Techies

April 5, 2016 5:32 AM

"Techies is a portrait project focused on sharing stories of tech employees in Silicon Valley. We cover subjects who tend to be underrepresented in the greater tech narrative. This includes (but is not limited to) women, people of color, folks over 50, LGBT, working parents, disabled, etc."

About page, continued: "The project has two main goals: to show the outside world a more comprehensive picture of people who work in tech, and to bring a bit of attention to folks in the industry whose stories have never been heard, considered or celebrated. We believe storytelling is a powerful tool for social impact and positive change.

Read the original post on Medium."

posted by d. z. wang (29 comments total)

Muffy Barkocy's tale about Twitter explains a lot. Not that it's news as such, but I haven't seen it described in this way before.
posted by jklaiho at 5:45 AM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is an astonishingly large amount of material to read, and I'm just getting started, but I just wanted to point out Lisa Dusseault:

[I had] one colleague who’s younger than me and less experienced than me, who thought it would be appropriate to give me some feedback after my first year as an Area Director. He said, “Sometimes I think you don’t know the answer to something that I think you should know the answer to, so I think your weakness is you should be more technical”. I had to say, “It’s called the Socratic method.” And he boggled. He hadn’t considered that I really did know these things [...] It takes a lot of seniority for a woman to start being able to give answers instead of having to couch answers in questions, and I have gotten there.
[...]
When I became a mom, something else changed completely. I started noticing that my commitment, my passion was now completely in question, and it hadn’t been before. When I was childless, I could be a geek—almost like people said, “Well, she must be basically a man in a woman’s body because look at how much she loves protocols, and architecture, and systems.” But then when I got pregnant and I very clearly was not a man, I noticed that was just overwhelming to people. People started saying things like, “Well, I guess you’ll be glad to leave work when you have the baby.”

Now I really want to go work for her, both because I am 100% positive that she would advocate for a sane office culture and work-life balance, and because I want to stare directly into the eyes of the man who asked when she was leaving work for good to raise her kids as I drive a harpoon directly into his solar plexus.
posted by Mayor West at 6:26 AM on April 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

I'm kind of baffled. I work in tech for a bank, a very dull, conservative, Canadian bank but >50% of project managers are female, the program manager is female and its great. Yet from the sounds of things our corporate culture is more progressive than many of the groovier, startups. Likely from years of treating people as adults.
posted by Damienmce at 6:40 AM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Similar situation here, Damienmce. That's why the Twitter bit that jklaiho was so interesting. In decades of working in the industry, Barkocy didn't notice being the only woman in the room until moving to Twitter.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:08 AM on April 5, 2016

“Well, I guess you’ll be glad to leave work when you have the baby.”

This doesn't just happen in tech, it happens everywhere, and is a source of much butthurt for me. I've found that a very common reaction to being a working mother is pity. It's automatically assumed that I don't want to work, but I have to because of finances, and that's a crying shame *shake fist at capitalism*. The reality is that I never even seriously sat down to do the financial math (which, just spitballing, would probably work out to "it would be pretty hard for the household, but we could do it if we really wanted to") because I can't stand the thought of not working. My mom worked. My husband's mom worked. I've worked since I was 15 years old. I believe I quote Christopher Walken when I say, "I just like to work."
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:10 AM on April 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm kind of baffled. I work in tech for a bank, a very dull, conservative, Canadian bank but >50% of project managers are female, the program manager is female and its great.

I've heard from a couple of people that working in tech for a university is also a lot better for women and older men. (I'm not talking about academics in CS departments. I'm talking about the people who actually design and administer the systems that keep the university going.) I think there may be some specific things about tech startup culture, especially but not exclusively in Silicon Valley, that promote a culture of exclusion.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:58 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've heard from a couple of people that working in tech for a university is also a lot better for women and older men.

