rush of warmth and good will toward my community for alerting me en masse to POOG, a podcast about wellness from the brilliant comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak. Wellness here is defined as basically the intersection of beauty and new age, a panoply of topics that have become mortifyingly huge mindshare for me during quar, plus their banter almost feels like an adequate sub for my IRL friends *eyes fill to brim with tears*

• All the aforementioned warmth and good will for the community has just drained from my body as I’m reminded me that no one alerted me to How to With John Wilson??? Even Jake Tapper saw the whole thing before me *insert the reddest maddest about-to-explode emoji*. New York City, the Nathan Fielder connection, lonely, life-affirming lols....does the word of mouth network know me at all anymore?? It’s on HBO so I can’t really link but this 9 minute promotional clip is un très bon gouter.

• Indulging in a spontaneous body percussion performance @ this tweet from AOC.

• A true IYKYK, but Tavi Gevinson is an artist and a seer, and her medium is instagram comment (here, here)

• Merry Christmas! The season officially commenced in our household with a long trumpet-like groan from my husband after finding me howling with laughter @ Kate Berlant and John Early’s Last Christmas video. It’s actually from last Christmas, and there’s no better proof of the cold humorless heart of humanity than the low viewcount on this absolute masterpiece.

Wishing you and yours happy holidays and imminent vaccinations!

Send me your existential questions for the New Year, we hear for you <3 askclairest@gmail.com

In the Before Times, I was planning on moving to San Francisco after a decade in New York and a short stint in LA, because it seemed like the “right thing to do” professionally and for long-term relationship prospects. But now everyone I know seems to be abandoning their Bay life for Sacramento (!!) or the Central Coast or the Pacific Northwest and moving there now just feels wrong. Between tech companies making work-from-home permanent + fires + cost of living, I can’t help but wonder….is the Bay Area OVER?

Signed,

Living in Limbo

Hi Limb,

Last night I dreamt about driving around a vast, gorgeous, open-air Costco. I got lost, then found myself standing at the top of a hill, taking in the view in a cluster of masked randos (“this is BORING!” my son forked in as I recounted it to him this morning, before launching into HIS dream, the centerpiece of which was a jellyfish’s eyeball spraying brain water onto a school of fish who, so stunned by what was happening, just sat there, opening and closing their mouths). The point is—insofar as there is one in this opening anecdote!—where we really live is in our minds (and those are deteriorating by the day?). Moving on…

My mantra/refrain recently has been “Possibilities!” after a book of David Graeber essays I’ve been thumbing through. Graeber would probably cringe at how I’m neutering the message to shopworn inspirational/motivational stuff (the book is about rethinking how society is arranged altogether, challenging systems of power, and embracing an anarcho-feminist utopian future which…c’mon gals, let’s do it???), but nonetheless it resonates that way. Possibilities! The reward—or maybe silver lining is more “it”—for living through a time of chaos, uncertainty, and change is the permission to rethink and arrange your life however you want. I live in Brooklyn, and as a city-remainer, I’ve gleefully joined in on my fair share of snarking of those who’ve fled to the burbs or upstate or LA, but frankly, who can blame them? The permanent remote-work thing is a liberation of sorts; without the chokehold of a daily commute, people SHOULD relocate to a place that they more personally, voluntarily align with. Good luck and God bless, I say!

While we’re rethinking where to live, why not also rethink what we DO? A couple of weekends ago (the Saturday our clinically obese president was hospitalized with Covid….memories, light the corner of my mind….), multiple people brought to my attention a minor social media snafu YouTube found itself in: a tweet, a delete, a mortifying apology. The whole thing reeked of urgency that’s really hard to grok if you haven’t lived it: a five-alarm behind-the-scenes firedrill, higher-ups assuring even-higher-ups “WE’RE TAKING ACTION TO REPAIR WITH COMMUNITY” while dozens of people and email threads spin and spiral underneath them. This is the bullshittization of work par excellence: helping no one, changing nothing, generating nothing but stress and anxiety. And to think these workers don’t even have the numbing solace/snacks of Google HQ anymore (does gallows humor work over Zoom??)! It’d be funny if the falseness and purposelessness at the core of these tech jobs wasn’t a form of spiritual violence. To invoke David Graeber again, live like you’re already free and there’s obviously nothing that makes us feel less free than a Bullshit Job—libérez les sardines!!

Cities have possibilities, too. I’m a dyed in the wool Bay Arean (Oakland native) with a dumb, abiding love of San Francisco, though I have to acknowledge that much of that is nostalgia, both real and imagined (I’m open to past life regression analysis re: the intense wistfulness I feel about places like Hippie Hill which let’s just say that as a Polk Street-dwelling, Google shuttle-riding yuppie, I was not exactly ~*authentically frequenting*~). If we’re honest, the pandemic can’t be SF’s livability tipping-point; it’s been serving up some sharp dystopian looks for a loooong time! The intense inequality, the poop and trash and people bleeding and sleeping on the streets everywhere…these problems aren’t unique to SF, they’re America’s problems, but they feel more extreme and intense there, a place responsible for so much ostensible “progress” and opportunity. I have literally no idea how to solve these intractable systemic issues but assume it will take ordinary people with a shared belief in humanity coming together to rethink the whole damn thing / fight for a better city for everyone. If you’re not picturing the Youngbloods playing live in Golden Gate Park in 1971, a sea of hippies swaying in the crabgrass to “Come on people now, smile on your brother” by this point, I frankly cannot help you!!!

Does that answer your question at all? I will toss in here for good measure and a bit more “value add” because I’m desperate for your approval and not sure I’ve clinched it, that I once saw in a Ted Talk that living near friends and family is worth like $135,000 a year. So there’s also that. Live where you want, Limb! Your possibilities, like the dreamscape Costco city-on-a-hill, are infinite.

Some more reading:

• Amazing to have a profile of a tech founder these days that inspires anything other than a reflexive “ew….” but damn, Signal’s Moxie Marlinspike seems like *such a good dude*—principled, conscientious, and a bonafide character. Plus the piece is by Tech Support worship-object Anna Wiener, so.

