letters to a young cog

on breaking into tech today, plus my attempt at a unified theory of the meaning of work and possibly life?

Hi Claire.

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