The thing I did not expect was how helpless I would feel during the end of U.S. democracy. I read so many books and articles on what it is like living in a collapsing democracy, but I thought that since we all knew about how that worked now, we’d be able to stop it this time around.
I can’t stop it, and no one else seems to be able to either.
My last specific update on the growth of fascism in the U.S., back in January 2017, was a little hopeful. During the last year and a half, I was often encouraged and heartened by the role the courts played, opposing Trump’s various unconstitutional actions.
Then July 2018 happened.
After a series of horrifying Supreme Court decisions including upholding Trump’s Muslim travel ban, the supposedly moderate Justice Kennedy announced his retirement. The GOP made it abundantly clear they have been the party of power for power’s sake for at least a decade, maybe two, when they refused to authorize federal funding to improve election security while our voting systems are actively being attacked by Russia. Current polls show about a 75% chance the Democrats will take the House, and 25% that they’ll take the Senate – when the Democrats have +7 to +10 advantage on the generic ballot. The second largest political party in the U.S. and the one that currently controls all three branches of government is not just willing but eager to destroy our democracy as long as they can stay in power.
The most helpful book I read in this time is “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (short summary here). Short version: our only chance to retain a functioning democracy in the U.S. is for the Democrats to win the 2018 elections, both House and Senate (there’s a tiny chance a Republican senator or two will caucus with the Democrats to save U.S. democracy but I’m not holding my breath). All of the other routes—mass protests, general strikes, various forms of violence, any funny business around changing constitutions or votes or similar—will just end up with a strongman of one sort or another and the end of democracy in some other way.
The odds of U.S. democracy making it through the next year intact are low and dropping (33% seems optimistic to me). My personal decision is to work hard on winning the 2018 elections. I’ve already donated thousands of dollars to variousswingelections, and I’m planning to do phone banking or other forms of volunteering for the same campaigns. I encourage others to do the same.
It seems awfully likely that the 2018 elections will be stolen one way or another, in addition to the already existing systemic biases in districting and representation that give the Democrats such an enormous disadvantage. The simplest way will be to use the technique that the Republicans are already using and that it appears Russia may have adopted as well: stop likely Democratic voters from voting, by purging the voter rolls, voter ID laws, or spreading lies and disinformation. I’ll be thrilled if the Democrats take the House and the Senate, but I am in no way planning on it.
During the rise of Nazi Germany, there was a period of time around 1933 or so when a lot of people who had studied history left Germany voluntarily, years before the really startling violence began. Hannah Arendt, author of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and “Origins of Totalitarianism,” among many other works, was one of them. In 1932, she was imprisoned by the Gestapo for eight days, and in 1933 she left Germany for Switzerland and later France. In 1937, Germany stripped her of citizenship. She escaped an internment camp in France in 1940 and came to the U.S. in 1941, spending a total of 13 years as a stateless Jewish refugee before being granted U.S. citizenship in 1950.
Right now, my best guess is that 2019 will be our 1933. My passport expires in 2019. I’m renewing it next week.
It sounds like Bryan Cantrill is thinking aboutorganizing another computer conference. When he did that in 2016, I wrote a blog post about why I wouldn’t attend, because, based on my experience as Bryan’s former co-worker, I believed that Bryan Cantrill would probably say cruel and humiliating things to people who attended.
I understand that some people still supported Bryan and his conference after they read that post. After all, Bryan is so intelligent and funny and accomplished, and it’s a “he said, she said” situation, and if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen, etc. etc.
What’s changed since then? Well, at least six other people spoke up publicly about their own experiences with Bryan, many of which seem worse than mine. Then #metoo happened and we learned how many people a powerful person can abuse before any of their victims speak up, and why they stay quiet: worry about their careers being destroyed, being bankrupted by a lawsuit, or being called a liar and worse. If you’re still supporting Bryan, I invite you to read this story about Jeffrey Tambor verbally abusing Jessica Walter on the set of Arrested Development, and re-examine why you are supporting someone who has been verbally abusive to so many people.
Here are six short quotes from other people speaking about their experiences with Bryan Cantrill:
“Having been a Joyent ‘customer’ and working to porting an application to run on SmartOS was like being a personal punching bag for Bryan.”
“I worked at Joyent from 2010 through 2013. Valerie’s experience comports with my own. This warning is brave and wise.”
“All that you say is true, and if anything, toned down from reality. Bryan is a truly horrible human being.”
“I know for sure Bryan’s behavior prevented or at the very least delayed other developers from reaching their potential in the kernel group. Unfortunately the lack of moral and ethical leadership in Solaris allowed this to go on for far too long.”
“Sun was such a toxic environment for so many people and it is very brave of you to share your experience. After six years in this oppressive environment, my confidence was all but destroyed.”
“Having known Bryan from the days of being a junior engineer…he has always been a narcissistic f_ck that proudly leaves a wake of destruction rising up on the carcasses of his perceived foes (real and imagined). His brilliance comes at too high of a cost.”
This is what six people are willing to say publicly about how Bryan treated them. If you think that isn’t a lot, please take the time to read more about #metoo and consider how Bryan’s position of power would discourage people from coming forward with their stories of verbal abuse. If you do believe that Bryan has abused these people, consider what message you are sending to others by continuing to follow him on social media or otherwise validating his behavior.
If you have been abused by Bryan, I have a request: please do not contact me to tell me your story privately, unless you want help making your story public in some way. I’m exhausted and it doesn’t do any good to tell me—I’m already convinced he’s awful. Here’s what I can say: There are dozens of you, and you have remarkably similar stories.
I’ll be heavily moderating comments on this post and in particular won’t approve anything criticizing victims of abuse for speaking up. If your comment gets stuck in the spam filter, please email me at valerie.aurora@gmail.com and I’ll post it for you.
Tomorrow I’m going to a protest against the forcible separation of immigrant children from their families. When I started thinking about what sign to make, I remembered my sign for the first Women’s March protest, the day after Trump took office in January 2017. It said: “Trump hates kids and puppies… for real!!!”
My protest sign for the 2017 Women’s March
While I expected a lot of terrifying things to happen over the next few years, I never, never thought that Trump would deliberately tear thousands of children away from their families and put them in concentration camps. I knew he hated children; I didn’t know he hated children (specifically, brown children) so much that he’d hold them hostage to force Congress to pass his racist legislation. I did not expect him and his party to try to sell cages full of weeping little boys as future gang members. I did not expect 55% of Republican voters to support splitting up families and putting them in camps. I’m smiling at the cute dog in that photo; now the entire concept of that sign seems impossibly naive and inappropriate, much less my expression in that photo. I apologize for this sign and my joking attitude.
I remember being terrified during the months between Trump’s election and his inauguration. I couldn’t sleep; I put together a go-bag; I bought three weeks worth of food and water and stored them in the closet. I read a dozen books on fascism and failed democracies. I even built a spreadsheet tracking signs of fascism so I’d know when to leave the country.
I came up with the concept of that sign as a way to increase people’s disgust for Trump; what kind of pathetic low-life creep hates kids AND puppies? But I still didn’t get how bad things truly were; I thought Trump hated kids in the sense that he didn’t want any of them around him and wouldn’t lift a finger to help them. I didn’t understand that he—and many people in his administration—took actual pleasure in knowing they were building camps full of crying, desperate, terrified kids who may never be reunited with their parents. In January 2017, I thought I understood the evil of this administration and of a significant percentage of the people in this country; actually, I way underestimated it.
