an honest letter to future women in tech.
I talk a lot here about growing up enamored with Silicon Valley and the tech industry. But that enamorment is gone, and the allure of the tech industry within the early 2010’s that I fell in love with is dead.
After 10 years since my first app was released, and having reached a CTO position, I would like to offer some honest advice for the new ‘normal’ of big tech companies that we’re seeing. This is for people who are vulnerable and looking towards tech as a path to safety, and possibly even power.
You will enter the tech industry, and perhaps take jobs that you morally disagree with, or will stomach with enough money. You may intern at Northrop Grumman, or find a position at Anduril potentially interesting.
The amount of power you get from aligning yourself with those who have it is intoxicating. Perhaps after a lifetime of being a woman / otherwise marginalized person in STEM, you will relish the power and what it makes you feel.
Being wanted by a large tech company is the biggest ego boost you will ever receive in your life, and it comes at a cost. One day, you are receiving a scholarship to a coding camp, and the next — you may build an algorithm that accidentally encourages a teen girl to kill herself, or a ‘dragon drone’ you made pours molten metal on soliders in forests.
Obviously, not everyone will be working on things like that. But everything tech builds DOES something, and therefore other things will be impacted.
It’s nice at first, Lockheed Martin let your robotics club walk around, or your girl coding camp gets to visit the offices of a company that does more than you ever thought possible. You’re enchanted by the world of technology in front of you, and you would do anything to reach it.
You’re even told that DEI is a priority, and that building safer products requires diversity. You’re a young woman or LGBTQ+ person and excited, and then you become an adult in tech and ask yourself, “But, is it actually a priority?”
Let’s look at Meta, home of walking fraternity bro Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the CEO of a company that has caused incalculable harm to young women from its’ conception, and he goes on podcasts and says the company needs more masculine energy after cutting DEI programs (to shareholder and Donald’s delight).
Elon Musk, (the man I looked up to my entire life, who let me tour the SpaceX facilities when I was 12 with my robotics team) did a Nazi salute at an inauguration of a president that’s committed to forced deportation.
The atrocities in our world are programmed by people with names and addresses who make enough money to offset moral objections. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re not surrounded by those people, or that you couldn’t be one of them.
To future young people in STEM — specifically for the young women and other marginalized people looking to tech as a way to escape poverty or hardship, here’s some advice that may get me blacklisted:
As a marginalized employee, you will be building tools that re-enforce power dynamics that benefit the company, so make sure you understand them, and if they act in your own interest.
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Learn about employment law, federal and state. It should be the first thing you do before you take a job. Figure out the laws about consent and recording conversations within your state.
Record your boss or co-workers if they harass you. Never trust a company lawyer, and never trust HR. Companies only care about PR issues, lost revenue, or leverage.
Take photos on your personal devices phone with timestamps, and send important communications to your personal email (with adherence to your IT department’s security policy).
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Learn about how businesses truly work, because businesses are the most powerful entities in the United States, and they are predictable with gluttony. Attend shareholder meetings of your employer if it’s public, and look at the financials — they predict layoffs. Cost centers and those working on unprofitable endeavors are the first to go.
If one tech company does a shitty thing and gets away with it, all of the rest will follow when they see there’s no consequences.
Everything any CEO says is propaganda to pump share price or valuation. All executives are puppets pulled by a market that has no desire to invest in the workforce that creates value.
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You work for yourself before you work for the company that has hired you. Build your own company if you can, but be careful about who you engage with to grow it. If you do not have an agenda, the agenda of others will be forced upon you.
Save the good tech salary you make to buy your freedom. Gain power from big tech companies, but then actually do worthwhile shit with the power you have. You have no power if it’s dependent on someone else giving it to you.
A lot of the intellectualism in Silicon Valley is rooted in a mono-culture of rich people who have not interacted with the people who are impacted by the products they build and the decisions they make.
A lot of companies have impact that they do not care about using responsibly. Do not trust that someone outside of you will care if a piece of tech you build hurts someone in a non-revenue damaging way, because (most likely) they will not.
Find your biases and mitigate them within your work. If you don’t have biases, you’re lying to yourself.
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Before you are a programmer, a designer, or tech lead, you are human.
Tech companies, like all companies, don’t give a shit if you or your family live in suffering or die. They are profit making vessels. Imagining they act in any other way besides self-interest is an illusion you should dispel.
Corporations align themselves with power to enable their survival, and they will never meaningfully challenge power that harms people if it makes the company more money than strife. There’s not trust in systems, but there’s trust in you and I. Good luck.