• “An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.” YOW! This, from Commonweal Magazine, about American’s flinty, inculcated understanding of socialism, is an absolute banger, and it also serves as a reminder that you never know where the next absolute banger is going to come from, because Commonweal is a Catholic opinion journal. I could quote the whole thing but instead I’ll just link again, go read it!

• My favorite writer on Trump and everything else, David Roth, weighs in on “America’s choice:” “Joe Biden won’t fix America. But booting Trump is a good place to start.”

• This conversation between Astra Taylor and Meredith Whittaker is a thoroughly clear diagnosis of the issues in tech + primer on what principled pushback looks like. And it’s a spirited dialogue ‘among badass queens’ to boot!!!!!!

• Enjoyed the tidy rebuttal of the Coinbase CEO’s attempt to banish politics and activism from the workplace from Google’s head of HR/iconic Nice Dad figure Laszlo Bock.

• Suuuuuuch a gentle, poetic profile of Timothée Chalamet by my friend Dan Riley with some truly incroyable images alongside. My kink is learning that gorgeous, exceptional people are just as restless and tormented as we are, it turns out!!!

If you’re getting this for the first time because someone forwarded it to you and your made it all the way to this point, you might as well subscribe yourself. SEND YOUR Q’S TO ME HERE: askclairest@gmail.com allthebesttilsoonhavefunbesafeletsgetthatmoney(foramorelivablefutureforall) <3 Claire

What I think makes Jessica so compelling is not actually having had such a huge, crazy job at a huge, crazy megacorp like Google in a turbulent and consequential period in its history (though can you imagine the PRESSURE? I’m furtively popping a roll of tums just thinking about it) but her later-career arc. She’s talked a lot about the ennui and disillusionment she experienced in her last years at Google, things that you don’t often associate with people who’ve achieved that level of power, probably because of the personality/compartmentalization/lack of rich inner life one also associates with that level of power. When she left Google, Jessica went on to get an MFA, and her career moves have been unexpected/creative/weird/interesting ever since, while still somehow fitting tidily in the neoliberal productivity/prestige matrix (she published a novel, co-founded a start-up, was just named a contributing opinion writer at the NYTimes, etc.). There’s a quintessence of having Figured Something Out, or at least having unblocked the chakras (more on next time! *winks to camera, makes peace sign with one hand, mimes rolling a doobie with the other*). Here, she discusses the value/values of “mission-driven” tech companies, what it’s like managing lots and lots of people (turns out it really IS “lonely at the top”!), and the $100 that finally lured her out of Google.

I polled some friends who are either still in communications and marketing at Google or are alumni working at other companies now about what to ask you, and a couple of themes came up a lot. One was around company values and the role they play in Big Tech today. Mark Zuckerberg recently said on Axios that if there’s one thing he would have done differently, it would’ve been to speak up more about Facebook’s values–free expression, voice, etc–upfront. Haha. I think that Google did always try to do that, but ultimately what do the values mean if the company is always choosing growth over anything else? And when you are the frontline for spinning a company decision when you know the values aren’t genuine, how do you navigate that internally without “sacrificing your career to the cause”?[editor’s note: amazing softball first question there, Claire!!!]  

So, one of the most important functions of communications in a company is acting as friction, particularly with the leadership. Because as companies get larger and more successful, we as employees start to feel invincible. We tend to become very tunnel-visioned in terms of how we interpret the outside world’s perception of us. 

So when a big hairy thing comes along, the issue quite often is getting explained to you by a lawyer or a product manager, someone you have no reason not to trust. It’s not that they’re lying to you, but it’s coming very much from the company perspective. So one of the most important things for a comms person to do is to try to remain level-headed and retain a healthy dose of skepticism so that you are channeling the outside world as you advocate for a certain decision with the leadership team (or whoever is making a particular decision). Otherwise it’s very easy for the group to start rationalizing things, and arrive at a conclusion that sounds very good and palatable to them, but that might be causing real harms externally. There always needs to be someone in the room that’s rooting for the company but is also thinking about 1) how it’s going to be perceived externally and 2) if it’s a company with a strong values backbone, how the decision maps back to the company’s values. 

If you look at Facebook, the internal conversation there, especially pre-pandemic, was “the world is out to get us, they just hate us.” There wasn’t so much self-reflection, not a lot of asking “what are we doing wrong?” I’m not saying no one was ever asking that, but in these really large companies the groupthink becomes very, very strong. I also think the vast majority of time in corporate PR the stuff you’re saying and doing doesn’t feel like spin. Sometimes you are literally just pitching a product launch or putting out a fire related to an outage or a battery issue.

So I’m hearing that you really believe in the values. But in 2020 the values feel sort of complicated and hollow, right? Like Facebook and YouTube talking about freedom of expression and “letting every voice be heard!” feels quite simplistic in the face of, say, what’s happening with misinformation and radicalization and democracy in general. 

I don't like values when they’re just used for marketing, and that does definitely happen at times in the Valley.

But on the whole, I think it’s a good thing that companies have values. I don't know if I want to live in a world where corporations are so transparently for profit that there is no such thing as some internal ethical guideline about what they will and won't do. People, young people in particular, want to work in organizations that generally want to make the world a better place and are guided by a set of values. There will still be bad decisions made along the way, but fewer than if those values hadn't existed.

When you're a public company, it becomes very difficult because the market doesn’t care about your values. You’re up against that constantly. If you really didn't want to show any misinformation on Facebook or any content creation platform, there is a way to do that but it would slow down your product, slow down the virality of video views, etc. 

Right. “Suspend the algorithm” is the “defund the police” option. 

At some point the question is: are we optimizing for our values or for the business? Like everything in life, it’s a compromise. I think the question for every individual professional is–and this sounds totally uninspiring–where do you draw the line? What are the levels of pragmatic compromise that you’re OK with, and where does it not work, or feels like too much? 

Did you like running a big team? 

One thing I really liked when I was leading a team was that I felt like I had some power to change things.  At different points in my career, at different companies, I saw things that were happening that I didn’t think were good, and that it would be better to change, but as a manager there's still very little you can change, at least in terms of bureaucracy. The best you can do is tackle the small space you have and even that small space you have is still very, very affected by larger policies. 