At that protest, several people asked me if Trump really hated puppies, but not one person asked me if Trump really hated kids. In retrospect, this seems ominous, not funny.
I’m going to think very carefully before creating any more “joke” protest signs. Today’s “joke” could easily be tomorrow’s reality.
I’ve been working about 30 hours a week for the last two and a half years. I’m happier, healthier, and wealthier than when I was working 40, 50, or 60 hours a week as a full-time salaried software engineer (that means I was only paid for 40 hours a week). If you are a salaried professional in the U.S. who works 40 hours a week or more, there’s a pretty good chance you could also be working fewer hours, possibly even for more money. In this post, I’ll explain some of the myths and the realities that promote overwork. If you’re already convinced that you’d like to work fewer hours, you can skip straight to how you can start taking steps to work less.
A little about me: After college, I worked for about 8 years as a full-time salaried software engineer. Like many software engineers, I often worked 50 or 60 hour weeks while being paid for 40 hours a week. I hit the glass ceiling at age 29 and started working part-time hourly as a software consultant. I loved the hours but hated the instability and was about to lose my health insurance benefits (this was before the ACA passed). Then a colleague offered me a job at his storage startup, working 20 hours a week, salaried, with benefits. I thought, “You can do that???” and negotiated a 30 hour salaried job with benefits with my dream employer. I worked full-time again for about 5 years after that, and put in more 60 hour weeks while co-founding a non-profit. After shutting the non-profit down, I took 3 months off to recover. For the last two and a half years, I’ve worked for myself as a diversity and inclusion in tech consultant. I rarely work more than 30 hours a week and last year I made more money than any other year of my life.
Now, if I told my 25-year-old self this, she’d probably refuse to believe me. When I was 25, I believed my extra hours and hard work would be rewarded, that I’d be able to work 50 or 60 hours a week forever, and that I’d never enjoy anything as much as working. Needless to say, I no longer believe any of those things.
Myths about working overtime
Here are a few of the myths I used to believe about working overtime:
Myth: I can be productive for more than 8 hours a day on a sustained basis
How many hours a day can I productively write code? This will vary for everyone, but the number I hear most often is 4 hours a day 5 days a week, which is my max. I slowly learned that if I wrote code longer than that, my productivity steeply declined. After 8 hours, I was just adding bugs that I’d have to fix the next day. For the other 4 hours, I was better off dealing with email, writing papers, submitting expenses, reading books, or taking a walk (during which I’d usually figure out what I needed to do next in my program). After 8 hours, my brain is useless for anything requiring focus or discipline. I can do more work for short bursts occasionally when I’m motivated, but it takes a toll on my health and I need extra time off to recover.
I know other people can do focused productive work for more than 8 hours a day; congrats! However, keep in mind that I know plenty of people who thought they could work more than 8 hours a day, and then discovered they’d given themselves major stress-related health problems—repetitive stress injury, ulcers, heart trouble—or ignored existing health problems until they got so bad they started interfering with their work. This includes several extremely successful people who only need to sleep 5 hours a night and were using the extra time that gave them to do more work. The human body can only take so much stress.
Myth: My employer will reward me for working extra hours
Turns out, software engineering isn’t graded on effort, like kindergarten class. I remember the first year of my career when I worked my usual overtime and did not get a promotion or a raise; the company was slowly going out of business and it didn’t matter how many hours I worked—I wasn’t getting a raise. Given that my code quality fell off after 4 hours and went negative after 8 hours, it was a waste of time to work overtime anyway. At the same time, I always felt a lot of pressure to appear to be working for more than 40 hours a week, such that 40 hours became the unofficial minimum. The end result was a lot of programmers in the office late at night doing things other than coding: playing games, reading the internet, talking with each other. Which is great when you have no friends outside work, no family nearby, and no hobbies; less great when you do.
Overall, my general impression of the reward structure for software engineers is that people who fit people’s preconceptions of what a programmer looks like and who aggressively self-promote are more likely to get raises and promotions than people who produce more value. (Note that aggressive self-promotion is often punished in women of all races, people of color, disabled folks, immigrants, etc.)
Myth: People who work 40 hours or less are lazy
I was raised with fairly typical American middle-class beliefs about work: work is virtuous, if people don’t have jobs it’s because of some personal failing of theirs, etc. I started to change my mind when I read about Venezuelan medical doctors who were unable to buy shoes during an economic recession. Medical school is hard; I couldn’t believe all of those doctors were lazy! In my first full-time job, I had a co-worker who spent 40 hours a week in the office, but never did any real work. Then I realized that many of the hardest working people I knew were mothers who worked in the home for no pay at all. Nowadays I understand that I can’t judge someone’s moral character by the number of hours of labor they do (or are paid for) each week.
The kind of laziness that does concern me comes from abuse: people using coercion to extract an unfair amount of value from other people’s labor. This includes many abusive spouses, most billionaires, and many politicians. I’m not worried about people who want to work 40 hours a week or fewer so they can spend more time with their kids or crocheting or traveling; they aren’t the problem.
Myth: I work more than 40 hours because I’d be unhappy otherwise
When I was 25, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do other things with the time I was spending on work. With hindsight, I can see that’s because I was socially isolated and didn’t know how to deal with my anxiety other than by working. If I tried to stop working, I would very quickly run out of things to do that I enjoyed, and would end up writing some more code or answering some more work email just to have some positive feelings. It took years and years of therapy, building up my social circle, and developing hobbies before I had enough enjoyable things to do other than work.
Working for pay gives a lot of people joy and that is perfectly fine! It’s when you have few other ways to feel happy that overwork begins to be a problem.
Myth: The way to fix my anxiety is to work more hours
The worse the social safety net is in your country, the more anxious you probably are about your future: Will you have a place to live? Food to eat? Medical care? Clothes for your kids? We often respond to anxiety by shutting down any higher thought and focusing on what is in front of us. For many of us in this situation, the obvious answer seems to be “work more hours.” Now, if you are being paid for working more hours, this makes some sense: money contributes to security. But if you’re not, those extra hours bring no concrete reward. You are just hoping that your employer will take the extra work into consideration when deciding whether to give you a raise or end your employment. Unfortunately, in my experience, the best way to get a raise or keep your job is to be as similar to your management as possible.
If you can take the time to work with your anxiety and pull back and look at the larger picture, you’ll often find better ways to use those extra hours to improve your personal safety net. Just a few off the top of my head: building your professional network, improving your resume, learning new skills, helping friends, caring for your family, meditating, taking care of your health, and talking to a therapist about your anxiety. The future is uncertain and only partially under your control; nothing can change that fundamental truth. Consider carefully whether working unpaid hours is the best way to increase your safety.
Myth: The extra hours are helping me learn skills that will pay off later
Maybe it’s just me, but I can only learn new stuff for a few hours a day. Judging by the recommended course loads at universities, most people can’t actively learn new stuff more than 40 hours a week. If I’ve been working for more than 8 hours, all I can do is repeat things I’ve already learned (like stepping through a program in a debugger). Creative thought and breakthroughs are pretty thin on the ground after 8 hours of hard work. The only skills I’m sure I learned from working more than 40 hours a week are: how to keep going through hunger, how to ignore pain in my body, how to keep going through boredom, how to stay awake, and how to sublimate my healthy normal human desires. Oh, and which office snack foods are least nauseating at 2am.