Can confirm. But it's also not high-status, high-paying work. It's workaday IT done by folks who value work/life balance over having an impressive LinkedIn profile. It's basically government work, but not.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:04 AM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

One minor thing that bugged me, having read a few of the bios, is that some of these people are still from filthy rich, near-aristocratic backgrounds. For all those filters up top, you can't choose "grew up poor". This observation of mine particularly applies to the white folk in the selection. It's no coincidence that whiteness coincides with disadvantage-surmounting careers. Their stories aren't really inspiring or uplifting. It's just par for the course of our society.

All that teaches us is that the real way to overcome the profound institutional biases of the tech industry is to have an ivy league degree, and that mommy and daddy must be lawyers or doctors with possible connections. Barring that, you definitely still have a leg up if your parents were only upper middle class, and not important. Whiteness helps, too.

I don't have much sympathy for some east-coast Brahmin female progeny with Tourette's or dyslexia that landed a great job at Google. Same for the white gay man who is more likely to receive, if successful, comparisons to Peter Thiel than to suffer a feminizing barrage of insults on the daily. For fuck sakes, one of the white women in the portraits implies she's the child of a diplomat (who are often well-payed and well-connected). No wonder she had the time and resources to get a great education and eventually launch her own app.

These people should have moved aside for PoC who actually had to undergo tremendous, racist scrutiny during the hiring process because they didn't have daddy-the-American-marquis vouching for them. Or trans people who are open to ridiculous levels of harassment at any moment. Some of those in this portrait series clearly had to fight discrimination in getting their jobs across multiple axes.

By grouping all the subjects together, the project seems to equalize the hardships of Andrew Jackson Vanderbilt XVII's or Midwest Evangelical affluents and queer women of colour. That is not okay.
posted by constantinescharity at 8:12 AM on April 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

For all those filters up top, you can't choose "grew up poor".

One of the filters is "poverty," although I guess it would include people who were poor later in life, as well as those who grew up poor.

I don't know. I guess I don't see sympathy as a finite resource, and it's interesting to hear from a variety of underrepresented people.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:17 AM on April 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

I don't think the point was to pick folks via some hardship olympics but to have a resource of people who actually aren't from the same backgrounds or with very similar life experiences ... who are also interesting and have accomplished something. That's going to mean someone you perceive as privileged crept in. But hey, privilege/oppression isn't a single ordered hierarchy.

Also I didn't even notice you could filter by categories and the first one I read was someone who definitely started poor. So uh poor is definitely in there.
posted by R343L at 8:23 AM on April 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I love this because people always look askance at me when I say I work in tech, but with all due respect, not all of these people are really techies...

"Designer + Illustrator, Freelance", "Editorial Director", Market Lead" - those people all look exactly like I'd imagine they would.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:29 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's basically government work, but not

1. Public education is still a thing for now.
2. "Government work" gets thrown around like it's a pejorative, and that makes me sad.

Feels funny coming in here to say this, because I originally came to say that [parts of] the government are unbelievably shit to work in if you're young or LGBT. This is undoubtedly one of the sources of the government's "tech problem."
posted by schmod at 8:50 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think the concept of the OP should spread worldwide to other centers of tech, and represent the tech industry, not just the Valley. Bangalore could do with a goodly dose of this, for instance.

I also came in though I'd RTFA and tweeted it earlier was because I noticed the pullquote mentions folks over 50 being overlooked and feeling left out. I'd just like to give a shoutout to the folks at the startup space where I hang out for specifically going out of their way to invite me to an invite only community day (inner circle of original founders). Boy do I stand out like a sore thumb among those lovely young blond Finns :) And their invite helped me feel a LOT less sore and thumby about stuff in general. For context, part of the 12 hour day's events included everyone sitting in a darkened room, drinking beer, and sharing stories about photographs from the good old days (7 years) ago when the first seeds were sown for the entire startup ecosystem that exists today. And yeah, I was there then too.