Whereas once you run an entire org, you can just start things and stop things. Yes, you might butt up against larger company bureaucracy, but at least there's a level of responsibility and scale that feels like you can make a change. It doesn’t even have to be about big weighty issues. For example, as a leader, not sending emails on the weekend to people in your organization helps create a culture where people are less likely to send emails on the weekend. 

I really enjoyed that part of being a leader because you could see how making certain shifts could really impact people on a personal level. Because I could see across my org, sometimes I could see certain opportunities for people that other people couldn't see just because of where they were sitting. 

On the other hand, I didn't like that people wouldn't talk to me in the micro kitchen. I didn't like the fact that if I started talking to someone more junior in my department they might act nervous, that at offsites people wouldn’t come talk to me because they were intimidated. 

How did you deal with bad managers?

I think my predecessor, Rachel, was very good about taking a tough stance on low performance. I very much learned from watching her. She also packed our organization very lean, which forced us to make sure that we always had the best people in place. When resources are scant, you can’t afford to let bad performance drag on.

Now what can be hard, and what I think employees don't always see, is that the path of managing out a manager (or any employee) can take a very long time. Even when it’s alarmingly obvious to the person’s team, it can take months to deal with. So what looks like the company doing nothing is actually the company doing all the things it is required to do from a legal and humane perspective to ensure that the process is fair and based on concrete feedback. 

But in general, and talking about any company, I would agree with you. I think the reason people don't deal with poor managers even when they know that there's a problem is that it's really hard to have honest conversations. It's a lot easier to not manage them out. It’s a lot easier to give people “tough” feedback in a roundabout way, which means they can often rationalize it, and not hear it for what it is. Generally, humans are not good managers. And likewise, generally, there are very few repercussions in companies for not dealing with bad managers. 

It often struck me that bad managers get ahead. The people who are great at managing up but are hated by their teams are the ones who rise through the ranks.

I’m sure I made the mistake of over-valuing someone who managed up well. But on the whole, I didn’t hear this complaint in our department. I also think people on my team knew I hated anything that looked like bragging. We had a weekly presentation where people would share projects they had done--best-practice sharing, type of stuff. You weren’t allowed to show me your successes without also telling me what you wished you had done differently and what you thought you could improve for the next time. 

So while I think it's absolutely true that you have people who are really good at managing up, the culture of how successful that strategy is sits squarely with the leader and what they value and communicate. 

If you’ve made it clear that good management is important to you then you might not get perfect management, but the culture will adjust to the expectation. If you say diversity really matters and you expect to see diverse candidates every time you're hiring, and you also talk about that a lot, then you will start to see a shift towards diversity in your candidate pool and hiring pool, because ultimately people want to make their bosses happy and their boss has communicated this is important to them. If you are a bully, you yell at your team, and you create a really aggressive culture, you will have managers that do the same things to their team. Culture starts at the very top. 

I’m curious to hear about your decision to leave Google and what you did afterwards.

I wrote a Medium article called “How to Quit Your Job in 837 Easy Steps” which sort of sums it up. It was a feeling building up in me for a few years, this very vague, mild sense of doom, that this is not what I should be doing. It coincided, too, with having two kids and being very sleep deprived and finding it really hard to juggle a very demanding job where I felt like I was working constantly. It was that thing where you are nursing the baby while trying to answer work emails and it's six in the morning. 

So it was a general unhappiness with my life. I was tired of defending certain things. I felt like I’d lost the skepticism I’d come in with, and also the creativity, something that was very valuable to me. The final component was looking around at my organization and seeing people constantly vying for more. I felt like if I were to ask people on my team if they wanted my job, they’d say, “yes, I’d love to have your job someday.” Or talking to my peers at other companies, they’d say my role was a great job by many, many measures. These jobs are so incredibly well-paid it almost feels wrong to stay in a job that you don’t want to do, just sitting there collecting money. Why not give someone else a chance? 

Those thoughts circled in an unproductive way for a very long time. It really wasn't clear to me what I should do. I even went and interviewed at other companies. I spoke to one company that makes very fancy cars because it seemed really cool. Everyone was always talking about how their CEO was very wild and crazy and doing all these insane things. In the first 20 seconds of talking to them I was like “I hate cars. I cannot think of something that interests me less than cars.” In the end, I realized it didn't matter where I went. I was done with PR, I was done cleaning up other people's messes. 

But that took me a while. I made a lot of excuses not to have to deal with it: if I just get through this pregnancy, or this one work milestone that’s stressing me out, I’ll feel differently. But the one thing that was very, very clear to me within all this vagary was “what am I if not this job?” I’d generally stopped reading books. I was dealing with a lot of my personal relationships really transactionally, slotting my friends in once a month to see them for a dinner of two hours. 

I remember catching up with a friend who’d just had a baby. She started telling me about what a rough birth it was, how she’d fallen into a horrific postpartum depression and had all these physical problems, too. It’d been a month and we were both in the Bay Area, and I didn’t even know. I was like, oh my gosh, I wish you’d called me. And she said, you are so busy with such a huge job, I feel like you would have come because you would have felt like that was the right thing to do, but it would have been the wrong thing to do to you. And the worst part was in my head, I was like, she's right, I would have gone and I would have been so stressed out the entire time about missing out on work stuff. It was a relief to hear that she went through this horrible thing, but came out of it fine and hadn't required me at all. Relief that a friend didn’t call you when she needed. That’s a horrible thing to confront about yourself.

I finally acknowledged there was a problem. So when I was on my second maternity leave, I applied on a whim to grad school because it felt like a way out. I applied in January for a September start, it felt far away and low commitment. I got in and once I paid the $100 deposit, it was like buying a gym membership where once you’ve paid the money you have to go. So it was $100 that finally got me to leave Google. 

Wow. 