Myth: Companies won’t hire salaried professionals part-time
Some won’t, some will. Very few companies will spontaneously offer part-time salaried work for a position that usually requires full-time, but if you have negotiating power and you’re persistent, you will be surprised how often you can get part-time work. Negotiating power usually increases as you become a more desirable employee; if you can’t swing part-time now, keeping working on your career and you may be able to get it in the future.
Myth: I can only get benefits if I work full-time
Whether a company can offer the benefits available to full-time employees to part-time employees is up to their internal policies combined with local law. Human beings create policies and laws and they can be changed. Small companies are generally more flexible about policies than large companies. Some companies offer part-time positions as a competitive advantage in hiring. Again, having more negotiating power will help here. Companies are more likely to change their policies or make exceptions if they really really want your services.
Myth: My career will inevitably suffer if I work part-time
There are absolutely some career goals that can only be achieved by working full-time. But working part-time can also help your career. You can use your extra time to learn new skills, or improve your education. You can work on unpaid projects that improve your portfolio. You can extend your professional network. You can get career coaching. You can start your own business. You can write books. You can speak at conferences. Many things are possible.
Real barriers to working fewer hours
Under capitalism, in the absence of enforced laws against working more than a certain number of hours a week, the number of hours a week employees work will grow until the employer is no longer getting a marginal benefit out of each additional hour. That means if the employer will get any additional value out of an hour above and beyond the costs of working that hour, they’ll require the employee to work that hour. This happens without regard for the cost for the employee or their dependents, in terms of health, happiness, or quality of life for their dependents.
Due to loopholes and lax enforcement, many salaried professionals end up in a situation where all the people they are competing with for jobs or promotions are all working far more than 40 hours a week. They don’t have to be working efficiently for more than 40 hours a week for this to be of benefit to their employers, they just have to be creating more value than they are costing during those hours of work. Some notorious areas of high competition and high hours include professors on the tenure track, lawyers on the partner track, and software engineers working in competitive fields.
In particular, software engineers working for venture capital-funded startups in fields with lots of competitors are under a lot of pressure to produce more work more quickly, since timing is such an important element of success in the fields that venture capital invests in. The result is a lot of software engineers who burn themselves out working too many hours for startups for less total compensation than they’d make working at Microsoft or IBM, despite whatever stock options they were offered to make up for lower salaries and benefits. This is because (a) most startups fail, (b) most software engineers either don’t vest their stock options before they quit, or quit before the company goes public and can’t afford to buy the options during the short (usually 90-day) exercise window after they quit.
No individual actions or decisions by a single worker can change these kinds of competitive pressures, and if your goal is to succeed in one of these highly competitive, poorly governed areas, you’ll probably have to work more than 40 hours a week. Overall, unchecked capitalism leads to a Red Queen’s race, in which individual workers have to work as hard as they can just to keep up with their competition (and those who can’t, die). I don’t want to live in this world, which is why I support laws limiting working hours and requiring pay, government-paid parental and family leave, a universal basic income, and the unions and political parties that fight for and win these protections.
Tips for working fewer hours
These tips for working fewer hours are aimed primarily at software engineers in the U.S. who have some job mobility, and more generally for salaried professionals in the U.S. Some of these tips may be useful for other folks as well.
See a career counselor or career coach. Most of us are woefully unprepared to guide and shape our career paths. A career counselor can help you figure out what you value, what your goals should be, and how to achieve them, while taking into account your whole self (including family, friends, and hobbies). A career counselor will help you with the mechanics of actually working fewer hours: negotiating down your current job, finding a new job, starting your own business, etc. To find a career counselor, ask your friends for recommendations or search online review sites.
Go to therapy. If you’re voluntarily overworking, you’ve internalized a lot of ideas about what a good person is or how to be happy that are actually about how to make employers wealthier. Even if you are your own employer, you’ll still need to work these out. You’re also likely to be dealing with anxiety or unresolved problems in your life by escaping to work. You’ll need to learn new values, new ideas, and new coping mechanisms before you can work fewer hours. I’ve written about how to find therapy here. You might also want to read up on workaholics. The short version is: there is some reason you are currently overworking, and you’ll need to address that before you can stop overworking.
Find other things to do with your time. Spend more time with your kids, develop new hobbies or pick up new ones, learn a sport, watch movies, volunteer, write a novel – the options are endless. Learn to identify the voice in your head that says you shouldn’t be wasting your time on that and tell it to mind its own business.
Search for more efficient ways to make money. In general, hourly wage labor is going to have a very hard limit on how much money you can make per hour, even in highly paid positions. Work with your career counselor to figure out how to make more money per hour of labor. Often this looks like teaching, reviewing, or selling a product or service with low marginal cost.
Talk to a financial advisor. Reducing hours often means at least some period of lower income, even if your income ends up higher after that. If like many people you are living paycheck-to-paycheck, you’ll need help. A professional financial advisor can help you figure out how to get through this period and make better financial decisions in general. [Added 19-June-2018]
Finally, we can help normalize working fewer hours a week just by talking about it and, if it is safe for us, actually asking for fewer hours of work. We can also support unions, elect politicians who promise to pass legislation protecting workers, promote universal basic income, support improvements in the social safety net, and raise awareness of what working conditions are like without these protections.
In the tech industry, alcohol is currency. It’s used to grow event attendance, to bribe participants, to reward employees and community members. Informal interviews are conducted in bars, to see if potential employees are likable in a social setting, or can hold up under heavy drinking with clients. Co-workers gather in pubs to bond and shed the day’s frustrations. Good performance is rewarded with shared whiskey, tequila parties, opening up the office taps. We drink to say thank-you, to seal deals, to bid farewell, to make new friends, to rant.
Except…not all of us drink.
When alcohol is currency, non-alcoholic drinks are considered valueless, and the interests and needs of people who don’t drink alcohol are easily forgotten. In a community so focused on alcohol, those who don’t partake are excluded. They may choose not to attend drinking events, missing key career and business opportunities. They may keep their choices to themselves, at risk of ridicule. They might drink a quick cup of water and say, sorry, I have to go home, something came up.
In an environment where companies and conferences use alcohol as currency to bribe or thank participation, there is a strong incentive not to question the myths crafted around alcohol. After all, if alcohol isn’t currency, then it can’t take the place of other compensation. Office perks wouldn’t make up for inadequate salaries or hostile working conditions. Free drinks wouldn’t be an acceptable payment for free labor. And worst of all, without a culture of drinking, would the startup world still be the hip bastion of partying that sets it apart from its corporate twin?
Confronting the assumed use of alcohol also forces an admission of other issues long swept under the tech industry’s collective rug. Tech events bill drinking as the headline activity even though their communities cite alcohol to excuse abusers and rapists and to victim-blame in the same breath. By forming an accepted myth that alcohol is currency, and then leveraging that myth at social events, tech companies also work to encroach on personal time and erode work/life balance. Refusing to go out for drinks, in preference of going home, is a nonsensical refusal to accept the dominant currency. In order to protect the status quo, those who refuse to partake in its structure are pushed out.
Non-drinkers and non-alcoholic drinks are a threat to some of the core illusions of the tech industry.
Why don’t you drink?
When I started working in tech, I was convinced I was the sole person at a startup of 80 employees who didn’t drink alcohol. I kept it to myself, embarrassed. I knew how important drinking from the keg on Fridays was; I knew how important after-work social time at the bar was. My kindhearted coworkers frequently offered me drinks, and I quickly found it wasn’t something I could hide. As I turned down each drink, people asked, “Why?”. It was years before I realized it wasn’t any of their business, and that I was far from alone.