What's interesting is that I get more pushback from men in their late thirties/early forties who are still fumbling to find themselves (er, "losers") than the 20 somethings who seem to think granny is cute anyhow anyway because their worldview has shifted so much due to the social media, the smartphones and the softwares they so gleefully write. The guys who come in from behind the former iron curtain also tend to have issues fwiw.
posted by infini at 8:54 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

My 'it's basically government work' wasn't meant as pejorative. I love my work (at a public university so yeah, I'm aware of its existence). It's stable, this can be a job for life if you want it to be, the benefits are as solid as you're going to get outside of super high-status companies filled with rockstars, and there is compliance and oversight tied to most of our funding streams. (Also generally more LGBT friendly than government, given that many of the faculty are LGBT.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:02 AM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

So HTML was easy to learn, but it’s hard to really do something good with it without having a sense for design and user interface.

Muffy Barkocy is wise in ways few others with this problem are. I liked her story.
posted by infini at 9:07 AM on April 5, 2016

constantinescharity: "Same for the white gay man who is more likely to receive, if successful, comparisons to Peter Thiel"

Reminds me of the NYT Style piece last weekend on a gay, Latino Goldman Sachs partner who nonetheless is every inch a successful white male executive.
posted by crazy with stars at 9:25 AM on April 5, 2016

constantinescharity - I liked the story of Everett Katigbak, a Filipino-American kid who grew up poor in the inland empire, went to work at recording studios when he was 19, found himself a new father at 20, and then left working as an illustrator and print designer at the Getty to get in on Facebook at the ground floor; and also Julie Ann Horvath a mixed-race, white passing Bay Area resident who got into tech as a broke college kid doing data entry for Yammer, and just followed that one basic rule of success for every entry level employee -- do all the jobs. Her story has some great, candid observations on meritocracy and privilege.
posted by bl1nk at 9:29 AM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

oh, and I just realized, as I finished reading her profile that Julie Ann Horvath is the person who was the subject of the big sexual harrassment news at Github two years ago (previously). There's a number of mini-InternetFamous people in that project, including Erica Joy who wrote The Other Side of Diversity (also previously)
posted by bl1nk at 9:44 AM on April 5, 2016

...with all due respect, not all of these people are really techies...

So because they don't write code, we should dismiss their contribution to the tech industry and stick them in the 'other' category? I can't think of a more opposite goal of this project.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 12:34 PM on April 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

I don't have much sympathy for some east-coast Brahmin female progeny with Tourette's or dyslexia that landed a great job at Google.

1. WTF.
2. Sympathy is not the point of this project.
posted by feckless at 12:55 PM on April 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I don't have much sympathy for some east-coast Brahmin female progeny with Tourette's or dyslexia that landed a great job at Google.

Wow, this is a pretty shitty way of reacting to project that seems to have made significant efforts to be representational without falling prey to tokenism.

Everybody has a different story, and being born with resources doesn't make you immune from the sexism, racism, or ableism that makes life difficult for folks, every single day.

To say that any person of color (or member of another underrepresented group) should "move aside" because others are more worthy (by your judgment) is to be yet another voice saying that they are not good enough.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:05 PM on April 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

some east-coast Brahmin female progeny with Tourette's or dyslexia that landed a great job at Google

I am an east-coast female, descendant of Brahmins, who landed a great job at the Wikimedia Foundation (albeit without Tourette's or dyslexia -- and I left Wikimedia Foundation and founded my own company). And indeed I probably will not submit my profile to Techies Project, mostly because I think I haven't had it that hard, and because -- and I'm grateful for this -- their project includes enough Asian-American women that I don't feel like submitting my profile would be filling a vacuum.

I've written to the Techies Project administrators to ask whether the "poverty" filter only selects people who grew up poor or also includes people who experienced poverty later in life.

Here are some notes from a chat at an open source conference, a few years ago, focusing on the experiences of people in the tech industry who have suffered from classism.
posted by brainwane at 1:44 PM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

A Techies Project administrator has emailed me confirming that yes, the "poverty" filter limits the selection to stories of people who grew up poor.
posted by brainwane at 1:50 PM on April 5, 2016

A friend of mine is in here; they've been telling me about this for the last two weeks, though only about their own interview. I didn't realize the scope of it until now, so it was strange/funny to see their face in a post here.