And it was also important to me because I felt like I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, it wasn't like all of a sudden I was going to be a writer or anything like that. This was just something that I had never studied before and I thought would be interesting. I knew that it would be really hard for me to stop working--after a week of being on vacation, what would I do? I felt like I needed to have something to create some kind of routine immediately and school felt like it would be some sort of a structure that would occupy me while I had this very gentle life crisis of what was I going to do with myself post-Google.

Then while I was at school, a friend sent a manuscript to Medium for a book I’d written years before: The Big Disruption. They liked it and said they’d give it a shot, which was cool for me because back in 2012, an agent had taken it to all the publishing houses in New York and everyone had turned it down. They were like “No one’s interested in tech.” But Medium bought the manuscript and three months later they published it. It was a whirlwind. I wanted to do it anonymously but they talked me out of it. As a comms person you’re so used to being behind the scenes. To all of a sudden have your name attached to something was a weird, uncomfortable feeling.

When you’re so used to writing for other people, when you write for yourself, it feels kind of nice, though, right? 

It is now, but at the time I found it really stressful. The process of writing the book was just this cathartic outpouring, but when the book came out I didn't really want to be in the public eye. I didn't want the book to be read as a tell-all about my experience at Google, particularly since I had written it coming out of an experience at a start-up--not Google. Like, if I wanted to write a nonfiction book, I would write a nonfiction book. I just really wanted to be anonymous and have this book out there that people would engage with and think about and yes, laugh at. Not have people wanting to know how many kids I have or what I think about content moderation. I have enormous respect and will always have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who works in comms and marketing, but I just didn't want to do that anymore and I certainly didn't want to do it for myself and my book. I think that's just hard for everyone when they find themselves in the spotlight. You just want the truth to be the thing that wins out and not to feel like you're taking this active role in it, having to think about how something is going to land. 

As a final question: now that you’ve left Google, how much do you follow what’s going on? I saw you tweeting about the recent congressional hearings and being relieved to not have to write the talking points for that kind of thing anymore. Has your cynicism towards Big Tech grown or lessened? What’s your vantage point as a former insider now on the outside today? 

I still have a lot of people that I care about working at various big tech companies. I think employee sentiment is a lot more complex than the media likes to portray. For much of the media, the classic tech worker is either the person who’s super all about it, all Kool-Aid, or they’re the whistleblower. The media kind of only allows for those two types. I think the vast majority–especially those of us in support functions, who aren’t the highest on the food chain, who aren’t engineers–are aware of the discrepancies and the things that are great about our jobs and that aren't.

Like all things in life you see the complexities and the compromises that people have to make. I also try to not view all these companies as the same. While I had gotten to a point that I felt like there were some values at Google that were butting up against business decisions, I still felt like on the whole the company had a much stronger moral backbone than certainly any other company that I had ever worked at. We would have conversations where we were saying here is this hundreds of millions of dollars opportunity, but do we actually want to be in this particular business? And we’d walk away from it. To me that said something because I have also been in environments where that definitely was not the case.

I do think it’s frustrating, looking across all these companies, to see that there is such a tendency to weigh particular issues or bad actors as if they were just another piece of data . Because in the aggregate, those bad actors or that data cohort may be small. So you minimize the human impact of those issues and you don’t take them as seriously. That is a real problem. Same with the ability to expand and expand and expand with very few checks on that growth. 

There's a lot I love about tech. I think it's unparalleled in terms of people asking really huge questions and not assuming that because something has been solved one way that it can't ever be solved another way. I think that is hugely inspiring.

I just have a lot of contradictions like anyone else. I really appreciate what a lot of these companies have done, while also wishing that they were not so beholden to the market and to growth, that they could make decisions that align more closely with their values.

***

Follow Jessica Powell on Twitter here. Query me at askclairest@gmail.com.

I went from one big tech company to another last year in pursuit of more opportunity because it felt impossible to move up in my old team. Well, I got it. A few months ago, my brand-new manager left unexpectedly (#2020) and I was tapped to do their job (and grew my direct reports 4x in the process). It’s gone pretty well so far, but my compensation and level haven’t been adjusted to my new scope. Ironically, I’m still the same level I was at my old company (where I had no reports at all). I’ve stated this clearly to my department head, but been told I basically need to chill and prove myself. Meanwhile, I’m in the process of hiring several people at practically my level or above, which feels pretty ridiculous considering I’ll be their boss. At all these companies where underleveling is the #1 complaint, isn't it ironic that the expectation is “outperform your level for at least a year”?

Best,

Chasing literal and figurative equity 

Dear Level-Head,

Your workaday angst is refreshing, friend. It’s optimistic. I’m usually blithely looking forward to the future–Christmas, the spring, breakfast tomorrow–but after the week we’ve had (the orange sky event–the day that we had to all face facts that yes, ecological collapse is imminent–was only a WEEK AGO) on the back of the six months we’ve had…thinking of what awaits us ~as a society~ on/after November 3 makes me want to thrust my leaden figure against the hands of time. I’ve been doing snow angels on the rug in a t-shirt that says VOTE! I bought on instagram recently in a fugue state as a kind of dark joke (it’s unclear to me who needs to be convinced to vote against the doom nightmare option on the ballot in November, much less what would sway them, but I’m guessing the fact of this shirt on my body in a liberal stronghold isn’t….it…..and anyway I didn’t leave the house that day #solipsism #symbolism) and mainlining David Graeber lectures (what DID happen to the future?). That said, last night, as I plunged into ever sulkier despair, I watched the entirety of AOC’s address to her nation of 6M instagram followers and felt oddly completely moved/motivated/galvanized/committed to shelving my gnawing fatalism because I do very much believe “the people” deserve a better future than what’s playing out. *in a thin quaver* we got this, fam.