There’s a myth that people who don’t drink are few and far between, because only teetotalers refuse alcohol, and they’re a rare bunch (we’re not). This myth ignores the multitude of reasons people avoid alcohol. People may not be drinking because they are pregnant — and for many, drinking culture puts them at risk of exposing their pregnancy in situations that could lead to professional discrimination. An increasing number of tech employees are underage, given the industry’s fetish for youthfulness, and the rampant use and abuse of interns. They may be on medications that preclude alcohol, and questions as to why they don’t drink put them at risk of disclosing their medical history. They might be recovering addicts, trying to avoid alcohol in an industry that places it everywhere without addressing alcoholism or providing adequate support. How about designated drivers, or simply people who are about to drive home? The illusion that “everyone drinks” has no space for the safety of commute.
People might not drink because they’re feeling unsafe – understandable in a space where others are increasingly drunk, harassment is common, and alcohol is frequently used to facilitate sexual assault. They might not drink alcohol for religious reasons, and by asking them why they don’t drink, you’re asking them to reveal their faith. Perhaps they’re working early the next morning, or they may be gluten-intolerant and you’re serving only beer. They might really be a teetotaler, someone who never drinks alcohol. Or, they may simply not be interested in drinking alcohol that evening.
The reasons don’t matter: What’s important is an understanding that there is a large range of rationales and circumstances around the non-consumption of alcohol, and the question of “Why aren’t you drinking?” is better left unasked.
After I began to be open about my choice not to drink, many people began to talk to me about their own choices around alcohol. Uncomfortable patterns began to appear. One theme was the stories of those who used to drink alcohol occasionally, and had a positive relationship with alcohol. After they began work at a tech startup, they’d start to drink much more frequently than they were accustomed to, because of parties, office taps, and expected team norms. “I’m no longer comfortable with my relationship to alcohol,” one person said to me, and others echoed the refrain.
This matches a common scenario in the tech industry, where attendees or employees wind up consuming more alcohol than they’d wished or planned for because alcoholic drinks are the most visible, best tasting, or only drinks available. Have we become a parody of hokey high-school peer pressure films, which warned that your “friends” and peers would ridicule you into imitating their behaviours, regardless of what’s best for you? Ultimately, our collective myths are peer-pressure; our practices and social gatherings are peer-pressure. The way that drinks are presented, advertised, or available at most tech events, alongside the overall atmosphere of presumed drinking, creates an expectation to enjoy alcohol.
5 Tips for Including Non-Alcoholic Drinks at Events
How can we, as individuals and as an industry, do a better job of supporting, including and welcoming people who choose not to drink at our events? As a Community Manager in the tech world, I regularly navigate conferences and parties searching for something delicious and non-alcoholic to drink. Including non-alcoholic options is about much more than “hey, we had Coke available!” Here are five guidelines that help balance alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks at events, make events more inclusive, and enable attendees to better choose for themselves what they’d prefer to be drinking.
Provide an equal number and quality of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drink options
If it’s important to have several different beers for different palates, it’s also important to have different non-alcoholic options. I’ve looked down many a menu packed with fancy, tasty alcoholic options, only to find my choice is between Coke and Diet Coke. The usual lineup of brand sodas are great for mix drinks, and for some attendees, but they’re not equivalent in quality to the alcohol served. Try serving Ginger Beer, iced tea, craft Root Beer, local soda, or drinks that show value by being craft brewed, higher priced, or using cane sugar.
Display alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks together at the event.
When setting up the bar area, have both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic options prominently and equally displayed. Asking people to guess what’s under the counter adds stress, especially with long drink lines. Most people will pick what they can see. Even as an experienced non-alcoholic drinker, I get flustered frequently by event bartenders who don’t know the options.
Advertise alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks equally before the event.
If alcohol is being used on the event page or in the marketing material to advertise the event, include a mention of non-alcoholic options. This adds value to your event, as it expands the number of people who will be interested. A few examples: “We’ll have beer, wine, craft root beer, and ginger beer available!” or “Delicious alcoholic & non-alcoholic drinks sponsored by [company]!”
If listed cocktails are being served, list an equal number of non-alcoholic mocktails.
If something special is being offered, attendees will want one! Give non-drinking attendees an equal treat with specialty non-alcoholic mocktail or mixed drink options. If you’re printing a menu or a placard, print both options on it. Otherwise, you give an easily-ordered option for alcohol, but make inventing and ordering something non-alcoholic the attendee’s responsibility. For example, if you’re serving a specialty drink, have both an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic version advertised and available at the table.
Have water freely available, in clear sight, and easy to obtain.
If there’s a long line for drinks, don’t make attendees wait in it just to get some simple hydration. Put a separate, clearly visible, hydration station nearby the drink line. Too often, water is hidden behind counters or bars where it’s hard to find. At user groups I run, I fill a pitcher or two with water and ice, and put them next to the stack of cups. It’s simple to do, and helpful for attendees.
While these guidelines won’t fix a culture of pressure and abuse, they will help many attendees better enjoy the event while making their own choices. You’ll still need to have and enforce a good Code of Conduct. And you’ll need to be prepared for some people to choose not to attend your events, despite making these changes, because so many of the spaces that include alcohol (and plenty that don’t) are hostile to those underrepresented in tech. But having a variety of non-alcoholic options available and advertised is one step to building safer, more inclusive, and more interesting parties. After all, there are many things other than alcohol that can create an interesting evening: good conversation, a variety of viewpoints, mutual respect, and just a dash of orange juice in your Shirley Temple.
To be a woman in tech is to be asked to talk about being a woman in tech, regardless of the desires or knowledge of the individual, unique woman in tech in question (see The Unicorn Law). This is a frustrating part of being a member of a marginalized group in any field of endeavor: being expected to speak for, represent, and advocate for your group, regardless of your own personal inclinations. Even women in tech who actively embrace talking about women in tech want to choose if, when, and how they talk about women in tech, and not do so on command by others.
As a woman in tech activist, I’m here to to tell women in tech: it’s 100% fine for you to not talk about women in tech if you don’t want to! It’s literally not your job! Your job is to do tech stuff. If someone really wants you to talk about women in tech, they can darn well offer to pay you for it, and you can still say, “Nope, don’t want to.”
Here are the reasons for you not to feel guilty about not wanting to be an activist, followed by some coping strategies for when you are asked to talk about women in tech. But first, some disclaimers.
This post presumes that you don’t want to harm women in tech as a whole; if you don’t feel solidarity with other women in tech or feel fine harming other women in tech to get ahead, this post isn’t for you. Likewise, if you are a woman in tech and want to talk about women in tech more than you are now, I fully support your decision, speaking as a programmer who became a full-time activist herself. Doing this work is difficult and often unrewarding; let me at least thank you and support you for doing it. If you want to point out that the ideas in this post apply to another marginalized group, or to fields other than tech: I agree, I just know the most about being a woman in tech and so that’s what I’m writing about.
Reasons not to feel guilty
Men should do more for women in tech. Many women in tech feel guilty for not helping other women in tech more, despite the fact that equivalent men often have more time, energy, power, and influence to support women in tech. I once felt guilty as a junior engineer when an older, more experienced woman in my group left, because she had previously asked me to mentor her (!!!) and I refused because I felt unqualified. At the same time, my group was filled with dozens of more knowledgeable and powerful men who felt no personal responsibility at all for her departure. Men aren’t putting in their fair share of work to support women in tech yet. Until they do, feel free to flip the question around and ask what men are doing to support women in tech.