At the same time I feel sorta strange looking at it. We went to school at the same time, live two blocks from each other now. But I dropped out - not to work, but giving up. I have a sudden fear that a family member of mine will see this and use it against me: "These people can do it, why can't you?" Which isn't meant to be a criticism of this project; I think it's a net good for it to be. I just have a lot of insecurities.
posted by you could feel the sky at 1:58 PM on April 5, 2016

This is a really fantastic project. I've only read a handful of the interviews so far but I am learning so much from these really interesting people. Thank you so much for linking.

On metafilter I often feel like I'm listening in on technology-related conversations that I don't understand, trying to guess from context to understand the histories and current issues around technologies themselves and the people who make (and sell) them.

Reading these interviews, I feel that although I still don't know most of the acronyms or platforms or even some of the expired dot.coms referenced, I am getting what the tech industry is. What are these businesses? What are they doing? What is their internal culture, and how is that impacting the larger culture? Who are the humans who build them and keep them humming?

I'm glad this is a project that centers POC, women, queers, older people, and people who have been poor, but I am reading this as a broad oral history of the tech industry overall.

This oral history is being disseminated through the voices of real people who make it (and thoughtfully doesn't center the voices of youthful cis, straight, white bros who are yes, disproportionately hired into these jobs, but are not the only people in these jobs.)

Anyway, great link, great stories, great reading. I think high school and college sociology and US history classes should probably read these...
posted by latkes at 4:43 PM on April 5, 2016

So because they don't write code, we should dismiss their contribution to the tech industry and stick them in the 'other' category? I can't think of a more opposite goal of this project.

Well, yeah, actually. As a woman, and an older woman at that, I've had to fight pretty hard not to be shunted into design or project management, because everyone knows "those are the things women are really good at". I'm not dismissing their contribution, but there is really nothing unusual about a woman illustrator or account director. It's almost like, if you are a woman in tech you must be either a designer or a project manager. It would be such a relief to see another coder who looked like me.
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:30 PM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

And I will definitely make a submission to the project!
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:33 PM on April 5, 2016

I've heard from a couple of people that working in tech for a university is also a lot better for women and older men.

This is true in my experience. More than half of my group are women, for example. BUT - my coworker reminds me that we do not see such favorable numbers in IT management at the university, not even close.
posted by thelonius at 5:46 AM on April 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm a 43 year old white male at a university in the north of England.

*All* our database people are women.

Precisely half of our systems team are women. For "systems" read MIS, business function type systems.

For most of my time here, although she is now retired, my immediate boss was a woman. Her boss,the head of the department, was a woman too. She alas is also retired. Easily the best boss I have ever had. Technically competent, fought for us against the savageries of more senior management and just generally fun to be around. She came to the pub with us all on Friday night and she can still drink me under the table.

I am in the infrastructure team, which is exclusively male. I don't know why that is particularly, though I do know it grew out of something that was once purely PC support into things like directories and so on. Those directories initially made it onto our campus in support of the running of PCs. The people who first occupied these roles, who I have met, were all laddy lads who were once students here. None of them came from a computing background but they were interested geeky types who got part time jobs whilst students and it kind of grew from there.

All the women came from more formal computer backgrounds, mathematics or comp sci.

I have often wondered if there is something about the respective histories of the disciplines that led to this situation. PC support here developed from "kids who are good with computers". What would once have been seen as "real computing" developed from the formal disciplines.

Here's another thing about the women here. I'm 43. They are all older than me. Only a year or maybe even just a couple of months in some cases, but I'm not aware of a single exception. In fact, my age seems to be about the dividing line.

I have never, ever worked with a woman who is a full time member of a technical team who is younger than me. Ever. In my entire career.
posted by vbfg at 11:16 AM on April 6, 2016 [1 favorite]