But ah, yes, *leans back in chair, puffs invisible cig* you wanted to talk about corporate leveling. The eternal question: hierarchy, is it good or no good?? I’m not sure if the Google levels correspond exactly elsewhere in Big Tech, but I worked with many levels of people there and here’s my quick breakdown. Level 4/5: seems pretty arbitrary who comes in at level 4 vs. 5, probably just favoring those who know how to negotiate (have you met MEN?). Level 6: OK, witnessed a wild range of IQ and skill levels there. 7s, 8s, now the Really Good people emerge from the pack, as well as the Gifted Gameplayers (and when both typologies are housed in one person that’s the elusive, rare Good Manager). And so on. A more recent big company phenomenon adding some spice to the mixture is the Shiny Object type, coming in at director level and immediately revealing that their main skill is self-marketing or Being Friends with Person who Runs the Department. Of course there is actual inequity, too (at Google they at some point confessed black women were on average at least 1-2 levels below white peers with comparable educational background and years of experience).

Hiring someone under their rightful level by some objective measure is kind of the original sin, because it’s not like the system is set up to correct these issues, and in fact often exacerbates them. Promotion takes forever and is another subjective, biased process. There are perverse incentives for advocating for yourself and trying to get fairly leveled–I never really saw that work out, tbh. I did see a lot of people get labeled entitled/abrasive/ungrateful of the increeeeeeedible opportunity they’d been afforded at Fortune Magazine’s Best Democracy Destroyers to Work For® 2020, though! I assume it’s different in engineering where there’s, like, lines of code to quantity output or impact, some clear case to be made that you’re operating at level X+1, but in a Bullshit Jobs ground zero such as I was in @ marketing at Google...*shrugs so limply it’s practically imperceptible*. I will gently interlude here that YouTube has 40 employees (+ agencies!!) managing a handful of social media feeds that increasingly read like full-on spambot automation. Some of those 40 will get promoted to the next level this year and let me tell you it won’t be due to anything they “accomplished for the business in this unprecedented societal moment,” it will be because they were slightly better at playing the politics via Zoom than their peers. #goalsssssssssss!

*wipes brow* All that said, I think your plight is distinct from all that. I consulted my most intimate tech executive friend on this one and, like a fat harbor seal between rocks, I’ve drifted over to his take, which basically aligns with the advice you got from the faceless superior. Put the level thing out of your mind–like getting pregnant or finding love, it’s going to take/feel a lot longer if you obsess. In the short term, you’re underleveled, but in the long term, the system has GOT YOU, girl (or boy!! *brings index finger to lips*). You’ve been shoulder-tapped for Management and I’m guessing you’re like 2-4 years from the tipping point of what I understand is an absolutely exponential pay scale in Tech. Do a good job, hit the right cheery, borderline obsequious notes in your 1:1s, ask a lot of questions about how you’re doing and what you could do better. Talk less, smile more, and whatever the rest of that Hamilton lyric is (“oh sure, sir!”? that’s literally the vibe). If that’s too passive or patient for you, you could try some manifestation exercises/light sorcery, but actually, the more you sit with the object of your desire–a promotion–the more you risk your own existential exposure. David Graeber has a line about how you get paid commensurate to power, ie the ability to do harm to others, which is why hedge funders get paid millions and nurses and cleaners and moms get bupkis. Don’t dwell on that, I guess! In the immortal words of Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana, “It ain’t about what’s waiting on the other siiiiide, it’s the cliiiiiiimb.” So enjoy it!!!!

Additional troubleshooting:

• A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive. Fuck.

• What Ails America. What doesn’t??? An incredible personal essay that reveals how barbaric, cruel, and greedy our health care system is, and how it’s undoing democracy (light fare!!!).

• Also loved/laughed/wept at this essay by Sarah Lazarus on being a bone marrow donor during the pandemic.

• A thoughtful, considered essay by Emily Ratajkowski that made me feel a lot of things, including dumb for acting personally affronted by her existence/brand of feminism for so many years.

• Insightful analysis of the bland, toothless corporate statements in support of Black Lives Matter from the likes of Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, to sharpen your understanding of precisely HOW they are bland and toothless.

• “They knew that trees are like men. They need one another, and without the support of a cluster they will be ripped up, knocked over; they will wither. The wind that roars off the Atlantic can sweep you from your feet. My island does not nurture things that stand alone.” Last week’s New Yorker fiction by Douglas Stuart is really nice and rather sexy, especially read aloud in the author’s Scottish accent

• I haven’t seen the Social Dilemma but I read this tweet and got the gist

**Welcome new subscribers. If you found this useful, consider sharing it with a friend or wherever you talk shit with your coworkers. If you’re getting it for the first time, here’s the link to sign up. Let me carry your burden at askclairest@gmail.com. 

Coming up in the next edition, I’m “bringing to market” an interview with Jessica Powell, Google’s lightly apostatic former head of Comms. We compare experiences/perspectives/unifying theories of Big Tech-induced ennui and talk some shit. I assume I’ll move a notch closer to the center on the current Google comms dartboard as a result and it’ll be worth it!!!

After stumbling on the new Fortune 40 under 40 list in an insomnia-slash-anxiety spiral the other night, I’m curious to know what you think about the importance or not of building one’s personal brand. It sounds cringe, but I wonder if a more self-designed, self-directed (and yes, self-promotional) approach to work cracks the “meaning and impact” problem a lot of us seem to be facing. 

Being a longtime, successful employee at a major technology company has always been a point of pride for me until the past couple of years (thanks to you and others ;). I like what I do and the people I work with, but describing it to anyone without familiarity with big tech’s inner workings is complicated and boring, and the simple ways to put it are either complete bullshit (“help businesses around the world grow to their full potential”) or completely depressing (“display some more ads”). Nothing I’m doing tells a clear story that sets me apart from anyone else in humanity. (Yes, I’m aware that humanity has bigger fish to fry at the moment). 

I’ve always considered myself a creative person; I did a lot of creative writing in school. Over the past decade (!) in the corporate world I’ve had spurts of inspiration to start a blog or a podcast or a business, but never really followed through on anything. I’ve known a lot of people to take tech careers like mine and launch into something that’s more creative, individual, and interesting. I’m sure some of this particular spiral stems from not having all of the distraction and social aspects of the office, which I greatly miss! 

I know this isn’t such a clear question but appreciate any thoughts and reflections on this.

Thanks,

Hoping to make the 100 under 100 list someday

GET IN LOSER, WE’RE GOING SHOPPING (just kidding, of course there are no losers in Tech Support; everyone gets a “Special Angel” trophy just for reading).