Women are punished for advocating for women in tech. Women who do speak about women in tech are often accused of doing it for personal gain, which is hilarious. I can’t think of a single woman in tech whose lifetime earnings were improved by saying anything about women in tech that wasn’t “work harder and make more money for corporations.” In reality, the research shows that the careers of women and other members of marginalized groups are actually harmed if they appear to be advocating for members of their own group. Feel free to decline to do work that will harm your career. (And if you do it anyway: thank you!!!)
Women in tech already have to do more work. Women in tech already have to do more work in order to get the same credit as an equivalent man. In addition to having to do more of our technical work to be perceived as contributing equally, we are also expected to do emotional labor for free: listening to people’s problems, expressing empathy, doing “office housework” like arranging parties and birthday cards, smiling and being cheerful, taking care of visitors, and welcoming new employees. We are also expected to help and assist men with their jobs without getting credit, and punished when we stick to our own work. Add on to that the job of talking about women in tech, which is not only unrewarded but often punished. While you’ll get pushback for turning down any of this free labor, feel free to wiggle out of as much of it as possible.
Activism is a whole separate job. Activism is a different job from a job in tech. It needs different skills and requires different aptitudes from most tech jobs. Some people have both the skills and aptitude (and the free time) to work a tech job and also be an activist; don’t feel strange if you’re not one of those people.
You can support women in tech in other ways. If you do want to support women in tech, but don’t feel comfortable being an activist yourself, there are plenty of other ways to support women in tech. You can give money to organizations that support women in tech. You can hire more women in tech. You can invest in women in tech. You can be a supportive spouse to a woman in tech. You can mentor women in tech. Feel free to be creative about how you support women in tech and don’t let other people guilt you into their ideas for how you should be supporting women in tech.
You are being a role model for women in tech. Women in tech can help women in tech simply by existing and not actively harming other women in tech. You can speak or write about your tech job. You can agree to interviews with the condition of not being asked about women in tech. You can get promoted and raise your salary. In other words, keep doing your job, and avoid doing things that harm women in tech in the long-term. Avoiding harm is harder than it sounds and takes some expertise and learning to get right, but some rules of thumb are: don’t push other marginalized folks down to give yourself a leg up, do recognize there are many different ways to be a women in tech, do default to listening over speaking when it comes to subjects you’re not an expert in (which may be activism).
Coping strategies
Here are a few coping strategies for when you are inevitably asked to talk about women in tech. You can use these strategies if you never want to talk about women in tech, or if you just don’t want to talk about women in tech in this particular situation. I personally find talking about women in tech fairly boring when the other person thinks they know more than they actually do about the topic, so I often use one of these techniques in that situation.
Make a list of other people to pass requests on to. Sure, you don’t want to give the one millionth talk on What It’s Like to Be a Woman in Programming Community X. But perhaps someone else has started a Women in Programming Community X group and would love to give a talk on the subject. You can also make a list of books or websites or other resources and tell people that while you don’t know much about career advice for women in tech, you’ve heard that “What Works for Women at Work” has some good tips.
Suggest that men do the work instead. When you suggest men do the work to support women in tech, you’ll get some predictable pushback. Lack of knowledge: Remind them that the research exists and can be learned by reading it. Feel afraid/scared/out of place: Remind them that that is how women feel in male-dominated spaces. Don’t you feel guilty: No, but if had the power men did I’d feel guilty for not using it. After a few of these annoying discussions, many people will stop asking you to do women in tech stuff.
Point out your lack of expertise. There’s nothing about being a woman in tech that necessarily makes you an expert on how to support women in tech in general. People will often ask women in tech to do things or make statements in areas they don’t have expertise in; get used to saying “I don’t know about that,” or “I haven’t studied that.” Lots of requests to speak for all women in tech or to reassure people that they aren’t personally sexist can be shot down this way.
Change the subject. If people ask you about women in tech, you often have an easy subject change: your job! Tell them about your project, ask them about their project, ask about a controversial research topic in your area of tech – it’s hard to object to a woman in tech wanting to talk about tech.
Practice saying no. For many people, it’s hard to say no, and it’s even harder when you’re a member of a marginalized group and people expect you to do what they say. Practicing some go-to words and phrases can help with saying no in the moment. It can also help reduce the feelings of guilt if you imagine the situation in your head and then go over all the reasons not to feel guilty.
Some examples of putting these coping strategies into practice:
“Will you write a blog post for International Women’s Day?”
“Thanks for the invitation, but I’m focusing on other projects right now. Have you thought about writing something yourself?”
“We need a woman keynote speaker for my conference. Will you speak? We pay travel.”
“I appreciate the invitation, but I’m only taking paid speaking engagements right now.”
“What do you think about Susan Fowler’s blog post?”
“You know, I haven’t had time to think about because I’ve been so busy. Can I bring you up to date on my project?”
“We’re doing great on gender equality at our company. Right?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough information to say either way. If you really wanted to know, I’d suggest paying an outside expert to do a rigorous study.”
“Will you join this panel on women in computing for Ada Lovelace Day?”
“Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m taking a break from non-technical speaking appearances.”
“I got approval for you to go to Grace Hopper Celebration! I assumed you wanted to go.”
“Wow, that was really kind of you, but I think other people on my team will get more out of it than I would.”
“Boy, that Ellen Pao really screwed things up for women in venture capital, don’t you agree?”
“That’s not really something I feel confident speaking about. I’ve got to get back to work, see you at lunch!”
“How does it feel to be the only woman at this conference?”
“That’s not something I’m comfortable talking about. What talk are you going to next?”
“We really want to hire more women, but they just aren’t applying to our job postings! What do you think we’re doing wrong?”
“I’m not a recruiting expert, sorry! That sounds like something you should hire a professional to figure out.”
“I’m putting together a book of essays on women in tech! Will you write a chapter for me for free?”
“No.”
“Why are you so selfish? Why won’t you do more to help other women?”
“I’m doing what’s right for me.”
This post was co-authored by Valerie Aurora and Susan Wu, and cross-posted on both our blogs.
Marginalized people leave tech jobs in droves, yet we rarely write or talk publicly about the emotional and mental process of deciding to leave tech. It feels almost traitorous to publicly discuss leaving tech when you’re a member of a marginalized group – much less actually go through with it.
There are many reasons we feel this way, but a major reason is that the “diversity problem in tech” is often framed as being caused by marginalized people not “wanting” to be in tech enough: not taking the right classes as teenagers, not working hard enough in university, not “leaning in” hard enough at our tech jobs. In this model, it is the moral responsibility of marginalized people to tolerate unfair pay, underpromotion, harassment, and assault in order to serve as role models and mentors to the next generation of marginalized people entering tech. With this framing, if marginalized people end up leaving tech to protect ourselves, it’s our duty to at least keep quiet about it, and not scare off other marginalized people by sharing our bad experiences.
Under that model, this post is doubly taboo: it’s a description of how we (Susan and Valerie) went through the process of leaving toxic tech culture, as a guide to other marginalized people looking for a way out. We say “toxic tech culture” because we want to distinguish between leaving tech entirely, and leaving areas of tech which are abusive and harmful. Toxic tech culture comes in many forms: the part of Silicon Valley VC hypergrowth culture that deifies founders as “white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford,” the open source software ecosystem that so often exploits and drives away its best contributors, and the scam-riddled cryptocurrency community, to name just three.
What is toxic tech culture? Toxic tech cultures are those that demean and devalue you as holistic, multifaceted human beings. Toxic tech cultures are those that prioritize profits and growth over human and societal well being. Toxic tech cultures are those that treat you as replaceable cogs within a system of constant churn and burnout.
But within tech there are exceptions to the rule: technology teams, organizations, and communities where marginalized people can feel a degree of safety, belonging, and purpose. You may be thinking about leaving all of tech, or leaving a particular toxic tech culture for a different, better tech culture; either way, we hope this post will be useful to you.
A little about us: Valerie spent more than ten years working as a software engineer, specializing in file systems, Linux, and operating systems. Susan grew up on the Internet, and spent 25 years as a software developer, a community builder, an investor, and a VC-backed Silicon Valley founder. We were both overachievers who advanced quickly in our fields – until we could not longer tolerate the way we were treated, or be complicit in a system that did not match our values. Valerie quit her job as a programmer to co-found a tech-related non-profit for women, and now teaches ally skills to tech workers. Susan relocated to France and Australia, co-founded Project Include, a nonprofit dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion in tech, and is now launching a new education system. We are both still involved in tech to various degrees, but on our own terms, and we are much happier now.
We disagree that marginalized people should stay silent about how and why they left toxic tech culture. When, for example, more than 50% of women in tech leave after 12 years, there is an undeniable need for sharing experience and hard-learned lessons. Staying silent about the unfairness that causes 37% of underrepresented people of color to leave tech37% of people of color cite as a reason they left helps no one.
We reject the idea that it is the “responsibility” of marginalized people to stay in toxic tech culture despite abuse and discrimination, solely to improve the diversity of tech. Marginalized people have already had to overcompensate for systemic sexist, ableist, and racist biases in order to earn their roles in tech. We believe people with power and privilege are responsible for changing toxic tech culture to be more inclusive and fair to marginalized people. If you want more diversity in tech, don’t ask marginalized people to be silent, to endure often grievous discrimination, or to take on additional unpaid, unrecognized labor – ask the privileged to take action.
For many marginalized people, our experience of being in tech includes traumatic experience(s) which we may not have not yet fully come to terms with and that influenced our decisions to leave. Sometimes we don’t make a direct connection between the traumatic experiences and our decision to leave. We just find that we are “bored” and are no longer excited about our work, or start avoiding situations that used to be rewarding, like conferences, speaking, and social events. Often we don’t realize traumatic events are even traumatic until months or years later. If you’ve experienced trauma, processing the trauma is necessary, whether or not you decide to leave toxic tech culture.
This post doesn’t assume that you are sure that you want to leave your current area of tech, or tech as a whole. We ourselves aren’t “sure” we want to permanently leave the toxic tech cultures we were part of even now – maybe things will get better enough that we will be willing to return. You can take the steps described in this post and stay in your current area of tech for as long as you want – you’ll just be more centered, grounded, and happy.
The steps we took are described in roughly the order we took them, but they all overlapped and intermixed with each other. Don’t feel like you need to do things in a particular order or way; this is just to give you some ideas on what you could do to work through your feelings about leaving tech and any related trauma.
Step 1: Deprogram yourself from the cult of tech
The first step is to start deprogramming yourself from the cult of tech. Being part of toxic tech culture has a lot in common with being part of a cult. How often have you heard a Silicon Valley CEO talk about how his (it’s almost always a he) startup is going to change the world? The refrain of how a startup CEO is going to save humanity is so common that it’s actually uncommon for a CEO to not use saviour language when describing their startup. Cult leaders do the same thing: they create a unique philosophy, imbued with some sort of special message that they alone can see or hear, convince people that only they have the answers for what ails humanity, and use that influence to control the people around them.
Consider this list of how to identify a cult, and how closely this list mirrors patterns we can observe in Silicon Valley tech:
“Be wary of any leader who proclaims him or herself as having special powers or special insight.” How often have you heard a Silicon Valley founder or CEO proclaimed as some sort of genius, and they alone can figure out how to invent XYZ? Nearly every day, there’s some deific tribute to Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg in the media.
“The group is closed, so in other words, although there may be outside followers, there’s usually an inner circle that follows the leader without question, and that maintains a tremendous amount of secrecy.” The Information just published a database summarizing how secretive, how protective, how insular the boards are for the top 30 private companies in tech. Here’s what they report: “Despite their enormous size and influence, the biggest privately held technology companies eschew some basic corporate governance standards, blocking outside voices, limiting decision making to small groups of mostly white men and holding back on public disclosures, an in-depth analysis by The Information shows.”
“A very important aspect of cult is the idea that if you leave the cult, horrible things will happen to you.” There’s an insidious reason why your unicorn startup provides you with a free cafeteria, gym, yoga rooms, and all night snack bars: they never want you to leave. And if you do leave the building, you can stay engaged with Slack, IM, SMS, and every other possible communications tool so that you can never disconnect. They then layer over this with purported positive cultural messaging around how lucky, how fortunate you are to have landed this job — you were the special one selected out of thousands of candidates. Nobody else has it as good as we do here. Nobody else is as smart, as capable, as special as our team. Nobody else is building the best, most impactful solutions to solve humanity’s problems. If you fall off this treadmill, you will become irrelevant, you’ll be an outsider, a consumer instead of a builder, you’ll never be first on the list for the Singularity, when it happens. You’ll be at the shit end of the income inequality distribution funnel.
Given how similar toxic tech culture (and especially Silicon Valley tech culture) is to cult culture, leaving tech often requires something like cult-deprogramming techniques. We found the following steps especially useful for deprogramming ourselves from the cult of tech: recognizing our unconscious beliefs, experimenting with our identity, avoiding people who don’t support us, and making friendships that aren’t dependent on tech.
Recognize your unconscious beliefs
One cult-like aspect of toxic tech culture is a strong moral us-vs-them dichotomy: either you’re “in tech,” and you’re important and smart and hardworking and valuable, or you are not “in tech” because you are ignorant and untalented and lazy and irrelevant. (What are the boundaries of “in tech?” Well, the more privileged you are, the more likely people will define you as “in tech” – so be generous to yourself if you are part of a marginalized group. Or read more about the fractal nature of the gender binary and how it shows up in tech.)
We didn’t realize how strongly we’d unconsciously adopted this belief that people in tech were better than those who weren’t until we started to imagine ourselves leaving tech and felt a wave of self-judgment and fear. Early on, Valerie realized that she unconsciously thought of literally every single job other than software engineer as “for people who weren’t good enough to be a software engineer” – and that she thought this because other software engineers had been telling her that for her entire career. Even now, as Susan is launching a new education startup in Australia, she’s trying to be careful to not assume that just because people are doing things in a “non Silicon Valley, lean startup, agile way,” that it’s not automatically wrong. In reality, the best way in which to do things is probably not based on any particular dogma, but one that reflects a healthy balance of diverse perspectives and styles.
The first step to ridding yourself of the harmful belief that only people who are “in tech” or doing things in a “startup style” are good or smart or valuable is surfacing the unconscious belief to the conscious level, so you can respond to it. Recognize and name that belief when it comes up: when you think about leaving your job and feel fear, when you meet a new person and immediately lose interest when you learn their job is not “technical,” when you notice yourself trying to decide if someone is “technical enough.” Say to yourself, “I am experiencing the belief that only people I consider technical are valuable. This isn’t true. I believe everyone is valuable regardless of their job or level of technical knowledge.”