You seem to have most of the answers here, Moana; the thing you’ve been searching for has been literally hanging around your neck all along (wow, is the message of Moana that one’s personal truth is actually a millstone?? that is….extremely deep), so I will just spend some time here reflecting back what you said with my own little twist on the off chance that’s edifying for others and that’s how the sausage is made I guess??

So I understand the use of the term “personal brand” here but I don’t think the heart (of Te Fiti—GOD I’ve seen Moana a lot of times, hashtag toddler parent) of the matter is whether or not you want to develop and promote the hell out of a Tim Ferriss-style lifestyle LLC (though I love that arc for you), but rather just the basic “what am I doing with my life?” question. To that end/answer, I guess there are no shortcuts. If you’ve got “the sickness” as a writing workshop teacher I had once referred to it, the thing where you’re going to feel blocked and frustrated until you’re regularly in a creative practice, then you should go do The Artist’s Way and start the process of peeling back all the layers of bullshit, self-doubt, and self-limiting beliefs of how a person should be (f*cK soCieTy!!!!). This is maybe a silver lining of tech offices–all the kindergarten color-palette stimulus and whiteboards and chocolate, the sense that you’re extremely special just for having a badge that opens the door, even if what you’re doing is, I’m sorry to say, what you are doing, which is selling ads while the world burns–not really existing anymore. There’s no distracting away the ennui anymore (the years of my life that zipped by in the Google microkitchens, throwing snacks and office gossip at the void/place where my soul should’ve been…I do find that I miss it). You have to look your existential unrest straight in the greenish dead Zoom eye, and that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Careers are long and there’s no time like the present to start feeling even a modicum more honest about what you’re contributing to the world.

In the meantime, I would probably try to avoid externalizing things too much. Figuring out a “clear story that sets you apart from the rest of humanity” is too intense of a brief for the moment we’re in. And also embarrassing, just structurally. It’s like stumbling upon the bio of an acquaintance that’s in the third person even though it’s obvious they wrote it, describing them as an industry pioneer or creative visionary or noting their spirit animal is “naturally, a cross between Stevie Nicks, Spike Jonze, and Oprah” (that’s from a real bio I read the other day so I’m actually typing this posthumously). To me the Fortune list is like that on a larger scale—I just feel a bit depressed by the posturing and aggrandizement of it all (though all due respect and congrats to those acknowledged especially Beyoncé [for whom I’m sure this is huge!], Sarah Huckabee Sanders [appreciate the commitment to finding ‘total rockstars’ on both sides of the aisle in these polarizing times!], and my IRL friend Erica Anderson who is genuinely rad and kind). Anyway, you may think these people are happy but I guarantee you the person who wrote the thing about Stevie Nicks and Oprah being their spirit animal probably isn’t, or maybe they are and that’s great and we’re not thinking about them anyway because this is about YOU (and Moana).

Good luck on your way <3

Additional troubleshooting:

• RIP to a “good one:” David Graeber, anthropologist, author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, coiner of the term Bullshit Jobs. Here’s a wonderful essay he wrote on play. 

• Two really interesting things about the future of work: a data visualization from the BBC and an an Atlantic piece on the social costs of permanent WFH, especially for young people.

• The spiritual consultants have arrived to save capitalism. Incredible how far corporate America will go to avoid just being good managers.

• Deeply cynical shit in the fight over Prop 22 and gig worker status: how Uber and Lyft funded a disinformation campaign against one of its most vocal critics, the law professor and person I like/admire very much, Veena Dubal

• That the main theme of the Discourse around this profile of Miranda July was not that she sounds completely unhinged (the frying pan anecdote!!!!) is surprising but she went to my high school, we generally stan, and damn, talk about living ~the Artist’s Way~

• I’ve watched all the Jordan Firstman impressions with such fervor I’m starting to feel like I’m cheating on John Early, even as I remind myself that true lols, as precious and rare as they may seem, are not a finite resource unlike literally everything else on the planet. lol!

*fielding further questions here: askclairest@gmail.com*

I recently saw via Instagram that an old friend accepted an offer in the specific org at [tech co redacted] where I used to work. It’s a toxic environment for sure but in subtle ways I’m not positive someone would pick up on in the interview process. I left on good terms but on some level wish I’d spoken out about a lot of things there including a very negative experience I had with a team lead at the end (I still have legit revenge fantasies lol). Should I warn her about what she’s getting into and who to watch out for? I’m torn because we’re not that close, she sounds really excited about it, and also #pandemic!

Signed,

Torn about yucking someone’s yum

HEY TORN

Woweee…the expression “yucking someone’s yum” spirits me back to when Cynthia Nixon was running for New York governor and ordered a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese and lox one day on the stump and we all laughed and laughed, so united in our agreement that her yum WAS a yuck (“lox her up!” the tweets said). The American mood was light. No mail sorting machines were going missing in a blunt, craven attempt to undermine election legitimacy, no protesters were getting beat up by police, though they actually probably were (Ferguson), but it didn’t matter as long as we had Obama up there, a papa to make us feel proud, who could make it all make sense, at least rhetorically, within an accepted framework of American values. Things mattered, or maybe they didn’t, but it was fun to laugh about it either way. But now all we have is a tense giggle in the face of even more devastating combustion of both democracy and the planet. Shrug emoji!

But back to YOUR yum vs. yuck (*John early voice* …I’m weird!), *rubs temples, eyes closed* I’m seeing a yellow light here. They didn’t ask for your opinion and anyway, workplace experience is maddeningly subjective. Even the places I’ve gone on the record saying are super-toxic (*cough* Google Creative Lab *cough*) I’ve marveled at how lots of people (or at least some) seem fine there, or have made it work, or just don’t see the problems the same way (I assume this is either their Meyers-Briggs type OR the color of their aura OR having time-traveled to the present from a Mad Men-era ad agency). That said, toxic environments (especially ones that have cultivated a shiny, cool, you-should-feel-lucky-to-be-here image) seem to be pretty good at sucking people in and warping their sense of what’s normal and acceptable, eroding their sense of worth and will to pursue better opportunities, etc. There’s some value in signaling to the newcomer like “it’s not normal there”—I think that opening that line of communication could be compassionate and helpful (the whisper network IS sisterhood…). I’d probably attach something cryptic to a cheerful congrats (the shifty eyes emoji? “if you ever want to talk through anything, I’m here” with an extremely long ellipsis?). But then honestly I’d probably get distracted mid-message draft and soon enough it’d be “wine time” (@mommies) and I’d forget about it and then months later I’d see them again on Instagram and be like “oh, what ever happened to that?”