Experiment with your self-identity
The next step is to experiment with your own self-identity. Begin thinking of yourself as having different non-tech jobs or self-descriptions, and see what thoughts come up. React to those thoughts as though you were reacting to a friend you care about who was saying those things about them. Try to find positive things to think and say about your theoretical new job and new life. Think about people you know with that job and ask yourself if you would say negative things about their job to them. Some painful thoughts and experiences will come up during this time; aim to recognize them consciously and process them, rather than trying to stuff them down or make them go away.
When you live in Silicon Valley, it’s easy for your work life to consume 95% of your waking hours — this is how startups are designed, after all, with their endless perks and pressures to socialize within the tribe. Often times, promotions go hand in hand with socializing successfully within the startup scene. What can you do to carve out several hours a week just for yourself, and an alternate identity that isn’t defined by success within toxic tech culture? How do you make space for self care? For example, Susan began to take online writing courses, and found that the outlet of interacting with poets and fiction writers helped ground her.
If necessary, change the branding of your personal life. Stop wearing tech t-shirts and get shirts that reflect some other part of your self. Get a different print for your office wall. Move the tech books into one out-of-the-way shelf and donate any you don’t use right now (especially the ones that you have been planning to read but never got around to). Donate most of your conference schwag and stop accepting new schwag. Pack away the shelf of tech-themed tchotchkes or even (gasp) throw them away. Valerie went to a “burn party” on Ocean Beach, where everyone brought symbols of old jobs that they were happy to be free of and symbolically burned them in a beach bonfire. You might consider a similar ritual.
De-emphasize tech in your self-presentation. Change any usernames that reference your tech interests. Rewrite any online bios or descriptions to emphasize non-tech parts of your life. Start introducing yourself by talking about your non-tech hobbies and interests rather than your job. You might even try introducing yourself to new people as someone whose primary job isn’t tech. Valerie, who had been writing professionally for several years, started introducing herself as a writer at tech events in San Francisco. People who would have talked to her had she introduced herself as a Linux kernel developer would immediately turn away without a second word. Counterintuitively, this made her more determined to leave her job, when she saw how inconsiderate her colleagues were when she did not make use of her technical privilege.
Avoid unsupportive people
Identify any people in your life who are consistently unsupportive of you, or only supportive when you perform to their satisfaction, and reduce your emotional and financial dependence on them. If you have friends or idols who are unhelpfully critical or judgemental, take steps to see or hear from them less often. Don’t seek out their opinion and don’t stoke your admiration for them. This will be difficult the closer and more dependent you are on the person; if your spouse or manager is one of these people, you have our sympathy. For more on this dynamic and how to end it, see this series of posts about narcissism, co-narcissism, and tech.
Depressingly often, we especially seek the approval of people who give approval sparingly (think about the popularity of Dr. House, who is a total jerk). If you find yourself yearning for the approval of someone in tech who has been described as an “asshole,” this is a great time to stop. Some helpful tips to stop seeking the approval of an asshole: make a list of cruel things they’ve done, make a list of times they were wrong, stop reading their writing or listening to their talks, filter them out of your daily reading, talk to people who don’t know who that person is or care what they think, listen to people who have been hurt by them, and spend more time with people who are kind and nurturing.
At the same time, seek out and spend more time with people who are generally supportive of you, especially people who encourage experimentation and personal change. You may already have many of these people in your life, but don’t spend much time thinking about them because you can depend on their friendship and support. Reach out to them and renew your relationship.
Make friendships that don’t depend on tech
If your current social circle consists entirely of people who are fully bought into toxic tech culture, you may not have anyone in your life willing to support a career change. To help solve this, make friendships that aren’t dependent on your identity as a person in tech. The goal is to have a lot of friendships that aren’t dependent on your being in tech, so that if you decide to leave, you won’t lose all your friends at the same time as your job. Being friends with people who aren’t in tech will help you get an outside perspective on the kind of tech culture you are part of. It also helps you envision a future for yourself that doesn’t depend on being in toxic tech culture. You can still have lots of friends in tech, you are just aiming for diversity in your friendships.
One way to make this easier is to focus on your existing friendships that are “near tech,” such as people working in adjacent fields that sometimes attend tech conferences, but aren’t “in tech” themselves. Try also getting a new hobby, being more open to invitations to social events, and contacting old friends you’ve fallen out of touch with. Spend less time attending tech-related events, especially if you currently travel to a lot of tech conferences. It’s hard to start and maintain new local friendships when you’re constantly out of town or working overtime to prepare a talk for a conference. If you have a set of conferences you attend every year, it will feel scary the first time you miss one of them, but you’ll notice how much more time you have to spend with your local social circle.
Making friends outside of your familiar context (tech co-workers, tech conferences, online tech forums) is challenging for most people. If you learned how to socialize entire in tech culture, you may also need to learn new norms and conventions (such as how to have a conversation that isn’t about competing to show who knows more about a subject). Both Valerie and Susan experienced this when we started trying to make friends outside of toxic tech culture: all we knew how to talk about was startups, technology, video games, science fiction, scientific research, and (ugh) libertarian economic philosophy. We discovered people outside toxic tech culture wanted to talk about a wider range of topics, and often in a less confrontational way. And after a lifetime of socialization to distrust and discount everyone who wasn’t a man, we learned to seek out and value friendships with women and non-binary people.
If making new friends sounds intimidating, we recommend checking out Captain Awkward’s practical advice on making friends. Making new friends takes work and willingness to be rejected, but you’ll thank yourself for it later on.
Step 2: Make room for a career change
If you are already in a place where you have the freedom to make a big career change, congratulations! But if changing careers seems impossibly hard right now, that’s okay too. You can make room for a career change while still working in tech. Even if you end up deciding to stay in your current job, you will likely appreciate the freedom and flexibility that you’ve opened up for yourself.
Find a career counselor
The most useful action you can take is to find a career counselor who is right for you, and be honest with them about your fears, goals, and desires. Finding a career counselor is a lot like finding a dentist or a therapist: ask your friends for recommendations, read online reviews, look for directories or lists, and make an appointment for a free first meeting. If your first meeting doesn’t click, go ahead and try another career counselor until you find someone you can work with. A good career counselor will get a comprehensive view of your entire life (including family and friends) and your goals (not just job-related goals), and give you concrete steps to take to bring you closer to your goals.
Sometimes a career counselor’s job is explaining to you how the job you want but thought was impossible to get is actually possible. Valerie started seeing a career counselor about two years before she quit her last job as a software engineer and co-founded a non-profit. It took her about five years to get everything she listed as part of what she thought was an unattainable dream job (except for the “view of the water from her office,” which she is still working on). All the rest of this section is a high-level generic version of the advice a good career counselor will give you.
Improve your financial situation
Many tech jobs pay relatively well, but many people in tech would still have a hard time switching careers tomorrow because they don’t have enough money saved or couldn’t take a pay cut (hello, overheated rental markets and supporting your extended family). Don’t assume you’ll have to take a pay cut if you leave tech or your particular part of toxic tech culture, but it gives you more flexibility if you don’t have to immediately start making the same amount of money in a different job.
Look for ways to change your lifestyle or your expectations in ways that let you save money or lower your bills. Status symbols and class markers will probably loom large here and it’s worth thinking about which things are most valuable to you and which ones you can let go. You might find it is a relief to no longer have an expensive car with all its attendant maintenance and worries and fear, but that you really value the weekly exercise class that makes you feel happier and more energetic the rest of the week. Making these changes will often be painful in the short term but pay off in the long term. Valerie ended up temporarily moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area to a cheaper area near her family, which let her save up money and spend less while she was planning a career change. She moved back to the Bay Area when she was established in her new career, into a smaller, cheaper apartment she could afford on her new salary. Today she is making more money than she ever did as a programmer.