I would maybe think about this differently if the “very negative experience” with the team lead was something illegal or abusive or if you feel that by not speaking up you left other people in harm’s way (I’m such an indiscriminate gossip-hound that I’m finding myself desperately curious about what went down, so feel free to reply w/ the specific tea! I live to serve [and be served]!) but even then, yeah, I don’t think the dm to the new person is going to kick off a satisfying arc of restorative justice (it’s never too late to sue, she says cheerily!!). Because it does sound like the person who could most use your help…..is yourself. I don’t know what heals the part of the subconscious that cultivates elaborate revenge fantasies (and honestly I believe in the clarifying and creative power of the occasional furious, vindictive dream) and maybe part of that is showing up for others who have gone through what you did. But it’s also all the normal/boring stuff like time and wine and therapy and voodoo dolls and remembering that hurt people hurt people and that our time on the planet is transient and maybe we were a little harsh on Cynthia and that cinnamon raisin lox bagel…who are any of us to say that someone’s yum is a yuck? (unless that yuck is truly harmful in which case….YYYYYYYUUUUCCCCKK!)

Taking the next couple of weeks off newslettering so see you in September when I presume Covid will be over and democracy will be “stronger than ever”. In the meantime: solidarity with the Pinterest walkout. A perfect inside joke for my fellow two million FAANG workers. This Ed Markey ad rules. Askclairest@gmail.com for your troubles!

Hang in there,
Claire

ALSO, I'm speaking to a group called Compound Writing on Monday, August 10, about this project and the tech labor movement and “using your voice” etc. The event is also open to Tech Support subscribers so if you are interested in joining, you can learn more and register here.

w/o further ado…

Dear Tech Support, 

I’m a black employee and my company is talking a lot about how to promote and develop black talent, but because there are so few black people in management roles, I’m being asked my opinion on these programs and it feels really awkward! I want to help create structures for the other black people in my org but generally it’s hard to have honest conversations with my predominantly white leadership about their privilege. But it also feels like the person benefiting most from these conversations is….me. I’m an extremely high performer (SRY to admit it but it’s true) and going up for another promotion on a team where there are people who haven’t gotten promoted at all. How do I signal to the people that I’m personally taking advancement opportunities from that I feel weird about it? 

Signed, 

Leadership’s Reluctant Darling

LRD!!!

Just going to discreetly pause the Taylor Swift sweater song (which I don’t even like that much ok!! *darts eyes around*) because it’s not really “the vibe”….

Couple of interesting things going on HEREIN. One is the funny phenomenon of leadership either ambiently or directly shifting the work of “solving diversity” onto the young and diverse. Can we blame them? Leadership should listen more, and people from underrepresented groups are going to have infinitely more insight into and ideas about leveling the proverbial playing field than, say, “the board” (though the MAIN idea is just paying and leveling everyone fairly, which remains the white whale [literally white] for every corporation on the planet, cf: the stunning breakdown of the Bon Appetit contract negotiations this week. Make it make sense, Condé Nast!). But it’s a delicate dance and we can’t really blame YOU for not feeling comfortable being honest and challenging to the powers that be. The pressure to “not be a bummer” is generally immense, congeniality is how we survive, we can’t all be Jonathan Swan, and so on. I obviously talk an enormous game about speaking truth to power but I’m tormented by missing the football in some of the face-to-face opportunities I’ve had to actually do so (most memorably in a meeting about women’s issues with Susan Wojcicki in which I opened with an obsequious word salad about admiring her “female leadership,” while later the two black women in the room gave a master class in holding leadership accountable, using both data and their personal stories about underleveling and YouTube’s egregious record on DEI to push through Susan’s obfuscations, deflections, and spin…. deeply satisfying, deeply uncomfortable, I’m tittering my hands together excitedly as I re-live it).

But the burden you’re being saddled with by being invited into these kinds of forum (is this my shining opportunity to use the word fora? surprisingly anticlimactic…) is not just the pressure to “speak for everyone” but the nature of being singled out altogether. Make no mistake that leadership beckoning you up (to their wood-paneled chambers or whatever) is strategic. Specialness is compromising (at least in the corporate sense. Personally, “off-duty”, I’m sure you are–as I tell my small sons every day–a gorgeous genius). Specialness erodes the will to fight for systemic change and to challenge the power, because sooner rather or later, you’re going to become the power. And power causes brain damage (I don’t make the rules!). Someday soon you might very well find yourself in the board room giving the OK on racist facial recognition technology or an eight-figure payout to a sex pest or a drone strike in the Middle East because young people don’t understand the tradeoffs of global business in shareholder capitalism and bad things are just what important people have to do.

So my advice to you is not to resist the upward flume to corporate success. Lean in, “get the bag, hunny!” and all that. But a la Steve Jobs’ “stay hungry, stay foolish” mantra, I say: stay guilty, stay conflicted! Keep a tight grip on that feeling of weirdness of rising the ranks while you can still clearly see that the ranks were created to keep most people down. Talk about it! Especially to those getting ossified in corporate disenfranchisement hell. There’s radical upheaval in the air (“It’s a Movement, Not a Moment!” as the title of a Bravo TV special on race in America hosted by reality TV stars I saw advertised while watching “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” at 7am with my infant son yesterday informed me) and we’re going to need you on the side of the people, not the management. No pressure.

A friend recently told me that it's obviously important to me to be perceived as politically left because I talk about it a lot, which was mortifying, but true. I volunteer outside of work, give money to causes I care about, organize activist groups with people, and am generally a community-oriented kind of person.