Take stock of your transferrable skills
Figure out what you actually like to do and how much of that is transferrable to other fields or jobs. One way to do this is to look back at, say, the top seven projects you most enjoyed doing in your life, either for your job or as a volunteer. What skills were useful to you in getting those projects done? What parts of doing that project did you enjoy the most? For example, being able to quickly read and understand a lot of information is a transferrable skill that many people enjoy using. The ability to persuade people is another such skill, useful for selling gym memberships, convincing people to recycle more, teaching, getting funding, and many other jobs. Once you have an idea of what it is that you enjoy doing and that is transferrable to other jobs, you can figure out what jobs you might enjoy and would be reasonably good at from the beginning.
Think carefully before signing up for new education
This is not necessarily the time to start taking career-related classes or going back to university in a serious way! If you start taking classes without first figuring out what you enjoy, what your skills are, and what your goals are, you are likely to be wasting your time and money and making it more difficult to find your new career. We highly recommend working with a career counselor before spending serious money or time on new training or classes. However, it makes sense to take low-cost, low-time commitment classes to explore what you enjoy doing, open your mind to new possibilities, or meet new people. This might look like a pottery class at the local community college, learning to 3D print objects at the local hackerspace, or taking an online course in African history.
Recognise there are many different paths in tech
The good news about software finally eating the world is that there are now many ways in which you can work in and around technology, without having to be part of toxic tech culture. Every industry needs tech expertise, and nearly every country around the world is trying to cultivate its own startup ecosystem. Many of these are much saner, kinder places to work than the toxic tech culture you may currently be part of, and a few of these involve industries that are more inclusive and welcoming of marginalized groups. Some of our friends have left the tech industry to work in innovation or technology related jobs in government, education, advocacy, policy, and arts. Though there are no great industries, and no ideal safe places for marginalized groups nearly anywhere in the world, there are varying degrees of toxicity and you can seek out areas with less toxicity. Try not to be swayed by the narrative that the only tech worth doing is the tech that’s written about in the media or receiving significant VC funding.
Step 3: Take care of yourself
Since being part of toxic tech culture is harmful to you as a person, simply focusing on taking care of yourself will help you put tech culture in its proper perspective, leaving you the freedom to be part of tech or not as you choose.
Prioritize self-care
Self-care means doing things that are kind or nurturing for yourself, whatever that looks like for you. Being in toxic tech culture means that many things take priority over self-care: fixing that last bug instead of taking a walk, going to an evening work-related meetup instead of staying home and getting to sleep on time, flying to yet another tech conference instead of spending time with family and friends. For Susan, prioritizing self-care looked like taking a road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway for the weekend instead of going to an industry fundraiser, or eating lunch by herself with a book instead of meeting up with another VC. One of the few constants in life is that you will always be stuck with your own self – so take care of it!
Learn to say no and enforce boundaries
We found that we were saying yes to too many things. The tech industry depends on extracting free or low-cost labor from many people in different ways: everything from salaried employees working 60-hour weeks to writing and giving talks in your “free time” – all of which are considered required for your career to advance. Marginalized people in tech are often expected to work an additional second (third?) shift of diversity-related work for free: giving recruiting advice, mentoring other marginalized people, or providing free counseling to more privileged people.
FOMO (fear of missing out) plays an important role too. It’s hard to cut down on free work when you are wondering, what if this is the conference where you’ll meet the person who will get you that venture capital job you’ve always wanted? What if serving on this conference program committee will get you that promotion? What if going to lunch with this powerful person so they can “pick your brain” for free will get you a new job? Early in your tech career, these kinds of investments often pay off but later on they have diminishing returns. The first time you attend a conference in your field, you will probably meet dozens of people who are helpful to your career. The twentieth conference – not so much.
For Valerie, switching from a salaried job to hourly consulting taught her the value of her time and just how many hours she was spending on unpaid work for the Linux and file systems communities. She taped a note reading “JUST SAY NO” to the wall behind her computer, and then sent a bunch of emails quitting various unpaid responsibilities she had accumulated. A few months later, she found she had made too many commitments again, and had to send another round of emails backing out of commitments. It was painful and embarrassing, but not being constantly frazzled and stressed out was worth it.
When you start saying no to unpaid work, some people will be upset and push back. After all, they are used to getting free work from you which gives them some personal advantage, and many people won’t be happy with this. They may try to make you feel guilty, shame you, or threaten you. Learning to enforce boundaries in the face of opposition is an important part of this step. If this is hard for you, try reading books, practicing with a friend, or working with a therapist. If you are worried about making mistakes when going against external pressure, keep in mind that simply exercising some control over your life choices and career path will often increase your personal happiness, regardless of the outcome.
Care for your mental health
Let’s be brutally honest: toxic tech culture is highly abusive, and there’s an excellent chance you are suffering from depression, trauma, chronic stress, or other serious psychological difficulties. The solution that works for many people is to work with a good therapist or counselor. A good licensed therapist is literally an expert in helping people work through these problems. Even if you don’t think your issues reach the level of seriousness that requires a therapist, a good therapist can help you with processing guilt, fear, anxiety, or other emotions that come up around the idea of leaving toxic tech culture.
Whether or not you work with a therapist, you can make use of many other forms of mental health care: meditation, support groups, mindfulness apps, walking, self-help books, spending time in nature, various spiritual practices, doing exercises in workbooks, doing something creative, getting alone time, and many more. Try a bunch of different things and pick what works for you – everyone is different. For Susan, practicing yoga four times a week, meditating, and working in her vegetable garden instead of reading Hacker News gave her much needed perspective and space.
Even if you are certain you want to leave toxic tech culture, actually leaving is a loss – if nothing else, a loss of what you thought your career and future would look like. Grief is an appropriate response to any major life change, even if it is for the better. Give yourself permission to grieve and be sad, for whatever it is that you are sad about. A few of the things we grieved for: the meritocracy we thought we were participating in, our vision for where our careers would be in five years, the good times we had with friends at conferences, a sense of being part of something excited and world-changing, all the good people who left before us, our relationships with people we thought would support us but didn’t, and the people we were leaving behind to suffer without us.
Step 4: Give yourself time
If you do decide to leave toxic tech culture, give yourself a few years to do it, and many more years to process your feelings about it. Valerie decided to stop being a programmer two years before she actually quit her programming job, and then she worked as a file systems consultant on and off for five years after that. Seven years later, she finally feels mostly at peace about being driven out of her chosen career (though she still occasionally has nightmares about being at a Linux conference). Susan’s process of extricating herself from the most toxic parts of tech culture and reinvesting in her own identity and well being has taken many years as well. Her partner (who knows nothing about technology) and her two kids help her feel much more balanced. Because Susan grew up on the Internet and has been building in tech for 25 years, she feels like she’ll probably always be doing something in tech, or tech-related, but wants to use her knowledge and skills to do this on her own terms, and to use her hard won know-how to benefit other marginalized folks to successfully reshape the industry.
An invitation to share your story
We hope this post was helpful to other people thinking about leaving toxic tech culture. There is so much more to say on this topic, and so many more points of view we want to hear about. If you feel safe doing so, we would love to read your story of leaving toxic tech culture. And wherever you are in your journey, we see you and support you, even if you don’t feel safe sharing your story or thoughts.