I got a degree in a social justice adjacent space right after college, but have worked on and off in that field but I feel like I am underpaid and overworked in a toxic field where my skills are underused. Since grad school, I've been working in tech, mostly nonprofits and educational products. It turns out I am excellent at digital marketing and have been successful in the field.

I hate how much I love it, but I'm detail oriented, opinionated, and good with words and numbers. I have an eye for design and can write just enough code and enjoy learning more. I like feeling secure that I can pay the bills, and I don't have the kind of risk tolerance to just quit and go work on an organic farm or something. Also, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and recession! Jobs are scarce and nothing feels secure.

I am currently looking for a new job, and while I've applied to a few positions at nonprofits, I know that it's likely that I will get hired at another tech company— one that's values adjacent or values neutral— and I can't get over it. I saw myself as doing something world changing by this age, not thinking about MQLs and how to increase mailing list size. But every time I start doing it, I enjoy the work more than anything else I've done for money. I'm also aware that the nonprofit industrial complex means that the majority of nonprofits are funded by these same companies, or the foundations that surround them.

I look at other peoples' jobs and achievements and I think "Wow! That's so cool!" I know that other people look at my jobs and life and think the same, but I can't get over the feeling that I'm selling out. I'm not fighting climate change full time or making art for my job or running a community space.

My family tells me to get over it, that I'm not actively doing anything evil and that there's no shame in enjoying marketing and having enough money to pay the bills. I know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I feel torn. Help!

-- Marketing Is Supposedly Evil, Right? Yet... 

To whom it may concern at Idealist.org:

This question is so vast, so total, so symphonic in the number of notes it hits, that I started researching for my response (“research”–I do do it...lest you assume that this blog is all toe-tapping word salad foolishness, though it is mostly that) by googling “thomas pynchon + meaning of life?” Felt prudent to bring in the big guns on this one. (Nothing really reeled me in on the first page of results, though it DID jog the memory that there’s a Gen Z/Millennial-bridge Pynchon son out there [“Jackson”] and off I went on a fruitless quest to find some sign of his existence/voice on the Internet. Three quarters of an hour later I was knee-deep in the Instagram following list of one of the Pynch-son’s purported Vassar freshman year bandmates, combing it for pseudonymic handles, becoming a little misty-eyed thinking of how proud TP must be of Jackson’s fastidious, near-perfect online anonymity...the apple certainly didn’t fall far, Mr. Pynchon, sir *salutes*…[this newsletter is approaching 100% toe-tapping nonsense]). 

OK, deep centering yoga-breath (not for you–sorry!–but me…you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself first etc). Let’s look at your predicament through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, work edition, because you don’t just have the basic needs met, brah, you’re enviably crushing them. I’m picturing you on one of those treadmill desks, racking up the MQLs (had to google that acronym, and to think I too call myself a “marketing professional,” smh…). I can feel the flow, the zing of the cold brew, the clenched air-fist of satisfaction of a task well done. Just pausing here for a moment on your behalf to bask in the blessing of having found a work-track that you like, are genuinely good at, and get paid for. This will carry you far in the new economy/post-apocalyptic Bread Wars and I entreat you not to forget it. 

So above work on this purpose-actualization pyramid that I’m constructing on the fly is the home of the work, i.e. the job. At the risk of showing my hand a bit too much, the working thesis for this newsletter (& shoutout to my “future of work” consigliere/high school friend, Nick Rizzo) might be “do all jobs suck?” Hierarchies are inherently problematic, those with a will to power tend to abuse it, toxic dynamics are pervasive, ubiquitous, difficult to escape, and so on and so forth. My wise former coworker Diana Scholl, whose career had mostly been in nonprofits before making the jump to Big Tech, informs me that institutional bullshit and bureaucracy are pretty much the same everywhere. And my stock job-seeking advice (just hitch your wagon to a good manager / inspiring person!) rings especially hollow now, because frankly the global context around work is so fraught, the world we live in so noisy, corrupt, and frustrating, not to mention extremely dumb, that no manager is going to solve/salve the existential unrest for you. The managers are not exactly going to lead the revolution. 

BUT WHO IS? So here’s the thing (I’ve just apropos nothing put on a straw hat and brought my hands together in front of my face in a triangle): the economic and political forces are so totalizing right now that the pursuit of self-actualization and ~making a difference~ seem downright quaint; it presupposes that selves matter at all. One of the side effects of the house being on fire w/r/t the overlapping crises of the pandemic, rampant inequality, systemic racism, and looming climate misery is that I think we can go ahead and lose “careers” as a concept. And maybe just de-couple purpose from jobs altogether while we’re at it. I’ve probably been way too deep down the Epstein hole this week but I struggle to think much of anything matters beyond, like, the love of your family and having a laugh with friends and maybe protesting in the streets and making something with your hands sometimes. 

This is not to say that you, a well-meaning and smart and capable person, should just give up on doing good or having a job that unlocks some higher level meaning. But I do think you can worry less about where you work and what people think. The move, imo, is about finding your moment and making the most of it (AOC incredible speech this week was an absolute master class in moment-seizing and should be studied in New Left School). Jobs may not matter all that much but small acts can be really valuable (though they generally exist off social media or otherwise disconnected from pleasure centers / personal brands / credit). For further inspo, this thread: 

And also this (not all heroes wear capes…literally! I’ll see myself out now.). Maybe you take a new job in tech and end up organizing there (Buzzfeed’s Facebook exposé this week was very boi-oi-oi-oing). The people I met this way at Google were the most invigorating band of weirdos you can imagine (shoutout to my life-affirming Signal group, you know who you are). Maybe you’ll stumble upon a whistle to blow, or a way to smuggle Chelsea Manning out of jail. Or maybe you’ll personally amass enough MQLs to finally make Medicare for All happen. Wouldn’t that be something?

Whatever it is, whenever it is: you’re going to have a moment. Trust.

have a query? askclairest@gmail.com

Sorry this is so long but I do think Pynchon would approve of you making it this far -

Claire